Book Excerpt: Russian cyber weapons are waging war on US networks and American minds

The Russians believe that the surest way of winning the conflict is to dupe the adversary into abandoning his plans to fight or to defeat him by outfoxing him without a fight.

Russia has a hugely different conception of cyberwarfare than the United States, rooted in its culture of secrecy, its conspiratorial mindset, and the state’s drive to control its citizens’ behavior and thinking. Conversely, U.S. cyber doctrine reflects American culture and values, such as freedom of speech, privacy, and the government’s non-interference in individuals’ lives. Regrettably, I must say, in recent years I have observed considerable erosion of these foundational American principles and their replacement with politically correct speech, "acceptable" opinions, feelings-based (rather than fact-based) conclusions, and behavior imposed by government on private businesses and religious organizations. It brings unwanted memories of my youth behind the Iron Curtain, where decades and even centuries of government censorship eventually led to individual citizens’ self-censorship of free expression, the most sophisticated form of state oppression.  Based on their distinct cultures and values, Russia and the United States have approached the cyber issue from two different angles. The Americans, direct and straightforward in their thinking, have focused on the technical, "cyber" aspect—systems, networks, and data encoded in ones and zeros. The Russians, cunning in their thinking from having had to survive centuries of foreign invasions and domestic oppression, have focused on the "informational-psychological" aspect—actual information content, how information is perceived by human minds, and how it can influence and manipulate an adversary’s thinking. In May 2017, DNI Clapper, commenting on Russia’s techniques employed during their 2016 covert influence campaign, told NBC’s Chuck Todd that the Russians are "almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor." Although I am ethnically Russian, as a strong opponent of political correctness and self-censorship, I wasn’t offended by Clapper’s comments, because I didn’t interpret them literally as an intentional xenophobic attack on Russian ethnicity. I understood that his choice of words was intended simply as a colorful, albeit exaggerated, description of a cultural trait that is present in some Russians, just like their infamous propensity to consume large amounts of vodka.