New York-based Bloomberg News reporter Dune Lawrence has been helping Bloomberg break news since 2004, when she joined the company, reporting on stocks and investors. After several years reporting from overseas, she returned to New York, where she joined the Projects and Investigations team in 2009. Today, her coverage often focuses on hacking and cybersecurity.
In Depth recently spoke with Dune to discuss her work and the latest trends in the field.
How did you first become interested in the subject of cybersecurity?
I naturally gravitated toward China-related stories when I first joined the investigative team because I had recently moved back from Beijing, where I was first a general assignment and then political reporter. China’s rise, and the impact as felt in other countries, is of course a big story. So I came at cybersecurity through the lens of China, initially. I ended up collaborating on a series of stories in 2012 and early 2013 about Chinese cyber espionage. It was like learning a foreign language since I have absolutely no technical background. I don’t even have an iPhone.
Hacking is certainly a hot-button issue. From your perspective, when did interest escalate? Was it a gradual process, or is there a particular tipping point you can recall?
It’s interesting to think back over that Chinese cyber spying project and see the shift in awareness and interest over the year-plus that we worked on it. When we began it in 2012, a lot of what we were trying to write about was almost old-hat to the cyber researchers we were talking to, and yet companies and the public hadn’t really been clued in. A year later, it had become the topic.
The first tipping point was a big report about Chinese hacking by Mandiant, a cybersecurity company, in February 2013, which got a lot of attention. (We’d written a long profile of the same group about six months before that.) And then in June, Edward Snowden hit, with all of his revelations about U.S. surveillance, sparking a much larger debate and dominating headlines. It’s amazing what a difference a year or so makes.
What challenges do you face when developing stories and sources?
A couple of times I’ve had whistleblowers come out of the woodwork and present me with a ton of documents, which brings its own challenges. What’s that person’s agenda? How do you make sure what’s being shown to you is authentic? How do you take the story in the direction it needs to go, while managing the expectations of the whistleblower, who might be even more invested in it than you are?
What does the future hold for this beat?
What interests me is taking a very technical subject and humanizing it. The Snowden saga was amazing in part because there’s a central figure to it, a human being. Cybersecurity, surveillance, privacy and the trade-offs between each are something that consumers, businesses and governments are all trying to negotiate, so that’s going to be a rich area for reporting for a long time.