Jon Lindsay

This is a misleading headline. Ai bio warfare is not right around the corner. There is still a long and complicated path from r&d -- where this story focuses on only one part -- to weaponization and operational capacity let alone strategic intent

Age of Deception by Jon R. Lindsay | eBook | Cornell University Press At the heart of cybersecurity lies a paradox: Cooperation makes conflict possible. In Age of Deception, Jon R. Lindsay shows that widespread trust in cyberspace enables espionage and subversion. While...

Good news! You can now download the open access (free) ebook of Age of Decption from @CornellPress !

(You can also buy a paperback, which makes a fine decoration for your bookshelf)

www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501...

Culture and Automation at War Thoughts on The Hand Behind Unmanned by Schneider & Macdonald

Interested in military automation? You should definitely read the new book by Jackie Schneider and Julia Macdonald!

I wrote up some thoughts on their terrific book here:
dolos.substack.com/p/culture-an...

Trump is not a Sparks fan?

This is my favorite LLM output to date:

Based on Haugeland's definition, the correct and most precise answer is **yes, this instance of Gemini does not "give a damn" about the answers.**

There is an ancient curse in Security Studies: "May your research be relevant."

And with that I am happy to annouce the arrival of Age of Deception!

You can find a paperback from any fine bookmonger or get the open access eBook from Cornell:
www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501...

Here are few thoughts on why _Age of Deception_ has the cover that it does. Coming soon from @cornellupress.bsky.social

dolos.substack.com/p/cover-me

Age of Deception by Jon R. Lindsay | eBook | Cornell University Press At the heart of cybersecurity lies a paradox: Cooperation makes conflict possible. In Age of Deception, Jon R. Lindsay shows that widespread trust in cyberspace enables espionage and subversion. While...

Age of Deception now has a cover!
Technologies of perception also conceal danger...

Coming this fall.

www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501...

Sing, Goddess, of the Wrath of AI Rethinking Artificial Intelligence, Geopolitics and War

I don’t often publish in critical security studies, but when I do, I drink Homeric epic.

Here is the director's cut of my recent essay on AI and war in Minds and Machines.

dolos.substack.com/p/sing-godde...

Myth, Power, and Agency: Rethinking Artificial Intelligence, Geopolitics and War - Minds and Machines This collection interrogates how Artificial Intelligence (AI) is reshaping war, sovereignty, and human agency by entangling technological experimentation with myth-making and geopolitical power. Drawi...

Check out this new forum offering critical perspectives on AI and geopolitics.

I wrote a strange little essay on why Homer's Iliad still matters in the age of AI-enabled warfare.

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

AI as Aurochs Intelligence Or, why ChatGPT makes you stupid

Next time you are tempted to let ChatGPT do your work, think about the wild aurochs.

dolos.substack.com/p/ai-as-auro...

Not with a whimper but a bang The legacy of Olympic Games after Midnight Hammer

MOPs finished what Stuxnet started

dolos.substack.com/p/not-with-a...

sometimes an index is poetry

Pope Leo’s Name Carries a Warning About the Rise of AI A century ago, Pope Leo XIII defended workers’ rights during the Industrial Revolution. Will Leo XIV do the same for AI?

If Leo XIV is warning about thinking machines,
does that make eLon XAI the antichrist?

Leo XIV, eLon XAI, just sayin...

time.com/7285449/pope...

If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em! Ideas for using LLMs in the classroom

When it comes to AI in the classroom, instructors can be police or guides. I prefer the latter. Here are a few half-baked ideas about incorporating AI into assignments.

dolos.substack.com/p/if-you-can...

The best reply

A lot of people are attacking Pete, but I think he will find the strawberries

True of a class

perhaps the 4th too given questionable DOGE accesses

China would like to defuse US weaponized interdependence

Thank you @staillat.bsky.social !

If you can't access it and want to, please let me know. JSS provides authors with a number of sharable links.

A whistleblower's disclosure details how DOGE may have taken sensitive labor data A whistleblower tells Congress and NPR that DOGE may have taken sensitive labor data and hid its tracks. "None of that ... information should ever leave the agency," said a former NLRB official.

The greatest hostile data exfil op in US history goes on and on, in plain sight. Our cybersecurity threat models are woefully unsuited to the insider threat of usurpation at scale.

www.npr.org/2025/04/15/n...

I was in Baja this weekend. (Gorgeous weather, amazing food, supernice people). One typical difference across the border is that you see Mexican miltiary vehicles patrolling around. But perhaps that will not be so different in the near future. :/

I *am* extremely grateful, too!

This article is also a preview of my forthcoming _Age of Deception_ with @cornellupress.bsky.social. The book goes into far more detail about the notion of Secret Statecraft. It also includes more empirical context on Stuxnet that didn't make it into the JSS paper (as well as many other cases!).

Stuxnet and the Limits of Cyber Warfare Stuxnet, the computer worm which disrupted Iranian nuclear enrichment in 2010, is the first instance of a computer network attack known to cause physical damage across international boundaries. Som...

This new article is both an update and an autocritique of my 2013 article on Stuxnet, which was a negative framing of the limits of cyber warfare. I did not say enough about the positive potentinal of cyberspace for intel & covert action. Mea culpa. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Stuxnet revisited: From cyber warfare to secret statecraft The Stuxnet attack on Iran’s nuclear program is an outlier in the history of cyber conflict. While espionage and subversion are prevalent, serious cyber-physical damage remains rare. Stuxnet has th...

TL;DR given what we now know about cyber in general and this case in particular (which is not just one case), Stuxnet is better understood as an extended, and successful, exercise in secret statecraft, rather than a discrete, and failed, case of cyber warfare.
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Can you believe that it's already been 15 years since we first heard about Stuxnet? And perhaps 25 years since Stuxnet components were first developed? Cyber is no longer emerging. It has emerged.

My new article in J Strat Std reconsiders this seminal case in light of new evidence & scholarship.

I was delighted that all understood what Erik and I were trying to do with this book -- articulate hard tradeoffs across the many means and ends of "integrated" deterrence -- and found the effort largely useful. They were also generous in excusing the inevitable missteps in a book of this scope.

Here are the links to the symposium all in one place:
Ludvik: doi.org/10.1017/S153...
McManus: doi.org/10.1017/S153...
Stein: doi.org/10.1017/S153...
Sukin: doi.org/10.1017/S153...
Quackenbush: doi.org/10.1017/S153...