New Books in Political Science Jon R. Lindsay "Age of Deception: Cybersecurity as Secret Statecraft" (Cornell UP, 2025)
Feb 7, 2026
Jon R. Lindsay, an associate professor at Georgia Tech and author of Age of Deception, explores cybersecurity as secret statecraft. He discusses how trust and institutions enable espionage and subversion. Case studies range from Bletchley Park to Israel’s 2024 pager operation. He reframes Stuxnet as covert action and teases consequences for policy, counterintelligence, and AI-era deception.
AI Snips
Chapters
Books
Transcript
Episode notes
Cooperation Enables Large-Scale Espionage
- Modern information institutions enable large-scale cooperation across society and states.
- That same cooperation creates opportunities for espionage and deception by design.
Stuxnet As A Long Covert Campaign
- Stuxnet was not a one-off cyber war but part of a 15-year covert campaign using multiple toolkits and partners.
- The operation depended on target systems' trust and US–Israel secret cooperation rather than open warfare.
Deception Needs Cooperation From Both Sides
- Deception relies on willing or unwitting cooperation from targets and covert collaboration among attackers.
- In Stuxnet, Iranian use of common vendors and US–Israeli coalition politics produced effects beyond technical sabotage.
