President Barack Obama: Espionage Is Being 'Turbocharged' By The Internet

The world is entering a new cyber era — one with no ground rules, and with the potential for traditional espionage to be "turbocharged" by the Internet, President Obama said. "Among the big powers, there has been a traditional understanding of, that everybody is trying to gather intelligence on everybody else," President Obama said. "It's no secret that Russian intelligence officers, or Chinese, or for that matter Israeli or British or other intelligence agencies, their job is to get insight into the workings of other countries that they're not reading in the newspapers every day." The informal, unwritten rules of the past are no longer adequate, the President added. "One of the things that we're going to have to do over the next decade is to ultimately arrive at some rules of what is a new game," he said. "And that is the way in which traditional propaganda and traditional covert influence efforts are being turbocharged by the Internet."