The speaker argues that cyber offense and defense are difficult to separate; removing offensive cyber capabilities also removes defensive capabilities and can leave potential defenders unable to help.

“positive and bad actors on the internet and ultimately the internet is an ecosystem where it's kind of like having you know an ecosystem of white blood cells and enabling more people to have the defensive capabilities actually helps you protect against the offensive capabilities that's right when we look at again the empirical reality of what happened is that it's really hard to separate cyber defense from offense”

“So when you remove cyber offensive capabilities,”

“you also remove cyber defensive capabilities.”

“And as a result, the players who would want to help defending are incapable of doing so.”