Is America Ready for a Full-Blown Cyberwar? with Nicole Perlroth, Michael Schmidt & Lt. Col. Vindman

Speaker 2 Hi, everyone, from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. This is on with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher.

Speaker 2 Today, I'm talking about cybersecurity, cyber attacks, and the potential for a full-blown cyber war with Nicole Perlroth, Michael Schmidt, and Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vinman.

Speaker 2 Nicole Perlroth spent a decade as the lead cybersecurity reporter at the New York Times before going inside the tent and joining the advisory board of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the Council on Foreign Relations Cyber Task Force.

Speaker 2 She's a founding partner at Silver Buckshot Ventures and a producer and host of To Catch a Thief, a new podcast about China's rise to cyber dominance.

Speaker 2 Michael Schmidt is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter for the New York Times and the author of the best-selling book, Donald Trump v. The United United States.

Speaker 2 He's also the executive producer and co-creator of the Netflix show Zero Day, a political thriller about a devastating cyber attack on the U.S.

Speaker 2 Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vinman is a former Director of European Affairs for the National Security Council.

Speaker 2 Vinman was a key witness during President Trump's first impeachment and testified about Trump's infamous phone call with President Zelensky of Ukraine.

Speaker 2 He is a senior fellow at the Johns Hopkins Foreign Policy Institute and the author of The Folly of Realism: How the West Deceived Itself About Russia and Betrayed Ukraine. So stick around.

Speaker 2 It's a panel of real experts here and on an important topic to me.

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Speaker 2 Nicole, Michael, and Alexander, thank you for coming on on.

Speaker 4 Thanks for having me. Thanks for having us.

Speaker 2 Thanks for having us. So I'm excited to have a panel with three smart people from different but related fields.
So let's start by setting the table.

Speaker 2 I'd love each of you right now to say, there's so many of them, but what's America's most worrisome cybersecurity vulnerability right now?

Speaker 2 If there's a serious cyber attack or a series of attacks against the U.S. in the next three years, what will it look like? Nicole, why don't you start? And then Michael, then Alexander.

Speaker 3 I think we got a glimpse of it with colonial pipeline. But if you remember, that was a ransomware attack by sort of this bumbling group of cyber criminals.

Speaker 3 And since then, what we've seen is China infiltrating pipeline networks, water networks, transportation networks, ports, grid.

Speaker 3 And they're doing it in a way where all they're doing is getting in and just making sure that they can stay in for the event of some sort of geopolitical tensions.

Speaker 3 And so, what we're really worried about right now is what we call the everything, everywhere, all-at-once cyber scenario, where you wouldn't just have one colonial pipeline, but you would maybe have five or ten simultaneously, not just on gas, but on water networks.

Speaker 2 So, that's called the long game, essentially. The long game is nuclear, just in case they need to do that.
Michael?

Speaker 1 I mean, the whole thing that I have about cyber attacks and sort of attacks in general is like, how would the country actually respond if something really horrific happened?

Speaker 1 If there was something catastrophic that really shut down

Speaker 1 communications or stuff like water or electricity, what would the response from the country look like? We all lived through the aftermath of 9-11.

Speaker 1 We saw how the country responded to a horrific, catastrophic attack.

Speaker 1 It's hard to believe the country would be united simply just on fact of what happened, let alone on response. And I'm a believer that if society doesn't have a

Speaker 1 understanding of what's going on around it, it's less likely to make the right decisions. So

Speaker 1 not a technical answer, but I think a larger thing about the threat that a threat really poses to this country.

Speaker 2 That's an excellent answer. Alex?

Speaker 10 Yeah, I think about it from the perspective of our adversaries. They think about it in terms of information confrontation with cyber being a component of that bigger confrontation.
And in

Speaker 10 the environment where a attack may be, the chances of an attack may be increasing, we're disarming and we are adding chaos to a potential response.

Speaker 10 I think in line with what Michael said, we don't have a predictable, reliable response from the federal government.

Speaker 10 Potentially it's fractured and localized with different narratives about who the aggressive actor is.

Speaker 10 I mean, there's reason to believe that if it was Russia, Trump would potentially downplay Russia as the threat actor and look for other different excuses.

Speaker 10 Elon Musk was talking about, you know, Twitter coming down because of Ukraine, and that was a false flag.

Speaker 10 So I think that's part of what I see unfolding: disarmament in the midst of increasing threat environment.

Speaker 2 Right. So essentially,

Speaker 2 long game, chaos, and we're not ready at the same time, or we're even worse than not ready, which is

Speaker 2 purposely incompetent, essentially. So, for the American public, the chances of cyber warfare actually affecting them can seem remote right now.

Speaker 2 Narrative fiction, in fact, is possibly the most effective way to make people wake up to the threat. So, let's play a clip from Michael's Zero Day, which starts with a Wolf Blitzer cameo.

Speaker 10 We've received reports not only of widespread outages impacting multiple regional power grids, but of computer systems that control transportation, communications, and other infrastructure completely hijacked, with safety warnings somehow overridden.

Speaker 10 Early estimates suggest a significant but unknown number of casualties.

Speaker 10 As subway cars and commuter trains filled with passengers found themselves switched onto the same track, resulting in head-on collisions and mass injury.

Speaker 2 So, Michael, this show was number one in English language TV on Netflix earlier this month. Talk about reactions you've gotten from the viewers.

Speaker 2 Did this switch on a light bulb for people? They see it more as a Robert De Niro going out with Connie Britton sci-fi thriller.

Speaker 1 My hope is the former, but I'm probably going to say the latter. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I think the thing that

Speaker 1 that clip tries to show is something that as journalists, we really struggle with. And Nicole and I both covered, you know, cyber stuff together at the times about this.
And

Speaker 1 when I started covering this stuff, I went to the Department of Homeland Security and I said, what would a cyber attack look like? This is like 10 years ago, 12 years ago. What would it be?

Speaker 1 Like, help me tell this story. You had all these national security officials going up to Capitol Hill and saying there's going to be a cyber pro harbor, cyber 9-11.

Speaker 1 So I went to them and they had this like something that looked like it came from the 1950s and it had different light bulbs. And they were like, well, if this switch happens, this light bulb goes off.

Speaker 1 And if this, and I remember thinking at the time, man,

Speaker 1 this is a really hard story to tell people. You have people really sounding alarms about it.
But even in text, I don't know how to bring this to life.

Speaker 1 And what the show allowed me and the other creators to do was to show you what this looks like in a way that no testimony from someone on capitol hill could give you and sure um it's hollywood it's dramatized but what it is is that it shows people hey this is what this could look like and it does it in a way that's accessible on a platform that millions and millions of people watch and in a forum where they can easily digest it and for me that was really exciting So, Nicole, you have a new documentary podcast called To Catch a Thief.

Speaker 2 It tells the story of how China used cyber attacks to steal our IP and also hack our critical infrastructure.

Speaker 2 Now, the former has been going on for a very long time, as you know, but the critical infrastructure is a whole new part of it.

Speaker 2 We've referenced this a bit already, but does the cyber threat get enough attention in D.C.?

Speaker 2 President Trump created the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency in his first term, but its funding and staffing are getting cut. It's getting decimated.

Speaker 2 And you obviously fired the head of it famously because he said the elections were fine. So, who are the lawmakers and people in power right now who are making it a priority?

Speaker 2 Because they seem busy with every other distraction known to man.

Speaker 3 Yeah, and I'm just going to back up and say I did this podcast because I feel like, and really to Mike's point, we have failed at every institutional level to convey just how serious this threat is.

Speaker 3 And as we failed to convey it in media, you know, at the New York Times, I always said, we need 12 people covering cybersecurity. I am one person.

Speaker 3 Mike was covering DHS, but there was a lot that goes on at DHS beyond cyber. We need one person just covering what Russia is doing in our infrastructure every single day.

Speaker 3 We need someone that's covering what China's doing with the IP theft and now critical infrastructure attacks. And we never did that.
And so it was really hard to tell this story.

Speaker 3 And I think there are some people in government who get it. And thank God, cybersecurity is still a bipartisan issue.

Speaker 3 Is it?

Speaker 3 We are losing support for this on the right because of exactly what you just said, because it became a political issue with the 2020 elections and Chris Krebs getting out there and calling it the most secure election in history, and Trump never forgave him for that.

Speaker 2 He fired him. Right.

Speaker 3 So I think really where a lot of the back channel lobbying going on right now is in making sure that this administration gets it. Sean Plancky was just named as the new CISA director.

Speaker 3 By all accounts, he's a great guy and he gets it.

Speaker 3 Inside NSA so far, a lot of the leadership is still there. And they have a very

Speaker 2 national security agency, just for people who that's right.

Speaker 3 The national security agency. You know, of course, people on the intelligence committee still see this.

Speaker 3 Mark Warner is doing a lot on this topic, but there's no longer someone I could say this person in the Republican Party is being very loud and clear on cyber SPN.

Speaker 2 Because, because

Speaker 3 Trump. Well, because everything is changing every 20 minutes.
You know,

Speaker 3 I would have said Marco Rubio really understands the threat of Russia on cyber and definitely China on cyber.

Speaker 3 But watching what happened in the White House in the Oval Office a few weeks ago, I don't know who is holding the line on this anymore.

Speaker 2 Alex, your new book, The Folly of Realism, shows how the U.S. has spent decades misunderstanding and mismanaging the Russia threat.

Speaker 2 In case anyone missed it, the running theme here is that all three of you are trying to alert policymakers and the public to risks that haven't gotten enough attention, which is why I wanted to do this.

Speaker 2 First, read how the U.S. has responded to Russia's developing cyber program in the last decade and what is happening now, I would say.

Speaker 2 And obviously, the Russia-Ukraine war is the first major conflict to involve large-scale cyber operations.

Speaker 2 Now, more than three years after the full invasion of Ukraine, what have we learned about the role it's going to play?

Speaker 2 And, you know, if there's nobody there, as Nicole says, on the Republican side and they're running, they're running the table, what happens?

Speaker 10 Aaron Ross Powell, you know, the book makes the point that we keep repeating the same mistakes of the past. We make the mistakes of

Speaker 10 catering to Russia's exceptionalism and buying into the hopes that we could do more with Russia or succumbing to fears that if we do too much with regards to Russia, that the relationship

Speaker 10 could break or spiral in a dangerous direction. And we've done this repeatedly across six different administrations, is the point I'm making.

Speaker 10 Same thing with regards to cyber, although we only really started paying attention to cyber over the last 25 years.

Speaker 10 We are now in an era in which we are the most transactional. We don't understand any of the lessons of the past.
It's only what's immediately in front of us.

Speaker 10 So we, you know, Trump, he's been in power. He had four years in office.
This is now really like month 60 or something like that of his of his presidential tenure.

Speaker 10 But nothing beyond like last week or the week before, except for some key themes, Russia good, Ukraine bad, continue on. Everything else is highly transactional.
Immediately what's in front of them.

Speaker 10 So, you know, we're looking at a reset here coming between a conversation between Russia and the United States, Putin and Trump, in which

Speaker 10 we could pivot further down the road of

Speaker 10 accommodating Russia, throwing out the playbook on the fact that we need to be hardening ourselves against Russian cyber attacks.

Speaker 10 We've already kind of unilaterally disarmed an offensive cyber, or it's hard to believe, you know, Trump is going to learn his lesson anytime soon, but eventually we get to the point where Trump is provoked and is made to look weak and might respond aggressively.

Speaker 2 So, those cyber threats to Ukraine have increased. Obviously, that's how they began softening up the country, right? That was their first move.

Speaker 10 Sure. And I think the fact is that nobody really knows

Speaker 10 the Russians better than the Ukrainians. And the Ukrainians are, you know, looking and constantly playing in the Russians' backyard

Speaker 10 very, very in a sophisticated manner. They might not have all the tools we have,

Speaker 10 but they are, they certainly understand the Russians. And,

Speaker 10 you know, the Russians have been attempting to exploit vulnerabilities, not entirely successfully with regards to Ukraine.

Speaker 10 Actually, Ukraine has been very effective at parrying a lot of these attacks on Ukrainian critical infrastructure. That's why you see hard power.

Speaker 10 You see, you know, missile strikes to do the work that they thought that they might be able to achieve.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 10 So, but there are, that's Ukraine is a bit of a hard target.

Speaker 10 There are soft targets all around Ukraine for the Russians to exploit, either with hard power or in the cyber domain, that the Russians are aware of and are becoming increasingly comfortable with attacking.

Speaker 2 So let's talk about where the cyber threats are coming from domestic groups a little bit. I'm not going to give away your whole plot, Michael, but there's also domestic threats throughout your series.

Speaker 2 What domestic threats concern you most and America's politics become more and more fraught? Because that's a topic here.

Speaker 1 You know, I defer to Nicole on like the specifics on sort of like who has what capabilities and such.

Speaker 1 But what we're trying to sort of show and raise in the show is the idea that these tools can be stolen. Even they don't have to be created outside of the government.

Speaker 1 They can be stolen from the government. And whether that is a state actor or that is, you know, someone someone sitting in their basement,

Speaker 1 you know, not to simplify it, but that the threat of this is everywhere. And it's not just Russia.
And it's not just state-sponsored folks. And, you know, Nicole understands it.

Speaker 1 better than I do, but what we're trying to say is that this is something that can rear its head from anyone in any different ways. And in a time in which things are so fraught and so

Speaker 1 divisive,

Speaker 1 you know, what does that mean for people that can get their hands on things like this?

Speaker 2 So, Nicole, your whole book was about this, obviously, using U.S. government-created technology and then spread all around the world by lots of people.

Speaker 2 So, talk a little bit about what's happening because

Speaker 2 AI is another element here. It can lower the barrier to entry for hackers.
AI-enabled military systems are vulnerable in the way traditional systems aren't.

Speaker 2 AI-powered cybersecurity tools can also be very powerful. In the end, talk about that impact and non-state actors in exploiting all this technology.

Speaker 3 Well, you know, it really is the perfect weapon, which is the name of another of our colleagues' books, David Sanger's book, because all of these tools can be developed, reverse engineered, fired back on their maker.

Speaker 3 Yes, the U.S. bears some responsibility for launching probably the most sophisticated cyber weapon of them all, Stuxet with Israel on Iran's nuclear facility way back when.

Speaker 3 And that has opened Pandora's box. And right now, we are seeing a whole well-oiled economy of ransomware in particular, where anyone can pick up these tools.

Speaker 3 They don't even need to have any technical savvy. They can pick up these tools, rent them, and fire them on anyone.

Speaker 3 And we've seen American teenagers, Canadian teenagers arrested in some of these hacks.

Speaker 3 And the barrier to entry only gets lower every day because we've all somewhat come to realize what a Chinese phishing email would look like. But now with AI, it's really hard.

Speaker 3 But let me just say something, you know, on Ukraine.

Speaker 3 Ukraine's defense is really the deterrence on Taiwan. You know, China has been watching very carefully how Vladimir Putin's invasion has gone.

Speaker 3 And they've watched what we've done with our support, with sanctions, with funding, with weapons.

Speaker 3 And now they're watching what we're doing on dithering on that support, on trying to make a deal on minerals, et cetera. And they're taking the lessons to heart.

Speaker 3 One thing I just want to say on what we've been witnessing with China creeping into our water networks and our pipelines is that this is, to Alex and Mike's earlier point, really, I think about it as a psychological weapon.

Speaker 3 We have incredible appetite in both parties still, maybe it's waning to support Taiwan in the event of some larger military conflict.

Speaker 3 But what appetite will Americans have to support an island 7,000 miles away if we can't get gas for more than three days or we can't get clean water or our water is contaminated?

Speaker 3 And really, the goal with some of these weapons is to basically win a war without firing a single bullet. Right.

Speaker 3 And one of the things that makes cyber this perfect weapon is we wouldn't immediately know whether this is a Chinese cyber attack or a Russian cyber attack or a ransomware attack.

Speaker 3 There are a whole host of possibilities for false flags, which we saw last week with Elon Musk accusing Ukraine of hacking Twitter. And I haven't followed that to its logical conclusion.

Speaker 3 But if it's coming directly from Ukrainian IP addresses, then you probably can be 100% sure that it's not Ukraine.

Speaker 2 Yeah, right. So we'll come back to Taiwan, but first let's get to the foreign hacking gangs, which is, I think, probably did something like this.

Speaker 2 For example, the Russian-speaking cyber gang called, I think it's ALF v.

Speaker 2 Black Cat hacked Change Healthcare, the subsidiary of United Healthcare that processed 40% of all health care claims and caused chaos for providers and patients.

Speaker 2 A lot of this stuff is not as well known because they try to keep it quiet, obviously. A few weeks ago, North Korean hackers known as the Lazarus Group stole $1.5 billion in crypto.

Speaker 2 Alex, talk about the relationship between criminal gangs and foreign adversaries like Russia, North Korea, Iran, and China.

Speaker 2 Generally speaking, they do have the tacit permission of these governments to hit American targets.

Speaker 10 It's more than tacit. In a lot of ways, they're extensions.

Speaker 10 It's well documented that the Russians have used Russian organized crime to do some of their dirty work, whether that's to channel hard currency

Speaker 10 or just

Speaker 10 muck around, mischief make.

Speaker 10 Think about it from this way. When the Russians want

Speaker 10 their detained, lawfully detained folks back, there have been a number of folks that have been cyber actors that were acting on behalf of the Ukrainian, the Russian government.

Speaker 10 It wasn't because they were benign looking to repatriate their folks. It's because these were actors that were serving the Russian Confederation's new future.
Yeah, exactly. So

Speaker 10 they're on a string. They have some latitude to engage in their own criminal activity just to enrich themselves, but they are also oftentimes employed as part of the government apparatus.

Speaker 10 Same thing in Ukraine.

Speaker 2 We'll be back in a minute.

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Speaker 2 So, Nicole, in your podcast to Catch a Thief, you quote Rob Joyce, the NSA's former director of cybersecurity. He says, Russia is like a hurricane, but China is like climate change.

Speaker 4 Right. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Speaker 2 What is our offensive against them? And walk us through their long-term cyber strategy and defense for their end game.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I would say, you know, with China, they've been coming at us for a long time. They've been coming for our intellectual property.

Speaker 3 In some cases, we're only just beginning to see how that has manifested. You know, we don't talk about Nortel anymore, but it disappeared long ago and Huawei stole all of its business.

Speaker 3 And they've they've replicated that model across many different industries, solar panels, now electric vehicles, electric vehicle batteries, genetically modified seeds, over and over again, wherever you look now.

Speaker 3 There is a hacking story that no one ever connected the dots back to this company's bankruptcy, but that is what's happening. And then they've added this critical infrastructure piece.
And

Speaker 3 what's gnawing at me and why I did this whole podcast is that this is a very different actor from the one that I was covering at the New York Times 15 years ago.

Speaker 3 You know, when China was hacking the New York Times, they phished us. It was, we didn't update our software.
They took advantage of that. They weren't a very sophisticated actor.

Speaker 3 But these days, there's no doubt in my mind that they have reached apex predator status.

Speaker 3 They are on par with what the U.S. capabilities are.
They have found a way to really utilize their authoritarianism to their advantage.

Speaker 3 You know, if you are a hacker in China and you are an elite hacker, you have been identified very early on in your student life. You are on a track.
Maybe you work at a private company.

Speaker 3 Maybe you work at Tencent. Maybe you are a founder.
Whatever you are, if you have these skills, you are now a gunslinger for the CCP.

Speaker 3 They can tap you on the shoulder at any time and bring you into these operations. And some of their best people do not work inside the PLA anymore or even inside the Ministry of State Security.

Speaker 3 They work through this loose satellite network of contractors, which makes attribution that much more difficult. And what have they done with this entire apparatus that they have built?

Speaker 3 They've infiltrated our telecommunication networks, the threat we call SALT Typhoon. They are inside our biggest telecommunication companies.
We have not been able to get them out.

Speaker 3 And frankly, we probably never will.

Speaker 3 And now they are in our water and transport and pipeline and grid networks as well. So it's not a good situation.

Speaker 3 And now, in terms of what our capabilities are, I do think we've entered this new era of mutually assured digital destruction.

Speaker 3 And I was actually very concerned when Putin invaded Ukraine, when we started escalating how much we were willing to support Ukraine with weapons and funding,

Speaker 3 that Russia didn't do more here. right? That they didn't actually utilize the access that they already have in too many cases to our pipeline networks and other critical infrastructure.

Speaker 3 And you would have to be a fly on Vladimir Putin's wall to understand why they didn't take advantage of that access.

Speaker 3 But I think it probably comes down to the fact that they know we are in their systems too. This idea that we're in their grid, we're in their pipeline networks as well.

Speaker 3 Now, one point that often gets overlooked when we talk about this is that actually cyber command, which does these operations and NSA, et cetera, is limited by law from hacking certain civilian systems that could lead to mass casualties.

Speaker 3 So we actually have laws that prevent how much we can infiltrate our adversaries' infrastructure. There are no laws like that in Russia and China.
So, it's not necessarily an even playing field.

Speaker 2 So, I saw you smile, Alex, about Russia's a hurricane.

Speaker 2 Can you talk a little bit about that? And also, we've talked about Russian cyber operations in Ukraine.

Speaker 2 You mentioned Ukraine is successful at repelling many attacks, which means they're not as good, right? If they're having trouble with Ukraine, they'll definitely have trouble with the U.S.

Speaker 2 So, what does it give the U.S. any lessons in how to fight back? Because I suspect we're pretty good at fighting off Russia at this point, or maybe not.

Speaker 2 But talk about this idea of Russia as a hurricane.

Speaker 10 I think the fact is that it's a microcosm of the bigger deterrence that we've achieved with regards to Russia. They understand

Speaker 10 that they do not want to provoke a direct confrontation. Now, they'll dance around it, they'll

Speaker 10 issue threats, nuclear threats. They've got this doctrine called a reflexive control that they've really tested over decades.
They understand

Speaker 10 what happens when they threaten a nuclear escalation or an exercise. We go to the darkest place.
We go to the consequence, a nuclear war without understanding the probability.

Speaker 10 But with regards to lower threats,

Speaker 10 they believe that

Speaker 10 that might be an escalation, a direct confrontation that could start us on an escalatory spiral. They have no interest in doing that.
They're concerned about a direct confrontation with the West.

Speaker 10 They do believe that we're, in a lot of ways, schizophrenic, but we're 10 feet tall and we have lots of capabilities that we can employ, conventional cyber.

Speaker 10 And I think they just are generally deterred by

Speaker 10 happy to make noise, but directly attacking the United States, that's a different kind of bar. Different kind of bar, yeah.

Speaker 2 So at the end of the day,

Speaker 2 I think focus should be on China, as you all pointed out.

Speaker 2 It seems like the Chinese attempt, though, at reunification with Taiwan is one of the most likely events that could kick off a full-fledged, not just cyber war, but other wars.

Speaker 2 Each of you, what are the chances that China invades Taiwan in the next five years? And if it does, we'll be able to defend against accompanying Chinese cyber attacks that will come probably before.

Speaker 2 Let's hear from each of you, Nicole first, then Michael, and then Alex.

Speaker 3 I don't think it's inevitable, but why are they hacking into our water networks? Why are they hacking into these targets that have no espionage value whatsoever?

Speaker 3 The only reason you would go there is if you were looking to shut them down one day. And the thinking is that this is all prepositioning for an eventual invasion of Taiwan.

Speaker 3 Now, Xi Jinping has basically made this part of his strategy, and he's talked a lot about reunification being inevitable.

Speaker 3 And I think he will see, you know, his success, his legacy, resting on whether Taiwan is quote unquote reunified, right?

Speaker 3 So the thinking is that, you know, in the next decade, we might see China take action on this. Do I think it's going to happen in the next two to three years? No.

Speaker 3 You know, we've seen people like Millie come out and say that they think China would be ready to launch their attack by 2027.

Speaker 3 I don't think that means that they're going to actually launch that attack in 2027.

Speaker 3 I think five years, you know, maybe in the next decade, likely, I think the thinking is that they think this is somehow going to happen automatically, that Taiwan will just sort of acquiesce and stop being what they see as this renegade province.

Speaker 3 But we know that that is not how Taiwan sees things. And I do think cyber is going to be a big determinant of what happens here.

Speaker 3 You know, when you look at just TSMC, right, they're not going to bomb Taiwan's semiconductor.

Speaker 3 The thinking there is that to take it, they would hold it hostage with some kind of cyber attacks until they would basically hand over the keys.

Speaker 2 Michael?

Speaker 1 Look, I don't know how to, it's hard to predict the future.

Speaker 1 I guess what I would say is that the thing that concerns me the most is that we seem to be in an increasingly sort of fragile position where any sort of signal or any sort of miscommunication can set something off.

Speaker 1 And the more and more that, you know,

Speaker 1 Trump increases the pressure on our foreign adversaries, whether that's through something as simple as tariffs or through his rhetoric, I just think that you're in a situation where something is more likely to be misconstrued.

Speaker 1 There's a ton of rhetoric, for example, going on right now between the administration and Canada, right?

Speaker 1 Trump is saying all these things about Canada that are outside the norms of what politicians have said about Canada.

Speaker 1 um for decades if not if not longer and in that type of situation you wonder if there is some sort of issue at the border or if there is some sort of miscommunication, what will the response be?

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 2 So, Alex, obviously, Russia has paved the way for this with Ukraine, although some people say the situation in Ukraine has been a deterrent for China to move in there, even if they may engage in cyber attacks.

Speaker 2 Is that something they're looking at, what's happened in Ukraine from your perspective?

Speaker 10 They're carefully looking at it.

Speaker 10 And I think there was a significant level of deterrence based on the consolidated response of the democratic world, imposing costs, Russia failing to achieve its military objectives that looks like it's eroding

Speaker 10 three years on under the Trump administration. I think what she might be considering here is two different things.

Speaker 10 I think there was a lot of rhetoric about the decadence and decline of the West, but the reality is that

Speaker 10 the economy in China was slowing down, and maybe there was a diminished, a closing window of opportunity where China felt strong enough to take action.

Speaker 10 That 2027 mark could have been important in that regard.

Speaker 10 But the reality, things have changed in a significant way, look like they might change in a significant way in that the Trump administration is breaking our alliances.

Speaker 10 And that's not just in Europe with NATO. Frankly, we're unreliable to our

Speaker 10 Indo-Pacific allies. The Japanese and the South Koreans are thinking that they need to be much more working much more tightly together.
Same thing with Australians.

Speaker 10 And in that kind of environment, you know, watching things unfold over the next several years as they build up capabilities, there's a decision point somewhere in that last year of whether the window is closing or it's likely to expand over the course of the subsequent decade or so.

Speaker 10 So I don't think we're, you know, in the next year or two, we're there. I think in the waning days of the Trump administration, if there's a deal to be had,

Speaker 10 that might be an opportunity, a narrow opportunity for the Chinese, or it it could be in the aftermath. So

Speaker 10 I'd say short to medium term might be okay, but in the medium to long term, things could get dangerous

Speaker 10 for Taiwan in particular. And the noise coming out of the administration, I'm not sure how many people caught Albert Colby's testimony.
He's an Uber Chinahawk for Under Secretary of Defense.

Speaker 10 He basically said the game is not about securing Taiwan. It's about preventing Chinese dominance in the Indo-Pacific, which is a huge turn for him.

Speaker 10 And that, you know, that is an interesting signal, aligning closer with the Trump administration

Speaker 10 and not putting all our eggs on securing Taiwan. Right.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that was interesting. So I want to shift gears then to talk about how Trump and Doge are affecting America's ability to defend itself from cyber attacks.

Speaker 2 The National Security Agency houses the U.S. Cyber Command.
And this month, Elon Musk met with the head of NSA for a conversation that was reportedly centered on staff reductions in operations.

Speaker 2 Doge already spearheaded cuts at CISA.

Speaker 2 Nicole, talk us through these cuts and any future reductions in staffing affect overall preparedness, even if the leadership of those agencies get it, as you said earlier.

Speaker 2 Just for people don't understand, it's not just cuts at CISA. There are cybersecurity

Speaker 2 agencies across the federal government that work on securing specific agency systems.

Speaker 2 And so when their jobs get cut, it further degrades cyber capabilities, although the White House recently emailed agency telling to avoid laying off cybersecurity staffers.

Speaker 2 So they seem to have some understanding that it's a problem. And then Michael, I'll have a follow-up question for you on this.

Speaker 2 But talk about these Doge cuts, because you wrote me right away when they started saying, oh, no. Yeah.

Speaker 3 I mean, we have a crazy cyber workforce shortage in this country. Already.

Speaker 4 Already.

Speaker 3 And where that becomes most critical is on cyber defense inside government.

Speaker 3 And so I have spent a lot of effort over the past four years trying to figure out what it would take to get our best and brightest at some of these private security firms, people who work in security at Google, Microsoft, et cetera, to do a tour of duty inside government.

Speaker 3 And it's really difficult, right? They all have stock. They don't want to give up.
They don't want to go work in a bureaucracy. They're getting paid really well to work at these companies.

Speaker 3 And they see the most interesting threat data because, in many cases, China comes first for Microsoft, as they did in 2023 or Google. So it takes a lot to get these people inside government.

Speaker 3 And what's really disturbing is to see how viciously we've been firing them.

Speaker 3 We need those people at CISA. We've never needed them more desperately inside government in these roles.
And so it's become a real national security threat.

Speaker 3 Some of these doji cuts. And yes, there have been these sort of memos sent out saying, you know, refrain from cutting cyber people.
Well, it's too late.

Speaker 3 You know, these people who've been fired, they're not going to come crawling back

Speaker 3 to take these jobs. They have many other options.
And so that's a big problem. Now,

Speaker 3 you know, on some of this reporting that Cyber Command has been told to stand down on some of its offensive planning operations around Russia, when I first read that, to be honest with you, I almost went and threw up.

Speaker 3 You know, this is, like I said, we are in a mutually assured digital destruction.

Speaker 2 We have to keep up the pressure.

Speaker 3 We have to keep up what they call active defense or forward defense, otherwise we're really screwed here.

Speaker 3 Now, I have heard in talking to people who are in the know that actually, this isn't what it sounds like.

Speaker 3 That actually, you know, as part of any negotiation with a foreign actor, it is standard practice to basically stand down on some of these operations as we are trying to come up with a deal on Ukraine.

Speaker 3 And so, this might be more standard operating procedure than it is Trump telling the people to basically stand down on any kind of offensive cyber planning or operations.

Speaker 3 And let's hope that's all it is.

Speaker 2 Let's hope we'll see.

Speaker 2 We'll be back in a minute.

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Speaker 2 So aside from cuts, Doge itself is gaining access to government databases with extremely sensitive information. They seem to be violating protocols and regulations while they're doing it.

Speaker 2 Michael, talk about that risk that it poses. Because this is, I mean, they seem to do one every day, largely probably out of ignorance.
Who knows what they're taking?

Speaker 2 Some of these people have sketchy backgrounds themselves and love a good secret. You know, I know these types.

Speaker 2 Talk a little bit about the worries you have here.

Speaker 1 It's, I think it's an interesting political calculation by Trump, and I'm not saying that that much thought went into it, but

Speaker 1 I understand that part of his desire is to,

Speaker 1 and Musk's desire, at least what they say, is to like remake the federal government. But in the process, it certainly looks like they're destroying parts of it.

Speaker 1 And maybe in the end, that results in better government. I'm open-minded to that.
But in the short term, I think that's a big political risk because it looks like they're doing it in a haphazard way.

Speaker 1 And it doesn't look like the Republicans on Capitol Hill have any interest in trying to understand that or to hold them accountable for that.

Speaker 1 And that's, I think,

Speaker 1 another thing of the whole thing is that they're going about it in a way that looks haphazard. And

Speaker 1 if something were to go wrong, tying the lines directly back to them by the, you know, the media or the Democrats would do

Speaker 1 looks like it would be pretty easy. So I do think that is a big political risk.
But look, I mean, Trump often proves this wrong.

Speaker 3 Yeah, let me just jump in real quick. Yeah.

Speaker 3 You know, I think actually the security blogger Brian Krebs has done a great job covering some of this and he's called it, you know, the great national hack. And that is really what it is.

Speaker 3 I mean, you have to think back to there was a Chinese hack on the Office of Personnel Management, OPM, right, about 10 years ago. And it was a huge counterintelligence win for China.

Speaker 3 They basically got into the system. They could see everyone who ever applied for a security clearance.
And then they've baked in machine learning and AI so that they can do these pairings.

Speaker 3 So anytime there is an American person whoever

Speaker 3 who once applied for a security clearance traveling repeatedly to the same place as a Chinese citizen.

Speaker 3 Well, now that Chinese citizen is put on a list of suspected CIA informants, and you start to see how you could break down our entire intelligence apparatus that way in China.

Speaker 3 And that's what they've been doing. And so now what you have is you have doji sending in 19-year-olds, 21-year-olds with their own little, you know, Rup Goldberg server.

Speaker 3 plugging it in and basically like doing whatever they want at these agencies.

Speaker 3 There is no way that that these people have not been identified and compromised on some level and that foreign actors and sophisticated nation states are taking advantage of this.

Speaker 3 And we have to look at it in that way. And I'm surprised that there are not people inside this administration who aren't sounding alarms over this.
It really is a very real security risk.

Speaker 2 How many big balls jokes do we have to tell before we realize this guy's creepy, creepy? You know he's making copies of everything.

Speaker 2 I'm like sitting there like he's and it's on a hard drive that he hands to his mother or something. Anyway, I know, right? Right.

Speaker 2 You know how sloppy, one of the great laws of Silicon Valley is how precise they are. They're not precise in any way.
They're actually quite sloppy and then they're venal at the same time.

Speaker 2 So Alex, I have to ask you about Elon's attacks against you. He has posted X that you're a traitor, a puppet, a puppeteer.
You've committed treason.

Speaker 2 Now I've been attacked by Elon for a long time now and it's pretty vicious. He calls me, it said my heart is seething with hate.
which it isn't. But I'd like you to talk about that just briefly.

Speaker 2 And as Nicole already mentioned, we're not sure if Peak HEGS has halted Pentagon cyber operations against Russia earlier this month, which was denied by the DOD.

Speaker 2 Is that

Speaker 2 Elon too, or what is happening there? Sure.

Speaker 10 So I think it's a little bit of smoke and mirrors, kind of this idea that we're going to halt offensive cyber operations. It sounds good that we're in the midst of sensitive negotiations.

Speaker 10 That's actually not necessarily the way it plays out. We are just much more,

Speaker 10 this is a knee-jerk reaction from an administration that is filled not with the practitioners that had the first go-around, that would be a little bit more surgical and methodical, probably

Speaker 10 continue operations and maybe do some sort of reviews, maybe an extra layer of caution around things that could. that could derail

Speaker 10 the kinds of negotiations

Speaker 10 that they're undertaking. But I think that's an afterthought because there was a blowback on this on this idea of halting

Speaker 10 defense. It just doesn't ring true.
We conduct all sorts of different operations against adversaries.

Speaker 10 This is one in which there is constant attacks against our allies, against DATO, and to halt all operations.

Speaker 10 That's not the way it works. The other thing is, you know, this,

Speaker 1 I

Speaker 10 don't understand how Elon is a successful businessman. I just don't.
I don't understand

Speaker 10 what he's doing with Doge is

Speaker 10 I see it as just completely destructive.

Speaker 10 There is no element of efficiency unless you're just literally working on chipping away at the bottom line to return dollars to the federal budget because it's usually

Speaker 10 largely starts with probationary employees across the board, regardless of what kind of sensitive the jobs that they're doing at NNSA or.

Speaker 10 CISA or any other place. So it is not in any way

Speaker 10 bringing around efficiency. I don't extend taking down the Wilson Center and Kennan Institute that studies Russia, how that works.

Speaker 10 Voice of America, our ability ability to compete in the information domain, you know, around the world,

Speaker 10 how that's helping. These are not steps towards efficiency.
This is potentially taking a hatchet to the way that the U.S. employs both hard power and soft power.
With regards to me specifically,

Speaker 10 I guess

Speaker 10 I... My wife says I tend to piss people off.
So, you know, I guess I pissed off the most powerful man in the world and the richest man in the world at various points.

Speaker 10 I don't really take these folks all that seriously at the moment. There are obviously lots of nefarious actors that have been brought into this administration.
I'm mindful.

Speaker 10 And I don't think I'm at the top of that list.

Speaker 10 You might be more, you could be higher on that list than I am, Karen. But if they want to pick this fight, I've got nothing to hide.
I would make it ugly for them.

Speaker 10 I mean, just think about the congressional testimony. They came at me on my area of expertise that really, in a lot of ways, I'm kind of untouchable on.

Speaker 10 I have, if they want to pick this fight, it's probably going to get ugly.

Speaker 2 So last two quick questions. Trump administration is reportedly looking into a deal to let Oracle run TikTok.

Speaker 2 Obviously, this is something I thought they would go with because they already were with Oracle and Project Texas.

Speaker 2 JD Vance and Mike Walls are leading Texas Project 2, I guess, what they're trying to figure out.

Speaker 2 But there's virtually no way to ensure the Chinese government doesn't have backdoor access to American user data on TikTok unless they completely don't bring the algorithm over.

Speaker 2 Nicole, you said you would never download the app and deserved urgency with which it was treated. Obviously, Congress voted to ban it.
So

Speaker 2 that's what they wanted to do, whether you agree with that or not.

Speaker 2 I'd love you to talk about, very briefly, about TikTok.

Speaker 2 And do you think it's as big a deal? And what do you imagine is going to happen to it?

Speaker 3 Yeah, it turns out they're China hawks who happen to love TikTok.

Speaker 3 You know, I wish that the White House, and this is across administrations, would declassify the security risks that they've seen around TikTok.

Speaker 3 It is not effective to go out there and say, Huawei is a national security threat if you use Huawei when it's so much cheaper than the competition, or to say the same about TikTok when honestly it's more fun than any of the other social apps I've used.

Speaker 3 I finally downloaded it and then I quickly undownloaded it on your phone? On my phone. Yeah, going into the election.
I know, I know.

Speaker 2 You need the fake phone like Kara Smisher.

Speaker 3 It's not on there anymore.

Speaker 4 I told you this five years ago, Nicole.

Speaker 3 But let me just say this. You know, I have heard stories, too many stories now, about people who are in sensitive positions inside government whose wives and kids have been hacked.

Speaker 3 um potentially through their access to tick tock okay so it is a very real security risk um now will it be less of a security risk if it is owned and operated by a u.s company? Yes, potentially.

Speaker 3 But, you know, what I really worried about with TikTok was more on the misinformation front, that they would tweak the algorithm.

Speaker 3 So, yeah, one day, you know, China invades Taiwan and, oh, there are college protests supporting it. And we have no idea how that happened.

Speaker 3 And there had just been a subtle tweak of the algorithm to basically serve up pro-PRC

Speaker 3 content.

Speaker 3 But I also worry about the backdoor issue. And I don't know.
It's a big question mark.

Speaker 3 I think a lot about my old college buddy, buddy, Mike Gallagher, who headed up the China Committee and is now outside of government.

Speaker 2 He's probably crying inside.

Speaker 3 Yeah,

Speaker 3 he spent so much effort on TikTok and now to sort of watch people in his own party say, never mind, we're actually okay with this and we're going to save it

Speaker 3 probably has to hurt a little bit.

Speaker 4 So it does. I don't know.

Speaker 2 I can tell you it does. I can tell you it does.
Also, that J.D. Vance, the world's most unsuccessful tech venture capitalist, is running the process really makes me feel good.

Speaker 2 I'm sure we'll get a great deal.

Speaker 2 Anyway, last question. Zero Day raises the question of national security versus civil liberties in the face of a cyber attack.
But what would happen to U.S.

Speaker 2 civil liberties if there's a serious cyber attack while Trump is president? All three of you?

Speaker 1 I think that if there were to be an attack, that

Speaker 1 the response of the country, as I was saying, would be incredibly unpredictable. And what Trump would do would be unpredictable.

Speaker 1 And it seems like a lot of classical issues in the post-9-11 world, like civil liberties, sort of got lost in the Trump era. That was a big debate during the war on terror.

Speaker 1 Like, you know, what do civil liberties mean and such? But when Trump

Speaker 1 rose to power, and then even when he was out of power and back, those classical arguments sort of went by the wayside. So in the sense of the show, it was a way of raising that issue and saying, okay,

Speaker 1 what about the good old question of civil liberties? And what would that mean? And if there was an attack, would the government seize power?

Speaker 1 And I think if we've seen anything, you know, based on Trump, Trump's basically willing to do anything here in this second term. And the people who would say no to him are no longer in the room.

Speaker 2 Right. So worse, worse than was already portrayed fictionally.

Speaker 4 Nicole?

Speaker 3 So. And I apologize because this is a little bit of a technical answer, but it's as technical as I'll go.

Speaker 3 You know, how is China infiltrating our infrastructure? They are using our civil liberty protections against us.

Speaker 3 They've actually hacked a lot of these systems by hacking home routers and home office routers that have stopped getting patches and we call that legacy software, right?

Speaker 3 And then they hack into these systems through like someone's house in Indianapolis so that when you're the water operator, water treatment plant operator, you see this little traffic coming from some house down the street in Indianapolis, you don't think twice about it.

Speaker 3 You would never suspect it's a Chinese state-sponsored hacker, right?

Speaker 3 And so we are really not set up well to be resilient against these threats because our adversaries have figured out that our Fourth Amendment protections are actually very exploitable.

Speaker 3 And so if there were to be some kind of full-scale conflict where we would see this everything, everywhere, all-at-once cyber attack scenario play out, it's an interesting question.

Speaker 3 Like, how do we defend ourselves when so much of this is coming coming in through American homes where the NSA and other agencies just don't have visibility?

Speaker 3 You know, we really are handcuffed when it comes to cyber defense. And I don't know how those would play out, but, you know, the Fourth Amendment is still the Fourth Amendment.

Speaker 3 And, you know, for now, it's still holding.

Speaker 3 And so that is actually why it is really disturbing that we are seeing these reports of cyber command and other agencies being told to stand down on our own pre-operational planning.

Speaker 3 Because all we really have in the United States, when we're blind to our own domestic traffic, is the ability to hack these systems back overseas and to basically create pain for any adversary that would choose to create pain here.

Speaker 2 Alex, why don't you finish up?

Speaker 10 I think for me, it's pretty simple. I see autocrats seeing opportunity in crisis and chaos.
So I think that that's just an opportunity for power grab.

Speaker 10 I've started watching Zero Day and basically very quickly you see the legislative branch seating authorities.

Speaker 10 I'm not sure what other authorities can be seated to this president. I mean he's already has immunity

Speaker 10 for all official acts, but I think there's just an enormous

Speaker 10 opportunity, depending on where it lands in the timeline, that could mean delayed elections if it happens to land in 2026.

Speaker 10 It could mean, you know, if there is chaos and looting, that's the only thing that's actually the perfect time to do a cyber attack would be right before the election. So no ideas.

Speaker 10 Sorry, I shouldn't have said that.

Speaker 10 But I think in the moment where you're seeing civil unrest as a result of, you know, services collapsing, you could see, you know, martial law and suspension of posse comitatus or something of that nature.

Speaker 10 So a lot of dangers. in that kind of crisis.

Speaker 2 Okay. Well, just watch zero days because it gets better.
And the legislative, you'll see what they do. You'll see right what happens.

Speaker 2 They're a little, they've got a little more fire than you think they do, but not maybe in a good way. We'll see.
Uh, you should all watch it. And everybody, please watch and read all these people.

Speaker 2 As I said,

Speaker 2 Alex's new book is called The Folly of Realism, and Nicole's new documentary podcast is called To Catch a Thief.

Speaker 2 I recommend all of them, and I really appreciate you all, even though the topic is dire.

Speaker 2 Thank you.

Speaker 2 On with Kara Swisher is produced by Christian Castro-Roussel, Kateri Yoakum, Dave Shaw, Megan Burney, Megan Kunane, and Kaylin Lynch. Nishat Kirwa is Vox Media's executive producer of audio.

Speaker 2 Special thanks to Maura Fox. Our engineers are Rick Kwan and Fernando Aruda, and our theme music is by Trackademics.
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