Dawn of the Code War: America's Battle Against Russia, China, and the Rising Global Cyber Threat by John P. Carlin

Dawn of the Code War: America's Battle Against Russia, China, and the Rising Global Cyber Threat

by John P. Carlin

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History & Foreign Affairs

Former DOJ National Security Division head John Carlin's account of building the legal framework for treating state-actor cyber attacks as crimes prosecutable by name — the "naming and shaming" indictment strategy applied to PLA officers, GRU operatives, North Korean and Iranian agents.

Core ideas
  • The indictment-as-deterrence approach: even when extradition is impossible, naming specific foreign-state operators with detailed forensic evidence imposes costs (travel restrictions, sanctions hooks, reputational damage) and establishes legal precedents for future action.
  • The Sony hack (North Korea), the OPM breach (China), the DNC hack (Russia), and the Anthem theft (China) are presented as the formative cases that built the framework — each producing institutional learning the next case applied.
  • The framework's limit is the book's quiet concern: it works against operators who care about international legitimacy and fails against actors (criminal gangs, less-deterrable states) who don't — and the threat surface is shifting toward the latter.
Published2018
Pages481
ISBN9781541773837
ReadJun 2025
foreign policy, intelligence memoir

Connected to 6 other books

shared themes first
Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror by Michael V. Hayden Playing to the Edge Michael V. Hayden Shares History & Foreign Affairs The Plot to Destroy Democracy: How Putin and his Spies are Undermining America and Dismantling the West by Malcolm W. Nance The Plot to Destroy Democracy Malcolm W. Nance Shares History & Foreign Affairs Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers by Andy Greenberg Sandworm Andy Greenberg Shares History & Foreign Affairs World on the Brink: How America Can Beat China in the Race for the Twenty-First Century by Dmitri Alperovitch World on the Brink Dmitri Alperovitch Shares History & Foreign Affairs Permanent Record by Edward Snowden Permanent Record Edward Snowden A cross-theme link Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency by Andy Greenberg Tracers in the Dark Andy Greenberg A cross-theme link

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