This is the cyberattack that keeps Edward Snowden up at night

Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who leaked data about government surveillance programs,has been far from quiet during his Russian exile.

In an interview with James Bamfordpublished Thursday by NOVA, Snowden said that when it came to cyber warfare, the United States has "more to lose than any other nation on earth." And he's not just talking about attacks on systems with obvious effects on the physical world, but the potential fallout of attacks aimed atcrippling the Internet itself.

When people conceptualize a cyber-attack, they do tend to think about parts of the critical infrastructure like power plants, water supplies, and similar sort of heavy infrastructure, critical infrastructure areas. And they could be hit, as long as theyre network connected, as long as they have some kind of systems that interact with them that could be manipulated from internet connection.

However, what we overlook and has a much greater value to us as a nation is the internet itself. The internet is critical infrastructure to the United States. We use the internet for every communication that businesses rely on every day. If an adversary didnt target our power plants but they did target the core routers, the backbones that tie our internet connections together, entire parts of the United States could be cut off. They could be shunted offline, and we would go dark in terms of our economy and our business for minutes, hours, days. That would have a tremendous impact on us as a society and it would have a policy backlash.

The United States is among the most digitally reliant nations out there, which opens up more avenues for cyberattacks. Having almost zero digital infrastructureturns out to be a pretty solid defense from this particular brand of assault -- it's hard to disrupt things that aren't connected to the Internet from the Internet. But it also means that what few digital connections an isolated nation might have likely lack resilience, as North Korea learned last month when its Internet access was disrupted.

Andrea Peterson covers technology policy for The Washington Post, with an emphasis on cybersecurity, consumer privacy, transparency, surveillance and open government.

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This is the cyberattack that keeps Edward Snowden up at night