2025-09-18
54 分钟I'm Dan Kurtz-Valen, and this is the Foreign Affairs Interview.
I actually believe that we can get our cyber defenses to where we have confidence that our most important networks cannot be disrupted by an adversary.
And that's really the question we have to ask ourselves.
Can we prevent the most critical military power pipeline networks from being disrupted during a crisis or conflict?
And I believe that we can.
In 2024,
the US government discovered that Chinese hackers had penetrated a huge swath of the American telecommunications system and remained there for years.
That attack came to be known as salt typhoon.
And from what we know,
China has not just managed to steal the data and surveil the communications of hundreds of millions of Americans,
it also embedded itself in the United States' most important infrastructure,
giving Beijing a crucial advantage in a conflict.
Ann Neuberger was until recently the top cybersecurity official on the National Security Council.
She was in that position when Salt Typhoon was discovered, and to her,
the attack is not just an isolated incident of cyber espionage.
Rather,
it is evidence of American weakness and Chinese dominance in a central arena of national security.
Decades after the widespread adoption of the internet opened a new realm of geopolitical contestation she writes in the current issue of Foreign Affairs,
the United States has fallen behind.
failing to secure a vast digital home front.