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Our interview is with Mark Montgomery and John Costello, both staff to the Cyberspace Solarium Commission. The Commission, which issued its main report more than a year ago, is swinging through the pitch, following up with new white papers, draft legislative language, and enthusiastic advocacy for its recommendations in Congress, many of…

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…

Another week, another Trump administration initiative to hasten the decoupling from China. As with MIRV warheads, the theory seems to be that the next administration can’t shoot them all down.  Brian Egan lays out this week’s initiative, which lifts from obscurity a DoD list of Chinese military companies and excludes them from U.S. capital…

It’s a law-heavy tech news week, so this episode is all news. If you come for the interviews, though, do not fear.  We’ll be releasing episode 333 tomorrow, and it’s all interview, as I talk with David Ignatius about the tech issues in his latest spy novel, The Paladin.

To kick things off,…

In this episode, Jamil Jaffer, Bruce Schneier, and I mull over the Treasury announcement that really raises the stakes even higher for ransomware victim.  The message from Treasury seems to be that if the ransomware gang is the subject of OFAC sanctions, as many are, the victim needs to call Treasury…

Our news roundup is dominated by the seemingly endless ways that the US and China can find to quarrel over tech policy.  The Commerce Department’s plan to use an executive order to cut TikTok and WeChat out of the US market have now been enjoined. But the $50 Nick Weaver bet me that TikTok…

John Yoo, Mark MacCarthy, and I kick off episode 329 of the Cyberlaw Podcast diving deep into what I call the cyberspace equivalent of a dumpster fire. There is probably a pretty good national security case for banning TikTok. In fact, China did a lot better than the Trump administration when it …

Our interview in this episode is with Glenn Gerstell, freed at last from some of the constraints that come with government service. We cover the Snowden leaks, how private and public legal work differs (hint: it’s the turf battles), Cyber Command, Russian election interference, reauthorization of FISA, and the daunting challenges the US (and its Intelligence Community) will face as China’s economy begins to reinforce its global security ambitions.

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Continue Reading Episode 304: Unfiltered: An interview with NSA’s former general counsel

This Week in the Great Decoupling: The Commerce Department has rolled out proposed telecom and supply chain security rules that never once mention China. More accurately, the Department has rolled out a sketch of its preliminary thinking about proposed rules. Brian Egan and I tackle the substance and history of the proposal and conclude that the government is still fighting about the content of a policy it’s already announced. And to show that decoupling can go both ways, a US-based chip-tech group is moving to Switzerland to reassure its Chinese participants. Nick Weaver and I conclude that there’s a little less here than Reuters seems to think.

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Continue Reading Episode 290: The Right to be Forgotten Shoots the Shark

We open the episode with David Kris’s thoughts on the two-years-late CFIUS investigation of TikTok, its Chinese owner, ByteDance, and ByteDance’s US acquisition of the lip-syncing company Musical.ly. Our best guess is that this unprecedented reach-back investigation will end in a more or less precedented mitigation agreement.

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Continue Reading Episode 285: ByteDance bitten by CFIUS