Rebecca MacKinnon Quotes

The Chinese are engaging in a huge amount of cyber-espionage… So do we…. We can’t ask the Chinese to stop doing something that we’re doing. We can’t ask them to obey rules that we don’t ask France and others to obey…. I think it’s going to take a while even to figure out even the rules we would like everyone to adhere to that we are prepared to adhere to ourselves.

Cyber weapons won't go away, and their spread can't be controlled. Instead, as we've done for other destructive technologies, the world needs to establish a set of principles to determine the proper conduct of governments regarding cyber conflict.

If the U.N. were to be successful in its efforts to control the Internet, countries where human rights records range from questionable to criminal could be put in charge of determining what is and is not allowed to appear online.

A number of countries, including Russia and China, have put forward proposals to regulate aspects of the Internet like 'crime' and 'security' that are currently unregulated at the global level due to lack of international consensus over what those terms actually mean or over how to balance enforcement with the protection of citizens' rights.

The standards of the international community manifest firmness. Iran has no need for long-range missiles or to collaborate with terrorist organizations all over the world.

The NSA and Israel wrote Stuxnet together.

In the United States, whatever you may think of Julian Assange, even people who are not necessarily big fans of his are very concerned about the way in which the United States government and some companies have handled Wikileaks.

We believe US threats of an approaching World War III and their use of Iran's nuclear issue as an excuse is another form of American insanity.

The United States lost a bit of the moral high ground when it comes to warning the world of the danger of cyberattacks.

The Internet - central to modern life - provides new ways for our enemies to plan and act against us.

Some of the greatest national security threats we face cannot be defeated or defended by traditional military hardware, but only by greatly enhanced cyberspace warfare, including both offensive cyber-warfare and cyber-security.

We know that the government in China has been involved in cyber attacks before. I look at our partners around the world, our traditional allies, our NATO partners who are making the same assessment. We share so much with them and rely on their technology, their expertise and interoperability in many aspects of our own armed forces.

In cyberspace, it is becoming increasingly difficult to uphold security for one's own country by sacrificing that of others.

Cyber terrorists are no different from other terrorists: No matter where they hide, we will track them down and seek to bring them to the United States to face justice.

Everybody has a hacking capability. And probably every intelligence service is hacking in the territory of other countries. But who exactly does what? That would be a very sensitive piece of information. But it's very difficult to communicate about it. Because nobody wants to admit the scope of what they're doing.

The use of encrypted communication and data storage to shield terrorist coordination from intelligence and law-enforcement authorities is known as 'going dark.'

U.N. Security Council resolutions are only as effective as their enforcement.

In a modern digitalized world, it is possible to paralyze a country without attacking its defense forces: The country can be ruined by simply bringing its SCADA systems to a halt. To impoverish a country, one can erase its banking records. The most sophisticated military technology can be rendered irrelevant. In cyberspace, no country is an island.

What we've seen over the last decade is we've seen a departure from the traditional work of the National Security Agency. They've become sort of the national hacking agency, the national surveillance agency. And they've lost sight of the fact that everything they do is supposed to make us more secure as a nation and a society.

All of our intelligence agencies, our Department of Defense, are all working to meet this threat. But it's a fast moving world; it's a place where offense is easier than defense, and keeping up with the next innovation in cyber-warfare is an enormous challenge.

Political pundits in Delhi and Islamabad have berated the West for its relativism and double-standards. After all why should Britain have a nuclear arsenal but not India? It is a reasonable question.

I worked for GCHQ, which stands for Government Communications Headquarters, and is the equivalent of the NSA here in the U.S.

Besides the conventional military threats, North Korean cyber capabilities are growing.

Some people are skeptical about the value of indictments where a foreign nation-state actor is involved. But in the case of APT10, the indictments marked an important step in publicly exposing China's continued practice of stealing intellectual property to give Chinese firms an unfair advantage in the marketplace.

The corporate community understands the need for rules. Indeed, it argues for regulation to protect intellectual property, physical property rights, and contract law. So why does it oppose global regulation to protect people and the environment?