We know that another dimension to warfare in the 21st century is cyber-warfare, and there is increasing potency to that, with vast resources being devoted to cyber-warfare by all states, to an extent, but mainly by states like China, the United States, and Russia.
In a sense there is the problem that you have to guard against cyber-warfare. You have to be knowledgeable about cyber-warfare, but democracies also have an obligation to protect the rights of their citizens. This is what we are about. Democracies are fundamentally not about the pursuit of virtue but about the protection of rights. It's an extraordinarily important question. To the extent that we are resilient capable societies, we have a profound interest in guarding the privacy, the safety, and the rights of our citizens. But it's a constantly evolving field and it's not well understood even by experts, because it's very segmented.
I think one of the problems is that we do not have adequate conversation across disciplines. You would have experts in cyber-warfare, and you would have experts in electronics, but they don't talk to their lawyers, and they don't talk to the civil libertarians, or not enough.
This is one of the things we need to do and one of the things parliamentarians may do in terms of leadership, to bring together these various levels of expertise so instead of a segmentation, there's a kind of integration, so we find the right kind of balance for protecting domestic rights, protecting ourselves as democratic societies against potential opponents.