The Perfect Weapon

A documentary on how cyber conflict became the main way states compete with and sabotage one another. John Maggio works from David Sanger's book of the same name. There are interviews with senior military and intelligence officials, reporting from the ground, and an account of the major attacks of recent years. It was made ahead of the 2020 United States elections, and the worry about how those elections could be affected by cyber attack runs through the spine of it. HBO produced it and it went out in October 2020. The narrative is built largely from the viewpoint of American officials; there is no voice from the countries it names, which sets the limits of its scope from the start.