"New York Times" Senior Correspondent Speaks at University of Idaho

By Nicole Hindberg on October 11, 2018

The Borah Symposium at the University of Idaho is held every year to commemorate and honor the former Idaho senator William Borah. It’s had speakers such as Eleanor Roosevelt and various Pulitzer Prize winners. This year it was David Sanger. He is a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner, “New York Times” national security correspondent and author of the book “The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage and Fear in the Cyber Age.” He delivered the keynote address for this year’s 71st annual Borah Symposium.

David Sanger: photo taken by Argonaut (student newspaper) photographer

At this year’s Borah Symposium, David Sanger discussed aspects of cyber warfare and cybersecurity and where those things are headed. He began by broadly discussing how influential cyber power is in modern times. He used the example of the Russian interference in the 2016 election to explain the scope of how dangerous cyber power is, calling it “a symbol of what we face in the future.” He gave an analogy of how the power of weapons and their scope compared to the scope of cyber power.

Sanger stated, “we know it can be weaponized, and we don’t know what they look like or what they’re capable of.” This caught my attention because of how alarming it was. My father works in IT and handles cybersecurity at Lewis-Clark State College and he has always lectured on the importance of cybersecurity, but he never put it in this context before. Sanger discussed how rapidly the dangers of cybersecurity approached us by showing us reports of the World-Wide Threat Assessment from 11 years ago versus the reports from the last five years.

Eleven years ago, there was no discussion of the threat of cyber warfare. However, for the last five years, the top threat was cyber warfare. He also discussed the four ways nations use cyber. They were for espionage, manipulation of countries, destructive response, and for achieving political goals. He then went on to discuss numerous examples of cyber attacks conducted by the U.S. and by other countries.

via Pexels.com

To conclude his speech, Sanger ended with the example of the Sony hack in response to the movie “The Interview.” He used that example to convey how cyber is “the perfect weapon” (referring to his new book). He said that because we can’t see these threats and there was no physical manifestation the public can see, our government use sanctions to punish other countries rather than attacking them. He explained how North Korea basically got away with the Sony hack because all former President Obama did was place sanctions on them.

One of the last things Sanger said that shocked me was “We are past the moment where we can create a weapon to defeat the perfect weapon.” That was the most alarming thing he said. I knew that cybersecurity was a problem, but I didn’t know to what extent it affects us. Like I said before, my dad has spouted versions of this to me all my life, but he never put it in this context in a digestible way for someone like me who doesn’t understand a lot of this works. Overall, Sanger was informative and entertaining when discussing a topic I had little knowledge of.

Continuing with the theme of “Pax Technologica”-”peace through technology,” the University of Idaho will have other speakers such as John Anderson, Associate Professor of University of Idaho’s Virtual Technology Design program and Jane McGonigal, a “New York Times” bestselling author.

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