Photo of Stewart Baker

Stewart Baker's career has spanned national security and law. He served as General Counsel of the National Security Agency, Assistant Secretary for Policy at the Department of Homeland Security, and drafter of a report reforming the intelligence community after the Iraq War. His legal practice focuses on cyber security, CFIUS, export controls, government procurement, and immigration and regulation of international travel.

Our interview this week is with Nicole Perlroth, The New York Times reporter and author of This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race. It’s wide-ranging, occasionally confrontational, and a great tour of the issues raised in the book about 0-day exploits, US responsibility for the global

This episode features a deep dive into the National Security Agency’s self-regulatory approach to overseas signals intelligence, or SIGINT. Frequent contributor David Kris takes us into the details of the SIGINT Annex that governs NSA’s collections outside the US. It turns out to be a surprising amount of fun as we stop to examine

The US has never really had a “cyberczar.” Arguably, though, the UK has. The head of the National Cyber Security Center combines the security roles of NSA and DHS’s CISA. To find out how cybersecurity issues look from that perspective, we interview Ciaran Martin, the first director of the NCSC.

In the news

It’s a story that has everything, except a reporter able to tell it. A hostile state attacking the US power grid is a longstanding and quite plausible national security concern.

The Trump administration was galvanized by the threat, even seizing Chinese power equipment at the port to do a detailed breakdown and then issuing

We interview Jane Bambauer on the failure of COVID-tracking phone apps. She and Brian Ray are the author of “COVID-19 Apps Are Terrible—They Didn’t Have to Be,” a paper for Lawfare’s Digital Social Contract project. It turns out that, despite high hopes, the failure of these apps was overdetermined, mainly by twenty

In this episode, I interview Zach Dorfman about his excellent reports in Foreign Policy about US-China intelligence competition in the last decade. Zach is a well-regarded national security journalist, a Senior Staff Writer at the Aspen Institute’s Cyber and Technology program, and a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs.

Episode 343 of the Cyberlaw Podcast is a long meditation on the ways in which technology is encouraging other nations to exercise soft power inside the United States. I interview Nina Jankowicz, author of How to Lose the Information War on how Russian disinformation has affected Poland, Ukraine, and the rest of Eastern

According to media reports, Russian government hackers have penetrated the systems of thousands of companies across a variety of industries, as well numerous US government agencies. Moreover, what has been publicly reported may be only the tip of the iceberg in terms of both the scope of the attacks’ victims and the attackers’ methodologies. The most recent reporting also suggests that victim companies are not just those that would be of obvious interest to Russian intelligence services. Accordingly, all companies should assess whether they have been affected by this attack, what steps they need to take to remediate those effects, and what legal and contractual obligations they may have to notify government agencies, business partners, customers, and individuals.
Continue Reading The Urgent Need to Assess and Respond to Russian Supply Chain Attacks

Did you ever wonder where all that tech money came from all of a sudden? Turns out, a lot of it comes from online programmatic ads, an industry that gets little attention even from the companies, such as Google, that it made wealthy. That lack of attention is pretty ironic, because lack of attention

Our interview in this episode is with Michael Daniel, formerly the top cybersecurity adviser in the Obama NSC and currently the CEO of the Cyber Threat Alliance.  Michael lays out CTA’s mission. Along the way he also offers advice to the Biden cyber team – drawing in part on the wisdom of Henry