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Bruce Schneier joins us to talk about AI hacking in all its forms. He’s particularly interested in ways AI will hack humans, essentially preying on the rough rules of thumb programmed into our wetware – that big-eyed, big-headed little beings are cute and need to have their demands met or that intimate confidences…

Our interview is with Kevin Roose, author of Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation debunks most of the comforting stories we use to anaesthetize ourselves to the danger that artificial intelligence and digitization poses to our jobs. Luckily, he also offers some practical and very personal ideas for how to…

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…

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…

Our news roundup for this episode is heavy on China and tech policy. And most of the news is bad for tech companies. Jordan Schneider tells us that China is telling certain agencies, not to purchase Teslas or allow them on the premises, for fear that Elon Musk’s famously intrusive record-keeping systems will give…

This week we interview Eliot Higgins, founder and executive director of the online investigative collective Bellingcat and author of We Are Bellingcat.

Bellingcat has produced remarkable investigative scoops on everything from Saddam’s use of chemical weapons to exposing the Russian FSB operatives who killed Sergei Skripal with Novichok, and, most impressive, calling a…

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…

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…

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.…