Jim Sciutto on ‘The Shadow War’
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 15 June 2019
⏱️ 47 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Russian and Chinese leaders understand that they’re unlikely to win a shooting war with the United States, but they have other ways to challenge Western interests, turning our greatest strengths—open societies, dominance of technology on Earth and in space, and military innovation—into weaknesses.
CNN anchor and chief national security correspondent Jim Sciutto calls it “the shadow war,” and it’s the subject of his new book of the same name. David Priess sat down with Jim to talk about these asymmetric threats to national security, and what the United States and its allies can do to fight back.
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| 0:25.6 | no bull and the aftermath. |
| 0:34.0 | This period of time in 2013-2014, when things really escalated, part of this a response |
| 0:39.1 | to Russia's perception of the Maidan, these pro-Western anti-Russian democracy protests, |
| 0:47.1 | you can call them in Ukraine, they perceive those as kind of, as they often do as a CIA |
| 0:52.0 | plot, you know, this kind of thing. |
| 0:54.0 | And it led to a very, have a second in the book where you see the very quick succession |
| 0:58.0 | of steps in response to that. |
| 1:00.2 | Crimea, you know, Eastern Ukraine, sadly soon after that, the MH17 shoot down. |
| 1:06.5 | Also at the same time, Russia begins a massive cyber attack on the US State Department email |
| 1:11.5 | system, successful one. |
| 1:13.6 | And they were in there for a long time before they were discovered. |
| 1:16.4 | I speak to Rick Leget, the former deputy director of the NSA, and he says, looking back, we |
| 1:21.0 | should have seen the State Department email hack as a sign of what was to come in 2016 |
| 1:26.0 | because they used similar guy, cozy bear and fancy bear. |
| 1:29.0 | They were active a couple of years before. |
| 1:31.2 | So the reason I do that is to see that there was a build up. |
| 1:34.0 | This did not come out of nowhere. |
| 1:35.7 | You know, that Pearl Harbor, as it were, was preceded by a lot of very aggressive activity. |
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