If you were still the NSA director, what would keep you up at night right now?

So what I would be trying to plan against? [chuckles] Put it this way, if I got asked, 'cause, you know, I- I'll, uh, the thing I liked about my previous life is I did cyber offensively as well as defensively.

If I was asking myself defensively how would, what would I be anticipating from, uh, from adversaries, and what do I think we'd need prepared to address? Um, number one, we would have, we have to be ready for the potential placement of destructive malware in key components of our infrastructure.

We've already seen it in power, but-- and you're gonna see it across the board, um, from financial to tele.

We have to be prepared for this to become much broader.

You know, it's very interesting to me.

In some ways, the virtual world, the digital world, has proven much more resilient than the physical world.

What could we do if we decided to go full force against a country like China today, and what should we be doing? What should our aggressive posture be?

So I'd be interested to get your thoughts there.

So for, for many of Oppenheimer's climate-- clients, boy, you know, it's a challenge you're dealing with every day.

So first of all, we have created a world and an economy, economic model that is increasingly based on greater, uh, remote access, greater automation, greater use of data, which means we bring data into our models, we collect it in larger and larger amounts, and now with AI as an example, we're developing technologies that are designed to generate more value out of data.

So we are creating a structure that is inherently vulnerable.

It's interesting.

If we were only looking at this world from a cybersecurity perspective, this isn't what we would have built.

[chuckles] This is not what we would have created.

What are your thoughts there?

So what does a national plan on this look like? How does that get tied to spectrum sales and allocation? How much would investment be and what's a reasonable time scale to create sort of a national commercially resilient architecture for the United States?

Right.

So number one, the FCC, as I said, the Federal Communications Commission allocates spectrum broadly in the United States.

They allocate it to the military.

They allocate it to the commercial world.

They broadly come up with what elements of the spectrum will be used for what purposes and who will then control those elements of the spectrum.

It's a system that's worked pretty well.

So where are our adversaries? What is it they've been achieving? And what is it that we need to be doing to better defend and protect ourselves?