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Podcast: New Books in Political Science
Episode: Jon R. Lindsay "Age of Deception: Cybersecurity as Secret Statecraft" (Cornell UP, 2025)
Description: At the heart of cybersecurity lies a paradox: Cooperation makes conflict possible. In Age of Deception (Cornell University Press 2025), Jon R. Lindsay shows that widespread trust in cyberspace enables espionage and subversion. While such acts of secret statecraft have long been part of global politics, digital systems have dramatically expanded their scope and scale. Yet success in secret statecraft hinges less on sophisticated technology than on political context.
To make sense of this, Lindsay offers a general theory of intelligence performance—the analogue to military performance in battle—that explains why spies and hackers alike depend on clandes...