How History, Hollywood, and Edgar Allan Poe Shaped Modern Cyber Warfare

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Before we get into the episode, a quick announcement: Security Revenue LIVE is evolving. The show is becoming The Cybersecurity Ecosystem Show, connecting the full spectrum of the industry: practitioners, investors, vendors, regulators, and everyone in between — because the more we learn from each other, the stronger we become. An investor once told me that cybersecurity isn't even really an industry because it's tied to everything else. It's a layer that runs through business, government, military strategy, and everyday life. The show needs to reflect that.

And this conversation with Allie Mellen is the perfect example of why.

Allie is a security industry analyst focused on detection and response, and she just released Code War: How Nations Hack, Spy, and Shape the Digital Battlefield. It traces how the histories of the United States, China, and Russia directly shaped the cyber strategies each country uses today. What makes it different from other cybersecurity books is that it's written for anyone, not just practitioners. And the stories she shared on the show are proof that this approach works.

What a Movie Night at Camp David Tells Us About Cyber Defense

One of the most striking stories Allie shared was about Ronald Reagan and the movie WarGames.

In 1983, Reagan watched WarGames at Camp David the day after it came out. The next morning, he asked the Joint Chiefs of Staff a simple question: can this actually happen to us? They didn't know. A week later they came back and told him it was worse than the movie suggested.

That conversation kicked off a decade of cybersecurity legislation and federal security policy. When Congress held hearings for the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, WarGames was referenced four separate times. A Hollywood movie became the catalyst for how the United States government thinks about cyber threats.

That's a human story. Not a technical one. And it's the kind of story that makes people outside of cybersecurity actually pay attention.

Edgar Allan Poe and the Roots of Election Security

Allie shared another story that I hadn't heard before, and it connects a 170-year-old crime to modern election security.

Edgar Allan Poe was found in a Baltimore gutter on Election Day in 1849. He was wearing clothes that weren't his, completely incoherent, and he wasn't supposed to be in Maryland. He died four days later. One of the strongest theories about his death is that he was the victim of cooping, a brutal form of voter fraud where gangs would kidnap people, beat them, and force them to vote for a specific candidate repeatedly. They'd change the victim's clothes between each trip to the polls. After each vote, the victim received a shot of alcohol, meaning they'd eventually collapse.

The reforms that followed cooping fundamentally changed how voting works in America. New ballot systems, identification requirements, and restructured processes all emerged from that era. Those reforms are the reason election fraud at scale is so difficult in the U.S. today, and they're a major reason why a cyber attack can't simply flip the results of an American election.

The present doesn't make sense without the past. That's a theme that runs through everything Allie covers in Code War.

The Gulf War Set the Stage for Modern Cyber Warfare

Another moment from our conversation that stuck with me was Allie's analysis of the Gulf War. In 1990 and 1991, there weren't significant cyber attacks happening during the conflict. But what the Gulf War demonstrated was how devastating multi-domain warfare becomes when information operations are integrated into it.

The U.S., China, and Russia all watched the Gulf War and drew their own conclusions. All three nations decided to move toward integrating information operations into their military strategies. They just went about it in very different ways, shaped by their own histories, their governments, and their relationships with their citizens.

That brings us to one of the most thought-provoking parts of the conversation: social contracts.

Why Social Contracts Shape Cyber Strategy

Allie breaks down how each nation's relationship with its citizens directly affects its approach to cyber defense and information control. In China, the social contract centers on prosperity and stability. The government has built its cyber infrastructure around information control from the very beginning, with the Great Firewall and the Golden Shield project dating back to the 1990s.

In Russia, the contract is different. It's rooted in survival. Citizens have more access to outside information than those in China, but the expectation is that they'll repeat the government's narrative when asked. Russia tried to implement China-style information controls but started a decade later, which has made it much harder to execute.

In the United States, the contract is built on freedom from government overreach. That's why federal data privacy legislation is so difficult to pass, why there's limited appetite for the government telling private companies what security controls to implement, and why so much of our cyber defense depends on the private sector.

None of these approaches are inherently right or wrong. But understanding them is essential if you want to understand why nations behave the way they do in cyberspace.

Where the U.S. Stands Today

Allie was candid about where the United States has strengths and where it struggles. The offensive cyber capability is strong and well known. But the defensive capability, both at the federal level and in the private sector, is in a difficult spot.

So much of U.S. cybersecurity is consequence-based rather than prevention-based. Companies aren't required to have specific controls in place in most cases. But if they get hit and user data is affected, they can face enforcement from multiple agencies at once. It's a "take your chances" model, and it creates gaps that adversaries understand.

Threat intelligence collaboration between the public and private sectors remains a challenge too. There's good reason for skepticism given past examples of government overreach, from the Patriot Act to the proposed Clipper chip that would have required weaker encryption across the private sector. That tension between security and freedom is baked into the American system, and it shapes every policy decision.

Why This Matters for Everyone in the Ecosystem

This is exactly the kind of conversation The Cybersecurity Ecosystem Show is built for.

If you're a practitioner, understanding the geopolitical forces behind the threat actors you're defending against makes you better at your job. If you're a vendor, understanding regulatory appetites across different markets shapes your product strategy. If you're an investor, understanding how governments approach cyber defense tells you where opportunity and risk live. If you're a regulator, understanding what the private sector actually faces on the ground matters for writing policy that works.

Allie made a point on the show that I keep coming back to: we have an industry that understands the challenges, but we don't have a broader public that does. The cybersecurity community can keep telling each other that security matters, but nothing changes until we bring everyone else into the conversation.

That's the gap this show is designed to fill. Not just conversations between security people about security. Conversations across the entire ecosystem that connect technology, policy, business, and the human stories driving all of it.

Allie's book Code War is available now. I'd recommend it for anyone in cybersecurity and especially for anyone who isn't. Watch the full conversation through the link below.

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