About this Event
At the heart of cybersecurity lies a paradox: Cooperation makes conflict possible. In his new book, Age of Deception, Jon 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 clandestine organisations and vulnerable institutions. Through cases spanning codebreaking at Bletchley Park during WWII to the weaponisation of pagers by Israel in 2024, he traces both continuity and change in secret statecraft. Along the way, he explains why popular assumptions about cyber warfare are profoundly misleading. Offense does not simply dominate defense, for example, because the same digital complexity that expands opportunities for deception also creates potential for self-deception and counter deception.
The seminar will be chaired by Sir David Omand, GCB.
Speaker:
Jon Lindsay is an Associate Professor at the School of Cybersecurity and Privacy and the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech). His research explores the role of emerging technology in global security. He is the author of Age of Deception: Cybersecurity as Secret Statecraft (Cornell, 2025) and Information Technology and Military Power (Cornell, 2020), co-author with Erik Gartzke of Elements of Deterrence: Strategy, Technology, and Complexity in Global Politics (Oxford, 2024), and the editor of Cross-Domain Deterrence: Strategy in an Era of Complexity (Oxford, 2019) and China and Cybersecurity: Espionage, Strategy, and Politics in the Digital Domain (Oxford, 2015). He holds a Ph.D. in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an M.S. in computer science and B.S. in symbolic systems from Stanford University. He also served in the U.S. Navy with operational assignments in Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East.
Chair:
Sir David Omand is a Visiting Professor in the Department of War Studies, King’s College London and sits on the advisory board of , investing in cyber security start-ups. During his long career in British government service he held senior posts in security, intelligence and defence.
He was Director of (the UK Signals Intelligence and Cyber Security Agency), Permanent Secretary in the and UK Security and Intelligence Coordinator, responsible to the Prime Minister for the professional health of the intelligence community, national counter-terrorism strategy and “homeland security”. He also served in the as Deputy Under Secretary of State for Policy and was Principal Private Secretary to the Secretary of State for Defence during the Falklands conflict. He served for three years with the Diplomatic Service as the UK Defence Counsellor in NATO, Brussels. He served for seven years on the UK .
Event venue & nearby stays
Dockrill Room, Department of War Studies, (KIN 628), King's College London, London, United Kingdom
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