Ben Buchanan

The threat of cyberwar can feel very Hollywood: nuclear codes hacked, power plants melting down, cities burning. In reality, state-sponsored hacking is covert, insidious, and constant. It is also much harder to prevent. Ben Buchanan reveals the cyberwar that's already here, reshaping the global contest for geopolitical advantage.

Cyber Attacks and the New Normal of Geopolitics

The Hacker and the State

Andrew Imbrie

AI is revolutionizing the world. Here’s how democracies can come out on top. Artificial intelligence is revolutionizing the modern world. It is ubiquitous—in our homes and offices, in the present and most certainly in the future. Today, we encounter AI as our distant ancestors once encountered fire. If we manage AI well, it will become a force for good, lighting the way to many transformative inventions. If we deploy it thoughtlessly, it will advance beyond our control. If we wield it for destruction, it will fan the flames of a new kind of war, one that holds democracy in the balance. As AI policy experts Ben Buchanan and Andrew Imbrie show in The New Fire, few choices are more urgent—or more fascinating—than how we harness this technology and for what purpose. The new fire has three sparks: data, algorithms, and computing power. These components fuel viral disinformation campaigns, new hacking tools, and military weapons that once seemed like science fiction. To autocrats, AI offers the prospect of centralized control at home and asymmetric advantages in combat. It is easy to assume that democracies, bound by ethical constraints and disjointed in their approach, will be unable to keep up. But such a dystopia is hardly preordained. Combining an incisive understanding of technology with shrewd geopolitical analysis, Buchanan and Imbrie show how AI can work for democracy. With the right approach, technology need not favor tyranny.

War, Peace, and Democracy in the Age of AI

The New Fire

Network Intrusions, Trust, and Fear in the International System

The Cybersecurity Dilemma

Why do nations break into one another's most important computer networks? There is an obvious answer: to steal valuable information or to attack. But this isn't the full story. This book draws on often-overlooked documents leaked by Edward Snowden, real-world case studies of cyber operations, and policymaker perspectives to show that intruding into other countries' networks has enormous defensive value as well. Two nations, neither of which seeks to harm the other but neither of which trusts the other, will often find it prudent to launch intrusions. This general problem, in which a nation's means of securing itself threatens the security of others and risks escalating tension, is a bedrock concept in international relations and is called the 'security dilemma'. This book shows not only that the security dilemma applies to cyber operations, but also that the particular characteristics of the digital domain mean that the effects are deeply pronounced. The cybersecurity dilemma is both a vital concern of modern statecraft and a means of accessibly understanding the essential components of cyber operations.

Hacking, Trust, and Fear Between Nations

An eleven-year-old boy who loves the Harry Potter books even though he has dyslexia recounts how he designed an original board game base on the stories, and entered it in his school's invention contest.

How I Discovered My Own Magical World

My Year with Harry Potter

Carol J. Adams

Susan Allison

Suggests ways to use the plot, themes, and characters of children's books to create an original board game, and provides advice on beginning and ending a game, developing complications, making the board and pieces, and other details.

Ben Buchanan

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