Thomas Rid
More info
- Affiliation
- King's College London, Johns Hopkins SAIS
- Known for
- Cyber War Will Not Take Place (2013), Active Measures (2020)
Political scientist who argued that cyberwar is not coming, and that the real threats are espionage, sabotage and disinformation.
Rid, a German scholar at King's College London and later Johns Hopkins, published the article in 2011 and the book in 2013: Cyber War Will Not Take Place. His case was that nearly everything labelled cyberwar was espionage, sabotage or subversion — old trades in new clothes — and that the word "war" mostly served budgets. It made him unpopular at some conferences and indispensable at others.
Rise of the Machines (2016) traces the word "cyber" from Norbert Wiener's cybernetics to Silicon Valley mysticism. Active Measures (2020) is a history of Soviet and Russian disinformation, ending with the 2016 US election. He has also dug into Moonlight Maze, a Russian intrusion campaign from the late 1990s.