This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race

by Nicole Perlroth

With Trump’s strange affinity for dictators, his inability to hold Russia’s feet to the fire for its 2016 election interference, his abandonment of the Kurds, one of America’s closest allies, and his refusal to clearly condemn the Saudis’ gruesome killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, America was losing its moral authority. (Even after a CIA assessment concluded that Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman personally ordered the hit on Khashoggi, Trump responded, “Maybe he did and maybe he didn’t.”) With these cases piling up, one former VRL employee told me in late 2019, “It’s getting harder to know if you’re selling these tools to the good guys or enabling the bad.”