Garrett M. Graff

It was a hard story to miss last year: In France last September, the telecom provider OVH was hit by a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack a hundred times larger than most of its kind. Then, on a Friday afternoon in October 2016, the internet slowed or stopped for nearly the entire eastern United States, as the tech company Dyn, a key part of the internet’s backbone, came under a crippling assault. As the 2016 US presidential election drew near, fears began to mount that the so-called Mi…

After nine months at war, he was finally due for a few short days of R&R outside the battle zone. Mueller had seen intense combat since he last said goodbye to his wife. He’d received the Bronze Star with a distinction for valor for his actions in one battle, and he’d been airlifted out of the jungle during another firefight after being shot in the thigh. He and Ann had spoken only twice since he’d left for South Vietnam. Despite all that, Mueller confessed to her in Hawaii that he was thinking…

Dandong is a sprawling border town that sits just across the Yalu River from North Korea. For tourists and expats, the Garratts’ coffee shop—just a short walk from the Sino-­Korean Friendship Bridge—was a hub of Western conversation and comfort food. “After time in North Korea a decent cup of coffee was one of those things I was really looking forward to,” one Australian tourist wrote in early 2014. “Peter’s was a perfect place.” The Garratts had come to China from Canada in the 1980s as English…

The people converging on the Plaza del Zócalo from all over the country weren’t the only ones who sensed opportunity in the new administration. At that very moment, high over the Pacific Ocean, a Chinese executive named Meng Wanzhou was winging her way from Shenzhen to Mexico. Meng is chief financial officer of Huawei, the world’s largest manufacturer of telecommunications equipment and second-­largest maker of smartphones. Though Huawei’s Android handsets are all but unknown in the United State…

Yet even if you missed the creation of the nation’s sixth military branch, it’s been hard to escape the jokes and criticism that have seemed to accompany Space Force since. The only headlines Space Force has made so far have come amid jokes, memes, and controversies. The creation of a new Space Force is among the most significant reorganizations of the military since the Goldwater-Nichols Act of the Reagan years, and the first addition of a new branch since the Air Force was broken out of the Ar…

The US knew this outcome was a possibility. The British have a long history of working with Huawei through British Telecom, acknowledging the security risk but taking aggressive measures to mitigate it. UK intelligence agency GCHQ, for instance, runs a special cybersecurity lab in partnership with Huawei. But in recent weeks, a senior delegation of US officials, including deputy national security adviser Matt Pottinger, traveled to London to lobby against any widening of Huawei’s role. Cabinet l…

A former telecoms entrepreneur, the Virginia senator says that saving the industry (and democracy) might mean blowing up Big Tech as we know it.

Now, Pompeo—who in April passed his two-year mark as the nation’s top diplomat—has spent much of the last year mired in a widening series of questions about his own leadership at the State Department and alleged use of taxpayer resources for personal errands and to bolster his own political ambitions. Pompeo has nearly unparalleled longevity in an administration not known for that, even earning a promotion from CIA director to the nation’s top Cabinet position. His staying power has come due in…

Jared Kushner brushing aside as mere “whining” the repeated resignation threats from White House counsel and its top lawyers in the face of Donald Trump’s ongoing push to overturn the election? The fact that even as rioters surged through the Capitol and members of Congress fled in terror, Donald Trump, the president of the United States, never once spoke to any corner of the US government to ask for help—never once called the Justice Department, Homeland Security, or the Pentagon? The committee…

It’s easy to look back at the 2016 election as though its outcome was inevitable—that Hillary Clinton was too weak of a candidate, one whose years of high-priced speeches had made her lose touch with the working-class voters of Wisconsin and Pennsylvania; that “but her emails” and Jim Comey’s repeated, inappropriate, and misguided meddling in the election turned the tide. But the new indictment of Trump is an important historical corrective, a moment that makes clear how the US, as a country, mu…

Untangling what exactly happened there, though, was a half-century journey through secret government programs, the Cold War, nuclear secrets, and the rise of conspiracy theories in US politics. We know something did crash in Roswell in late June or early July 1947, just weeks after the age of the flying saucer dawned. The modern age of UFOs began on June 24, 1947, when a 32-year-old Idaho businessman named Kenneth Arnold, an experienced rescue pilot with some 4,000 hours of mountain-high-altitud…

When Anne Neuberger stepped into the newly created role of deputy national security adviser for cyber and emerging technology on the White House’s National Security Council at the start of the Biden administration, she was already one of the government’s most experienced cyber veterans. Neuberger spent a decade at the National Security Agency, serving as its first chief risk officer, and then assistant deputy director of operations, and then leading the newly created cybersecurity directorate. J…

After a year of eyebrow-raising headlines about government whistleblowers alleging that the military was running secret programs focused on alien spaceships and a months-long study and dogged investigative work through the shadows of classified Pentagon programs, the United States Defense Department announced Friday that it found no evidence that the government is covering up contact with extraterrestrials. The first sentence of the 63-page report on the government’s involvement with unidentifie…