How serious a threat is cyber warfare? David Sanger will join us to talk about the

perfect weapon, war, sabotage, and fear in the cyber age. What terrible things took place

on New York City's Blackwells island? Stacey Horne will be here to talk about her new book,

Damnation Island, Poor, Sick, Mad, and Criminal in 19th Century New York. Alexander Altair

will give us an update from the publishing world. Plus, our critics' Dwight Garner,

Pearl Sagle, and Jen Zalai will join us to talk about the latest in literary criticism.

This is the Booker V Podcast from the New York Times. I'm Pamela Paul.

Joining us now from Washington is my colleague David Sanger. He is the National Security

correspondent for the Times and the author of a new book, The Perfect Weapon, War,

Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age. David, thanks for joining us.

Great to be with you, Pamela. Let's start and talk a little bit about your day job.

What do you do as the National Security correspondent? What falls under that umbrella?

Well, we have a big team that covers national security in the Times Bureau as you would expect.

In the past, I've been a White House correspondent. She flashed in correspondent and so forth.

We all specialize a bit. Starting about a decade ago, I began pressing to get us more into the

cyber age. In addition to the usual foreign policy and national security issues that I covered,

nuclear proliferation, North Korea, Iran, and so forth, I've also developed a bit of a sub-specialty

that has come to dominate a good deal of my daily life in covering the growth of cyber conflict

among nations, which has really emerged in the past few years as the dominant way that countries

try to undercut each other without actually going to war. All right, so you just used word

cyber conflict and then people also use the word cyber warfare, cyber terrorism, electronic

sabotage. What are all these things? How do they differ? There's this all on the same kind of

...