"At the heart of cybersecurity is a paradox: Cooperation enables conflict. In Age of Deception, Jon R. Lindsay shows how widespread trust in cyberspace enables espionage and subversion.
The dark arts have long been part of global politics, but digital systems expand their scope and scale. Yet success in secret statecraft depends on political context, not just sophisticated technology. Lindsay provides a general theory of intelligence performance—the analogue to military performance in battle—to explain why spies and hackers alike depend on clandestine organizations and vulnerable institutions.
Through cases spanning codebreaking at Bletchley Park during WWII to the weaponization of pagers by Israel in 2024, Lindsay reveals continuity and change in secret statecraft. Along the way he explains why popular assumptions about cyber warfare are profoundly misleading. Offense does not simply dominate defense, for example, because the same digital complexity that expands opportunities for deception also creates potential for self-deception and counter-deception. Provocative and persuasive, Age of Deception offers crucial insights into the future of secret statecraft in cyberspace and beyond."
"Western political discourse on cybersecurity is dominated by news of Chinese military development of cyberwarfare capabilities and cyber exploitation against foreign governments, corporations, and non-governmental organizations. Western accounts, however, tell only one side of the story. Chinese leaders are also concerned with cyber insecurity, and Chinese authors frequently note that China is also a victim of foreign cyber attacks—predominantly from the United States.
China and Cybersecurity: Espionage, Strategy, and Politics in the Digital Domain is a comprehensive analysis of China's cyberspace threats and policies. The contributors—Chinese specialists in cyber dynamics, experts on China, and experts on the use of information technology between China and the West—address cyberspace threats and policies, emphasizing the vantage points of China and the US on cyber exploitation and the possibilities for more positive coordination with the West. The volume's multi-disciplinary, cross-cultural approach does not pretend to offer wholesale resolutions. Contributors take different stances on how problems may be analyzed and reduced. The compilation provides empirical and evaluative depth on the deepening dependence on shared global information infrastructure and the growing willingness to exploit it for political or economic gain."
