Dark Territory
by Fred Kaplan
2020-12-29 10:15:09
âAn important, disturbing, and gripping historyâ (Kirkus Reviews, starred review), the never-before-told story of the computer scientists and the NSA, Pentagon, and White House policymakers who invent and employ cyber warsâwhere every ...
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âAn important, disturbing, and gripping historyâ (Kirkus Reviews, starred review), the never-before-told story of the computer scientists and the NSA, Pentagon, and White House policymakers who invent and employ cyber warsâwhere every country can be a major power player and every hacker a mass destroyer. In June 1983, President Reagan watched the movie War Games, in which a teenager unwittingly hacks the Pentagon, and asked his top general if the scenario was plausible. The general said it was. This set in motion the first presidential directive on computer security. From the 1991 Gulf War to conflicts in Haiti, Serbia, Syria, the former Soviet republics, Iraq, and Iran, where cyber warfare played a significant role, Dark Territory chronicles a little-known past that shines an unsettling light on our future. Fred Kaplan probes the inner corridors of the National Security Agency, the beyond-top-secret cyber units in the Pentagon, the âinformation warfareâ squads of the military services, and the national security debates in the White House to reveal the details of the officers, policymakers, scientists, and spies who devised this new form of warfare and who have been planningâand (more often than people know) fightingâthese wars for decades. âAn eye-opening history of our governmentâs efforts to effectively manage our national security in the face of the largely open global communications network established by the World Wide Webâ¦.Dark Territory is a page-turner [and] consistently surprisingâ (The New York Times).
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