I’m unable to resist pointing out the profound bias built into everything Silicon Valley does these days. Google, it turns out, is planning to tell enterprise users of its word processor that words like “motherboard” and “landlord” are insufficiently inclusive for use in polite company. We won’t actually be forbidden to use those words.
Data Breach
Episode 389: The FTC Jumps Into Llog4j Cleanup with One Foot
The Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) other foot, I argue, is lodged firmly in its mouth. Tatyana Bolton defends the agency, which released what can only be described as a regulatory blog post in response to the log4j vulnerability, invoking the $700 million in fines imposed on Equifax to threatening “to use its full legal…
Episode 357: Conservative Catfight
They used to say that a conservative was a liberal who’d been mugged. Today’s version is that a conservative who’s comfortable with business regulation is a conservative who’s been muzzled by Silicon Valley. David Kris kicks off this topic by introducing Justice Thomas’s opinion in a case over Trump’s authority to block users he…
Episode 351: When will Cyberattacks on the Grid Become the New Normal?
In the news roundup, David Kris digs into rumors that Chinese malware attacks may have caused a blackout in India at a time when military conflict was flaring on the two nation’s Himalayan This leads us to Russia’s targeting of the US grid and to uneasy speculation on how well our regulatory regime is…
Episode 346: What Gives with Electric Grid Security?
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…
Episode 343: The Grim Lessons of the SolarWinds Breach
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…
The Urgent Need to Assess and Respond to Russian Supply Chain Attacks
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
Episode 336: Trumping Schrems II
Our interview this week is a deep dive into the mess created by the EU Court of Justice in Schrems II – and some pretty good ideas for how companies might avoid the mess as proposed in a U.S. Government white paper. I interview Brad Wiegmann, Senior Counselor for the National Security Division…
Episode 335: Digital Dunkirk
In this episode, I interview Rob Knake, Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, about his recent report, “Weaponizing Digital Trade — Creating a Digital Trade Zone to Promote Online Freedom and Cybersecurity.” The theme of the report is what the US can salvage from the wreckage of the 1990s…
Episode 333: Interview with David Ignatius
In this week’s episode I interview David Ignatius about the technology in his latest spy novel, The Paladin. Actually, while we do cover such tech issues as deepfakes, hacking back, Wikileaks, and internet journalism, the interview ranges more widely, from the steel industry of the 1970s, the roots of Donald Trump’s political worldview,…