DAVID E. SANGER

The most secretive White House in modern history has learned the hard way …that it must reveal a pretty steady stream of secrets.

The law does not distinguish terribly well between real secrets and sort-of secrets, especially in an age when the instinct to stamp “classified” runs rampant.

Deterrence, of course, is all about the perception of power. It hinges on convincing adversaries that, with force, guile, or economic isolation, you can make the think twice about acting against American interests.

The most closed, control freak, administration I have ever covered.

One thing about cyberattacks is that what works on Monday may not work on Thursday.

Mr. Trump has been consistent in some areas. Since the late 1980s, he has nurtured a set of preoccupations, chiefly that America's allies - Japan and Saudi Arabia among them - are ripping America off.

A Trump presidency will plunge the United States into an era of unknowns that has little parallel in the nation's 240-year history.

Mr. Obama is the first president to have grown up in the region - he lived in Indonesia as an elementary school student - and he has never doubted that America is underinvested in Asia and overinvested in the Middle East.

When Russia's intelligence agencies obtained some of the National Security Agency's secrets about its own cyberweapons, it appeared to do so by manipulating a virus protection program sold by Kaspersky, a Russian firm.

If there's a cyberattack from China or Russia or Romania or Mexico, it may well run through a server in another country. And it may take months before you know where it really came from.

Once cyber crosses into the realm of the physical, then it's a physical attack, but it starts with cyber. And the idea of a cyber attack being able to take control of machines - that becomes a scary process.

In an age of reckonings, when so many bills have come due, Obama has made the case for an America that can no longer do it all. It must pick its fights.

Unfettered markets eventually get out of whack.

It's no surprise that hackers working for North Korea, Iran's mullahs, Vladimir V. Putin in Russia, and the People's Liberation Army of China have all learned that the great advantage of cyberweapons is that they are the opposite of a nuke: hard to detect, easy to deny, and increasingly finely targeted.

We have spent so much time worrying about a 'cyber Pearl Harbor,'' the attack that takes out the power grid, that we have focused far too little on the subtle manipulation of data that can mean that no election, medical record, or self-driving car can be truly trusted.

If you go in to vote, and you are no longer confident that the vote that you put in is the way it's going to get recorded because you don't know if the Russians or someone else have gotten into the voting system, that undercuts your trust in the democratic process.

Under the Trump administration, the traditional structure of White House oversight of American offensive and defensive cyberactivities is being dismantled.

Cyberattacks have long been hard to stop because determining where they come from takes time - and sometimes the mystery is never solved.

There are a lot of columnists who get out and opine.

Never mention a web site is coming until it's already there.

In the Chinese view, the United States has designed its own system of rules about what constitutes 'legal' spying and what is illegal.

What the Russians did in the election in 2016 was clearly short of war, yet it was a pretty aggressive act to go into another country's voting system.

State oil companies in Saudi Arabia, Africa, Iran, and Mexico have often been intelligence targets for the United States.

As we put autonomous cars on the road, connect Alexas to our lights and our thermostats, put ill-protected Internet-connected video cameras on our houses, and conduct our financial lives over our cell phones, our vulnerabilities expand exponentially.

The government does not deny it routinely spies to advance American economic advantage, which is part of its broad definition of how it protects American national security.