Tools and Weapons: The Promise and The Peril of the Digital Age

by Brad Smith

These nuclear risks weighed heavily on President Reagan on June 4, 1983, as he helicoptered to Camp David in rural Maryland with a stack of classified arms control documents. As a storm rolled into the Appalachians that evening, Reagan, with his wife, Nancy, settled into the lodge for a movie—one of the 363 films the former movie star would watch during his two-term presidency.10 A writer for the new film, WarGames,11 had arranged a screening; it had premiered the day before. The thriller features a teenage hacker who goes from changing his grades in the high school’s computer to stumbling into a supercomputer at the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD, and nearly starting World War III. The Cold War tale spooked the commander in chief. Two days later during a high-level meeting at the White House, he asked whether anyone had seen the movie. Receiving blank looks, he described the plot in detail, before asking the chairman of his Joint Chiefs of Staff if the plot line was plausible.12 That conversation set off a chain of decisions that led to the first federal forays into cybersecurity. Life imitated art, leading in part to the passage of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act to make the hacking portrayed in the movie illegal.13