New Books in Science, Technology, and Society Jon R. Lindsay "Age of Deception: Cybersecurity as Secret Statecraft" (Cornell UP, 2025)
Feb 7, 2026
Jon R. Lindsay, associate professor at Georgia Tech and author of Age of Deception, explores how trust in digital systems enables espionage and subversion. He traces cases from Bletchley Park to Stuxnet and Israel’s 2024 pager operation. He reframes cyber incidents as secret statecraft, explains cooperation’s paradoxical role, and previews links between deception and AI.
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Cooperation Enables Deception
- Jon R. Lindsay argues that large-scale cooperation in cyber institutions creates opportunities for espionage and subversion.
- Cooperative systems enable deception because actors can pretend to cooperate while extracting side benefits.
Stuxnet As Covert Campaign
- Lindsay treats Stuxnet as a network of covert operations spanning ~15 years rather than a single cyberwar incident.
- He shows it relied on target cooperation and US–Israel secret collaboration to avoid a preventive war.
Deception Differs From War And Deterrence
- Deception uses the means of peace to achieve the ends of war by subverting cooperative systems.
- This logic differs fundamentally from both war and deterrence and requires its own theory.
