When Russia invaded Ukraine, it wasn't a general who saw it coming first… it was Microsoft. Sensors planted across Ukraine picked up a massive spike in cyberattacks on banks, transport, and command-and-control, and the company picked up the phone and warned the White House.
That moment, says intelligence veteran Emily Harding, is when the line between a tech company and a defense company quietly disappeared.
Harding is a VP at CSIS, a former CIA analyst, NSC Iran director, and architect of the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Russia report. She walks host Erol Yayboke through the most destabilizing shift in modern conflict: the data center is now a battlefield, and nobody has agreed on the rules. If Iran hits a server farm in Italy, who got attacked? If China strikes an AWS cloud, does the US go to war? These are the questions keeping deterrence strategists up at night, and the answers aren't written yet.
In this conversation:
Why Microsoft, Amazon, and Google are now "on the front lines" of three conflicts at once
The 2014 Sony hack as a failed test case and what the US must do differently
How adversaries decide a hospital's data center is "fair game"
The World War One alliance trap hiding inside US tech policy
Why Harding is an AI optimist who still calls ChatGPT a "professional mansplainer"
How 90% of useful intelligence now lives in open source and why that's dangerous
The free-speech line a democracy can't cross, even to fight propaganda
Subscribe to Navigating Noise for sharp analysis of the forces shaping global conflict and information. Watch on YouTube, listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
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