How do New York Times journalists use technology in their jobs and in their personal lives? David E. Sanger, a national security correspondent based in Washington, discussed the tech he’s using.
You previously were a bureau chief for The Times in Japan, one of your many roles for the newspaper. When you arrived in Tokyo in the late 1980s, what tech were you equipped with?
In retrospect, nothing very impressive. Our “portable” computers weighed about the same as an electric typewriter, had a tiny cathode-ray tube screen that showed a paragraph or two at most and stored stories on magnetic bubble memory, which in the 1980s was supposed to replace hard drives.
Needless to say, it was a technology whose time never arrived. Oh, and the computer had two black rubber cups on the top. You put the handset of a hard-line phone into them and dialed up a computer in New York to transmit at the astoundingly slow speed of 300 bits per second. Half the time we had to give up and call the dictation room, where someone would type out the story that you read to them.
When we gave up on bubble memory computers and moved to the first laptops, I sent a note to New York asking what to do with these dinosaurs. The answer I got back was: Your office looks out over Tokyo Bay. Figure it out.
So today the technology is lots faster, but perhaps not a lot more reliable. What’s the worst tech failure you’ve suffered?
Naturally, things die when deadlines are tightest. There was the time I was rushing off the back stairs of Air Force One in the Middle East with an open laptop, story half-written and late to the editing desk, and managed to drop my computer 20 feet on the tarmac. (Not good.) I’ve had modems die in Egypt, and the blue screen of death crawl across my laptop in India. Power supplies don’t like variable current — I’ve melted my share.
This has all made me focus intently on what NASA calls “mission-critical components.” If you can’t file your story — or record video, or connect up with “The Daily’’ — you might as well not be there.
So I travel with a laptop and a backup iPad with a keyboard, so there is always a way to write. I take two phones — and two booster battery packs. I carry an AT&T portable hot spot, and still I’ve had to fall back at times on the built-in Wi-Fi hot spot on my iPhone. Oh, and a Logitech camera that allows me to do TV hits over a Skype connection without using the built-in pinhole camera in the laptop.
So my backpack weighs plenty — and my wife and our sons think carrying it everywhere is faintly ridiculous. Until they run out of cellphone power.
You’d think that belt-and-suspenders approach would cover everything. It doesn’t. In Hanoi, Vietnam, this year for a summit meeting between President Trump and Kim Jong-un, we were, as my colleague Edward Wong put it, “comms cursed.”
Lots of things failed. It didn’t help that I was staying in the Metropole hotel, where the meeting was being held, and security personnel blanketed the lobby with a cellphone suppression technology that keeps terrorists from detonating bombs remotely. Turns out it also keeps reporters from updating their stories on the web.
You published your third book, “The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage and Fear in the Cyber Age,” last year. It’s a geopolitical look at how nations are using cyberweapons, and not just for espionage. Ever been a target?
I’m afraid that if you are in my line of work — writing about the intersection of technology, spying, cybersabotage and national power — you attract attention from intelligence services.
In Beijing in 2017 with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, I made the mistake of looking up something about the Tiananmen Square massacre from my hotel room, over a portable hot spot. Big mistake. The hot spot stopped working. I couldn’t revive it in Japan, or back at home. We later determined that Chinese intelligence had fried the firmware.
A few years ago I began seeing that big red banner over my email account that declared: “We have detected a state-sponsored attacker seeking to obtain your data.” That could be anyone: Russians who didn’t like our investigations into the 2016 presidential election and subsequent hacks; Chinese People’s Liberation Army officers who didn’t care for our work exposing Unit 61398, which stole intellectual property; North Koreans who didn’t like our coverage of the Sony hack, the Bangladeshi central bank cyberheist or the cyberattacks on their missiles.
And I’ve survived enough F.B.I. leak investigations to become mildly paranoid about our own government.
So what do you use to protect yourself?
There is no permanent technological solution to hacking, data manipulation and, soon, deep fakes — like climate change, this is a problem we have to manage. Ultimately, we will need a mix of technology, political agreements and retaliatory responses that establish that attacks are not cost-free.
That said, I’m a big fan of Google’s Advanced Protection program. It uses a combination of a key that fits in a USB slot (with a button that must be pressed) and a Bluetooth dongle, each registered to your computer or cellphone. Try to get access to someone’s accounts on a computer without that hardware present and you don’t get in.
If you were cyber king for a day, what mandates would you issue?
First, I’d ban the use of any voting machine that doesn’t rely on a hand-marked paper ballot, so there is something to count later. I’d require encryption for all personal information that you are asked turn over, including when I hand my passport to a hotel clerk. (Hear that, Marriott? It’s time.)
And I’d make it illegal to have Social Security numbers used as an identifier on any electronic document, site, app or password combination. It’s the one number in your life you simply cannot change, without extraordinary effort. It was never intended to be used as a secure identifier. So let’s not try.
What favorite cool technology do you always take with you?
Sanity-preservation devices that cut me off from the world, from editors and from the complaints of presidents, secretaries of state and national security officials. The three most vital: Bose noise-canceling headphones, a small shortwave radio and a seven-piece, four-weight fly rod that breaks down to fit in a tube under a foot long.
When the weather warms up, I carry the rod in that overloaded backpack along with a reel and a box of flies. No batteries required. I’ve been known to sneak out of hotels in early-morning hours to cast into rivers, harbors, ponds, you name it. I don’t even care if nothing’s biting — the casting is therapeutic.
Don’t tell the bosses, O.K.?
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