Samantha Baryer is a Junior Research Fellow with the NATO Association of Canada’s Cybersecurity & Emerging Threats program. Her research interests include constitutional law, international policy, national security, and cybercrime.
Samantha holds a Bachelor of Arts in Criminology from Simon Fraser University, where she participated in several research initiatives. She travelled to Glasgow, Scotland, for an intensive 11-day field program focused on cybercrime and international policy, where she also participated in the Scotland Police International Academy. As part of the program, she conducted semester-long research examining the Budapest Convention and gaps in the international legal framework addressing online child sexual exploitation. Her broader academic interests include constitutional law, comparative politics, and democratic reform. Her work in the latter area is reflected in a paper examining Indonesian and American electoral systems, which was published in the SFU Undergraduate Journal of Political Science in 2025.
Professionally, Samantha works as support staff at a major national law firm in downtown Vancouver, working in a fast-paced, hands-on legal environment. She plans to pursue a Juris Doctor in the coming years, with the long-term goal of contributing to the emerging legal and policy landscape surrounding cybercrime, cybersecurity, and digital infrastructure.
When does a cyberattack become an “armed attack”? In this article, Samantha Baryer examines the growing need for a shared framework, using the WannaCry and Viasat cyberattacks to explore how non-kinetic and cascading effects could inform an evolving understanding of NATO’s Article 5 in the cyber age.
