David E. Sanger

“Cyberattacks have long been hard to stop because determining where they come from takes time - and sometimes the mystery is never solved.”

“If there's a cyberattack from China or Russia or Romania or Mexico, it may well run through a server in another country. And it may take months before you know where it really came from.”

“Until Japan's economy drove off a cliff, there was a running argument in Asia about whether it would be wiser to follow the 'Japan model' - with its megacorporations, jobs for life, state control of strategic industries - or the 'American model' of largely unfettered markets.”

“There's this incredibly young, dynamic, educated population in Iran that is essentially pretty pro-American.”

“The government does not deny it routinely spies to advance American economic advantage, which is part of its broad definition of how it protects American national security.”

“Once cyber crosses into the realm of the physical, then it's a physical attack, but it starts with cyber. And the idea of a cyber attack being able to take control of machines - that becomes a scary process.”

“American officials sometimes dig into corporations because they are suspected to be witting or unwitting suppliers of technology to the North Koreans or the Iranians.”

“Bloggers are not reporters.”

“Under the Trump administration, the traditional structure of White House oversight of American offensive and defensive cyberactivities is being dismantled.”

“When Japan was on the rise, American governors would come to inspect Toyota City and study 'just in time' manufacturing to increase efficiency; when America was at its peak in the late 1990s, the world beat a path to its venture capitalists.”

“We have spent so much time worrying about a 'cyber Pearl Harbor,'' the attack that takes out the power grid, that we have focused far too little on the subtle manipulation of data that can mean that no election, medical record, or self-driving car can be truly trusted.”

“Because our government has been so incompetent at protecting its highly sophisticated cyberweapons, those weapons have been stolen out of the electronic vaults of the National Security Agency and the C.I.A. and shot right back at us.”

“I did think that it'd be truly cool to be a foreign correspondent, and it was. There is a degree of freedom - and the right to roam the earth on somebody else's nickel.”

“Even China's leaders routinely let the news media pool in, though they do their best to ignore them.”

“As we put autonomous cars on the road, connect Alexas to our lights and our thermostats, put ill-protected Internet-connected video cameras on our houses, and conduct our financial lives over our cell phones, our vulnerabilities expand exponentially.”

“The remarkable thing about the Chinese is that they've operated differently than the Russians, the Iranians, and the North Koreans. By and large, they have not done destructive hacks.”

“Although Mr. Trump will not be able to pull the United States out of the Paris climate accord, he can legally ignore its provisions, in keeping with his questioning of the existence of man-made climate change.”

“There are certainly some secrets the government needs to protect, but many of the most important clues about revolutions, nuclear transfers, and new military sites can be found online, in open chat rooms and commercial satellite photos.”

“State oil companies in Saudi Arabia, Africa, Iran, and Mexico have often been intelligence targets for the United States.”

“It's no surprise that hackers working for North Korea, Iran's mullahs, Vladimir V. Putin in Russia, and the People's Liberation Army of China have all learned that the great advantage of cyberweapons is that they are the opposite of a nuke: hard to detect, easy to deny, and increasingly finely targeted.”