Truman National Security Project

We need new rules of engagement in cyberconflict. And they must be flexible enough to allow the military to conduct specific — yet limited — cyber-operations without presidential authorization. Requiring the president to approve all cyber-offensive operations is an antiquated framework that made sense when cyberthreats were less sophisticated. Times have changed. What we need [...]

Just a few hours before the State of the Union address, President Obama signed an executive order authorizing new policies to protect U.S. critical infrastructure cybersecurity. Following several failed attempts by Congress to legislation in this area, the president addressed the important issue of “repeated intrusions into critical infrastructure.” During the past few years, we [...]

It has become a depressing but now familiar pattern: in the space of a week, reports surfaced both that LinkedIn’s mobile app scraped information from users’ mobile devices and stored it on LinkedIn’s servers—without informing it’s users of the practice—and that LinkedIn user passwords had been broken and stolen by hackers since LinkedIn had only [...]

The news last month that LightSquared, a company attempting to deliver broadband internet via satellite, had filed for bankruptcy, settled a long-simmering but little noticed debate with far-reaching impacts on militaries, governments, businesses—and plain old folks like you and me. Why? Because the global positioning system—better known as GPS—industry feared that LightSquared’s technology would interfere [...]

Late last year, Iranian and Venezuelan diplomats reportedly met with a shadowy group of hackers in Mexico to plan cyber attacks against American targets, including nuclear power plants. These types of meetings, between people hostile to the United States and criminals, terrorists, and “hacktivists” who have the know-how to steal our business secrets and attack [...]