David Sanger, national security correspondent and senior writer for The New York Times, joins Sam Wang in this episode to discuss the growing cybersecurity threats facing the United States.

Sanger outlines how cyber warfare levels the playing field, allowing rich and poor countries alike to attack other nations, especially the United States. He also details several cyber attacks, including those undertaken by North Korea.

In Sanger’s 36-year reporting career for The Times, he has been on three teams that have won Pulitzer prizes, including one in 2017 for international reporting. He is also the author of several books, including his most recent one “The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age.”

ABOUT THE HOSTS

Wang is a professor at Princeton University, appointed in neuroscience with affiliate appointments in the Program in Law and Public Affairs and the Center for Information Technology Policy. An alumnus of Caltech, where he received a B.S. with honors in physics, he went on to earn a Ph.D. in neuroscience from the Stanford University School of Medicine. He conducted postdoctoral research at Duke University Medical Center and at Bell Labs Lucent Technologies. He has also worked on science and education policy for the U.S. Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources. He is noted for his application of data analytics and poll aggregation to American politics. He is leading an effort at the Princeton Gerrymandering Project to build a 50-state data resource for legislative-quality citizen redistricting. His work to define a state-level legal theory to limit partisan gerrymandering recently won Common Cause’s Gerrymandering Standard Writing Contest. His neuroscience research concerns how the brain learns from sensory experience in early life, adulthood and autism.