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The Foreign Agent Registration Act is having a moment – in fact its best year since 1939, as the Justice Department charges three people with spying on Twitter users for Saudi Arabia. Since they were clearly acting like spies but not stealing government secrets or company intellectual property, FARA seems to be the only law that they could be charged with violating. Nate Jones and I debate whether the Justice Department can make the charges stick.…

Continue Reading Episode 287: Plumbing the depths of artificial stupidity

What is the federal government doing to get compromised hardware and software out of its supply chain? That’s what we ask Harvey Rishikof, coauthor of “Deliver Uncompromised,” and Joyce Corell, who heads the Supply Chain and Cyber Directorate at the National Counterintelligence and Security Center. There’s no doubt the problem is being admired to a fare-thee-well, and some evidence it’s also being addressed. Listen and decide!…

Continue Reading Episode 272: Illuminating supply chain security

Orin KerrDoes the FISA court perform a recognizably judicial function when it reviews 702 minimization procedures for compliance with the fourth amendment?  Our guest for episode 115 is Orin Kerr, GWU professor and all-round computer crime guru, and Orin and I spend a good part of the interview puzzling over Congress’s mandate that the FISA court review what amounts to a regulation for compliance with an amendment that is usually invoked only in individual cases.  Maybe, I suggest, the recent court ruling on 702 minimization and the fourth amendment doesn’t make sense from an article III point of view because the FISA judges long ago graduated from deciding cases and controversies to acting as special masters to oversee the intelligence community.  We also explore an upcoming Orin Kerr law review piece on how judicial construction of the fourth amendment should be influenced by statutes that play in the same sandbox. …
Continue Reading Steptoe Cyberlaw Podcast – Interview with Orin Kerr

The House Intelligence Committee has now adopted a manager’s amendment to what it’s now calling the “Protecting Cyber Networks Act.”  Predictably, privacy groups are already inveighing against it.

I fear that the House bill is indeed seriously flawed, but not because it invades privacy.  Instead, it appears to pile unworkable new privacy regulations on

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