The Digital Domain of Warfare

Edward Snowden: The Internet is shared critical infrastructure for everyone on Earth. It’s not supposed to be a domain of warfare. We’re not supposed to be putting our economy on the front lines of the battleground. But that’s increasingly what’s happening today.

Shane Harris: You think about how the military looks at cyberspace today – they actually look at it as a domain of warfare comparable to land and sea and the air and outer space, and they're looking at cyberspace as a way to both attack their enemies and spy on them, but also a place where they can be attacked and they can be spied on.

David Rothkopf: In fact, many cyber attacks occur without being noticed and most cyber attacks occur without the government having any idea that they are taking place.

Harris: The advantage is always going to go to the attacker because if you're defending your network and let's say you're a large industrial company and you've got 70,000 computers in your company that are connected to the internet, that’s 70,000 points of access that you have to defend against. The guy who's trying to get in through your system only has to find one, and frequently will look for a vulnerability in some software that you're running that you or even the manufacturer doesn't even know exists.

Michael Hayden: The American people have not yet decided what it is they want their government to do or what it is they will allow their government to do to defend them in the cyber domain.

Richard Clarke: We’re spending billions of dollars creating this new kind of warfare capability. And yet there’s been no discussion in public about the strategy for using it – about the issues that arise in that strategy. So I think we would benefit by a public discussion now of the strategy involved with cyber war, but we’re not getting it.

PRODUCTION CREDITS

Produced by

Ceri Riley

Director of Photography

Gary Henoch & Neil Barrett

Special Thanks

Ari Daniel, Lauren Aguirre, Will Toubman, Chris Schmidt

Original Footage

© WGBH Educational Foundation 2015

MEDIA CREDITS

Music

APM

Animation

Ekin Akalin

IMAGE

(main image: animated globe)

© WGBH Educational Foundation 2015