The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age

by David E. Sanger

If the Russians had struck at our election system in some more obvious way—poisoning candidates it opposed, for example, as it has poisoned dissidents—any president would have called them out and responded. Only because the gray zone of cyber conflict gave the Russians cover did Obama hesitate. By the time he responded, after the election, it was too late. We are likely to pay for that failure for years to come. As James Comey said of the Russians: “They will be back.” Some who look back now on the decisions made in the summer and fall of 2016—politicians and national-security staffers, intelligence officials and FBI agents, Russia specialists and journalists—have described the sequence of events as a massive intelligence failure. But it wasn’t a failure in the classic sense of the phrase. It didn’t launch America into a war on false pretenses, and it didn’t underestimate the progress of Russia’s nuclear program, or North Korea’s for that matter. Rather, it was a failure to confront how skillfully and creatively the Russians were using newly minted cyber skills around the world and how potent a weapon they could become in widening America’s political and social fault lines. In our fixation on the types of cyberattacks we thought we understood—against power grids or banks or nuclear centrifuges—we missed the turn toward manipulating voters.