Words matter. These are the best Jared Cohen Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I want to use the best technology we have at our disposal to begin to take on trolling and other nefarious tactics that give hostile voices disproportionate weight. To do everything we can to level the playing field.
By definition, transnational crime crosses borders, but efforts to combat it mostly do not.
Since most cyberwar is conducted covertly, governments avoid any public acknowledgment of their own abilities and shy away from engaging in any sort of ‘cyber diplomacy.’ Statecraft conducted in secret fails to create public norms for deterrence.
Part of the responsibility of the technology industry is to anticipate the challenges of the vast majority of its future users and proactively start thinking about them now and proactively build products that address those challenges.
Iranian young people are one of the most pro-American populations in the Middle East.
Essentially, it’s not that technology or cyberspace is some parallel universe that operates tangentially from the world we know; it is simply a new front in the international system.
The big unknown is, at what point is a cyberattack so significant that it warrants a physical-world response.
My job is to put as many ideas out there as possible every day. Some of them will get traction, some won’t – some of them shouldn’t.
Every single young person is reachable. Ask them what dating is like in their country. Ask them if they have a girlfriend. Ask them what their type is. There’s nobody who’s too conservative to talk about that.
It’s not a panacea: there are problems in the world that technology can’t fix. You can’t fix water shortages. You can’t storm a Ministry of the Interior with a cell phone. You can’t magically create leaders and institutions overnight. You can’t eat it. You can’t shield a bullet.
I think, when I wrote ‘Children of Jihad,’ I wrote it with a very optimistic view of what technology can do. Today I maintain that optimistic view, but I’m also aware of the challenges we have. So I would say I’m not a techno-utopian, but I’m a techno-pragmatist.
Cyber weapons won’t go away, and their spread can’t be controlled. Instead, as we’ve done for other destructive technologies, the world needs to establish a set of principles to determine the proper conduct of governments regarding cyber conflict.
The importance of human judgment does not evaporate in the future, and as connected individuals, we will have to exercise sound judgment about what we choose to share or not share about ourselves.
I dislike the phrase ‘social media.’ ‘Social media’ is merely a way to describe new tools in an old and narrow paradigm where we measure success by how many people are reached.
The intensity of cyber conflict around the world is increasing, and the tools are becoming cheaper and more readily available.
The virtual world is a ‘public square’ much more vast than Tiananmen Square. And you can’t send in the tanks to crush the netizens.
Technology can be useful to organise a large number of people online and offline against the common goal of getting a particular dictator out of power. But at the end of the day, somebody still has to run for president with a different last name and deliver for the population.
I often say Policy Planning is very analogous to a venture capital firm. A venture capital firm sees an interesting idea and puts money behind it; in Policy Planning, we look for promising ideas and then put contacts and relationships behind it.
