to yet another Authors@Google Talk.

Today with us is best-selling New York Times author Peter

Singer.

He wrote a very important book on cyberwar.

Our own Eric Schmidt says, "this is an essential read."

My dear colleagues, I will repeat this for you.

This is an essential read.

So we do have copies of the book on sale.

This is the way it looks like.

Please go and buy the book, even if you've seen this talk.

Peter is a great author in many respects.

But what he did for cybersecurity and cyberwar

for, in particular, is he expanded

on a field that is growing.

And that we know is becoming increasingly important not only

from the infrastructure standpoint,

but also for international relations.

I'm going to let Peter actually take it from here.

Thank you, Peter.

PETER SINGER: Thank you for the kind introduction.

So it's a little bit daunting to be

talking on this topic at a company like this,

because I remember the very first time

that I ever saw a computer.

My father took me to a science center down in North Carolina.

And I got to see a Commodore, if you remember those.

And I took a class on how to program,

learning an entire new language for the sole purpose

of making a smiley face out of the letter m that printed out

on one of those old spool printers

that you tore the perforated paper off the sides.

Remember that?

Now since then, the centrality of computers to my life,

your life, the entire world, it's

almost impossible to fathom.

We live in a world where more than 40 trillion emails

are sent every single year.

The first website was made in 1991.

Now, according to your own analytics,

there's more than 30 trillion individual web pages out there.

Moreover, the internet is not just

about compiling and sharing information.

It's also having impact out on the real world via the emerging

Internet of Things.

According to Cisco, we'll see more than 40 billion devices

internet-enabled over the next five years,

as everything from thermostats to cars to refrigerators

to technologies literally not yet invented or imagined all

come online and all start to carry

on conversations without us.

So in short, domains that range from communication to commerce

to critical infrastructure to even conflict.

98% of US military communications

goes over the civilian-owned and operated internet.

All of these spaces are dependent on it.

So we're in an age of cyber dependency.

But in the short history of the internet,

I would argue that we've reached a critical turning point.

And it's because while the positive side of cyberspace

is rippling out, so too are the risks, the negative side.

There's all sorts of ways you can illustrate this.

You can illustrate it with the raw numbers.

Every second, nine new pieces of malware are discovered.

97% of Fortune 500 companies know that they've been hacked.

And the other 3% have been, too, they just

aren't willing to admit it to themselves.

More than 100 governments have created some kind

of cyber military command, some kind of military unit designed

to fight and win wars in cyberspace and beyond.

And indeed, the very first Pew poll to kick off 2014

found that Americans are more afraid of a cyber attack

than they are of North Korean nuclear weapons,

Iranian nuclear weapons, the rise of China, Russia,

or climate change.

So these fears, they've coalesced

into one of the most rapidly growing industries

in the entire world.

They've also driven a massive bureaucratic growth

at the national governmental level

not just in the United States.

Just earlier today, France announced

that it was spending another $2 billion

in its military on cybersecurity issues and cyberwar.

But also we see it at the state level.

And even at the local level, where

you see cities like Los Angeles, for example,

creating cybersecurity centers.

What all this together means is that for all the hope

and promise of the new digital age,

we also live in an era of cyber insecurity,

if we're really being honest about it.

And so before I go much further, it's

at this point I'm going to try and do

something that's a little bit counterintuitive,

but will maybe help make that point about cyber insecurity.

And a lot like the challenge of trying

to write a book about cybersecurity

and make it interesting, you also

have the challenge of how do you give a talk about it

and give visuals that make it interesting.

So what I did-- and with Boris's help,

hopefully it will play for us here

--is I've assembled what I think are

some of the best illustrations of cyberwar art,

and some of the worst illustrations of it.

And it's going to play in front of me.

I'm not going to speak to it.

It's just going to continue to flash for a couple reasons.

One, to tell that story of cyber insecurity.

But also because data has found that you're

60% more likely to retain what I'm

saying if you look at a picture.

Even if the picture has nothing to do with what I'm saying,

it's just the way us humans work.

And that actually goes to a broader lesson

that the book explores, and we'll talk about it later on.

Which is that we're humans, we're strange, we're weird,

but that's what drives all of these things.

So let's pull back on all this and wrestle

with the question of why a book on cybersecurity and cyberwar,

and why now?

There's two quotes that motivated

me that basically encapsulate this.

The first is from President Obama,

who declared that cybersecurity risks pose quote,

"The most serious economic and national security

challenges of the 21st century."

The second quote is from the former CIA director,

who said quote, "Rarely has something been so important

and so talked about with less and less clarity and less

apparent understanding."

And you can see, I really do want to talk to this one,

but we'll keep moving on.

So let's explore this gap.

We see it in all sorts of fields.

From the 70% of business executives--

not 70% of CTOs, CSOs, CIOs --but 70%

of business executives in general, in any industry, who

have made a cybersecurity decision for their company

despite the fact that no major MBA program teaches it

as part of your normal business management

training and responsibility.

That same kind of gap in training

happens at the schools we teach our diplomats, our lawyers,

our journalists, our generals.

Or anecdotes.

And there's just an array of funny,

but in a certain way sad, anecdotes that

populate the book.

From the opening of the book where a Pentagon official is

telling us how important this all is,

but he describes it as "this cyber stuff."

When you can only call something stuff,

but you know it's important, that's

not a good place to be in.

Or the former Secretary of Homeland Security,

the agency that is ostensibly in charge of cybersecurity

on the civilian side for the United States--

who has actually now taken over as Chancellor of the university

system out here in California --who proudly talked

to us about the fact that she doesn't use email.

And in fact hasn't used social media for over a decade.

Not because she doesn't think it's secure,

but because she just doesn't think it's useful.

That same phenomena is happening on the Judicial Branch.

Where, for example, a Supreme Court Justice

talked about how they quote, "Hadn't yet

gotten around to email."

Now this is obviously worrisome to folks

here working on the Gmail account.

But there's a broader question of what

does this mean for Justices that in the upcoming year

are going to decide everything from maybe net neutrality

questions to the legalities of some of the things

that the NSA was doing when they just haven't yet gotten around

to email.

The cyber stuff problem is not just an American phenomenon.

We saw the same thing in meetings

with leaders in China, UAE, France, Great Britain.

The Head of Cybersecurity in Australia

had never heard of Tor, obviously

a critical technology in this space.

Now the result is that cybersecurity

is as crucial to areas as intimate as your personal

privacy, to the security of your bank account,

to as weighty as the future of world politics itself.

But it's been treated as an issue

only for the "it" crowd, for the IT folks.

In turn, the technical community that

understands the workings of the software and the hardware

hasn't dealt very well with the wetware,

with the human side, and particularly

the ripple effects of this into other worlds,

be it policy, law, war, you name it.

They've often looked at the world

through a very specific lens and failed

to appreciate some of the broader pictures out there.

Now the dangers of this are diverse.

Each of us, in whatever role we play in life,

must make decisions about cybersecurity

that shape the future of the world well

beyond just the online world.

But too often we do so without the proper tools.

Basic terms and essential definitions

that define both what's possible but also what's proper,

what's right and wrong, are missed or even worse distorted.

Past myth and future hype often weave together,

obscuring what actually happened with where we really are now.

And so the result is that some threats are overblown

and overreacted to, and other threats are ignored.

So for example, as someone who loves history,

it absolutely pains me when I hear

people-- and people who have done

this range from senior government leaders

like senators to generals to prominent news columnists

--describe how we are in a parallel to the Cold War.

Or as a cabinet official told me,

that malware was "just like a WMD."

And that's why we needed to approach it

in the same kind of deterrence theory

that we used in the Cold War.

What these people fail to appreciate

is the parallel to the Cold War is not

the one they think they're making.

If you understand both the historic side

and the technical side, the best parallel to the Cold

War-- actually, those early days we

didn't understand well either the technology but even more so

the political dynamics that it was driving, the period of time

where we took the real life versions of Dr. Strangelove

seriously.

So as an illustration in the book,

we explore the episode where the US Air Force actually

had a serious plan to nuke the moon

to show the Soviets that we could

do interesting stuff in space, too.

Those are not historic lessons we should be drawing in terms

of the how-to's.

But that's often what the discourse is.

Let me go into some of the manifestations

of this disconnect, and how they play out, and why they matter.

One in particular is that we often lump things together

that are unlike, simply because they involve zeros and ones.