Dear Future President,

Today, the United States faces a lot of problems. So many that it is frightening to the people. One of those problems has to do with our national security, which has many problems of its own. One of these problems, which is a very big problem due to the effects it can have as a result is cyber war. Roughly two months ago in July during the Democratic National Convention, an unknown person or group hacked into the convention and illegally obtained emails that the website WikiLeaks posted thousands of. This has caused me to worry deeply that our nation is not adequately prepared for the new security challenges we face today in cyberspace. This DNC email leak, bears all of the hallmarks of an information warfare operation, timed as it was to coincide with the announcement of the Democratic vice presidential pick and commencement of the convention.

The content of this DNC hack is fresh, salacious, and stolen. This data was passed through foreign servers and may have been modified but many are authentic which means we can not purely dismiss as propaganda. We are likely to see more hacks in this style and the people responsible for these hacks could indeed be Russia, but even if not, the consequences of a hack are all too real.

As a result of a catastrophe like this, we need to raise our cyber defenses in government and the private sector, to make attackers work harder to breach our systems. We need to develop norms of nation state behavior in cyberspace that preclude attacks on civilian infrastructure and allow us to hold actors accountable. And we need to build resilience to lessen the payoff when breaches inevitably do happen. It is very important that you make this happen considering that there are a lot of hostility building up between nations.