A First Step to Unpacking Cyber, Deception, and Intelligence Contests
-security.jpg?sfvrsn=982907ba_5 "A First Step to Unpacking Cyber, Deception, and Intelligence Contests")
A First Step to Unpacking Cyber, Deception, and Intelligence Contests
Publish Date: 2026-06-05 16:15:00
Source Domain: www.lawfaremedia.org
In our first jobs in cybersecurity, at the Pentagon in 1998, Greg Rattray and I had to help the Air Force to “normalize” cyber and other information operations. But was it more “normal” to treat such operations as an aspect of intelligence or instead as warfighting in a new domain? Our answer matters little to history, as the Air Force and Pentagon subsequently seesawed many times about what was “normal.”
Jon Lindsay’s “Age of Deception” sides with those saying cyber operations predominantly serve intelligence functions. Since cybersecurity is driven by the “logic of deception,” normalizing it requires treating it as a new form of an ancient type of international contest, what he calls “secret statecraft.”
“Age of Deception” is two books in one. The first explores secret statecraft, drawing from international relations, intelligence, and cyber conflict. Anchored in crucial case studies, it provides novel insights about how the logic of deception affects gray-zone cyber competition between states.
The second book extends that foundation to claim that all of cybersecurity—not just the competition between states taking place in cyberspace, but all of it—is best seen through the lens of deception. Here Lindsay overreaches. Deception of course matters, but he overlooks other key factors, especially vulnerability.
Deception in cybersecurity may never have received such sustained attention from an academic of Lindsay’s caliber. His book deserves the attention of all those interested in the ways in which governments use their intelligence and cyber capabilities. The book’s importance would have been magnified had he either focused more fully on developing his theory of deception and secret statecraft or more systematically addressed the complex ways deception plays out across all of cybersecurity.
Deception and Secret Statecraft
“Secret statecraft,” the book begins, “is the use of organized deception for…
