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This episode features a much deeper, and more diverse, examination of the Fifth Circuit decision upholding Texas’s social media law. We devote the last half of the episode to a structured dialogue about the opinion between Adam Candeub and Alan Rozenshtein. Both have written about it already, Alan critically and Adam supportively.…

With the U.S. and Europe united in opposing Russia’s attack on Ukraine, a few tough transatlantic disputes are being swept away – or at least under the rug. Most prominently, the data protection crisis touched off by Schrems 2 has been resolved in principle by a new framework agreement between the U.S. and the…

Federal district judge Robert Pitman has enjoined enforcement of Texas’s law regulating social media censorship.  The ruling sparks a fight between me and Nate Jones that ranges from how much weight should be given to the speech rights of social media to the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict imposed by Facebook when it decided he…

This week we celebrated International Tech Policy Week, which happens every year around this time, when the American policymakers, the American execs who follow them, and the U.S. journalists who report on them all go home to eat turkey with their families and leave tech policy to the rest of the world.

Leading off…

Among the many problems with the current social media enthusiasm for deplatforming is this question: What do you do with all the data generated by people you deplatformed?

Facebook’s answer, as you’d expect, is that Facebook can do what it wants with the data, which mostly means deleting it. Even if it’s evidence of…

Two major Senate committees have reached agreement on a cyber incident reporting mandate. And it looks like the big winner are the business lobbyists who got concessions from both committees. At least that’s my take. Dmitri Alperovitch says the bill may still be in trouble because of Justice Department opposition. And Tatyana Bolton…

We begin the episode with Michael Ellis taking a close look at the takedown of the ransomware gang. It’s a good story for the good guys, as REvil seems to have been brought down by the same tactic it used against so many of its victims – malware that lingered in the backups…

In this episode, we welcome Nick Weaver back for a special appearance thanks to the time-shifting powers of podcast software. He does a sack dance over cryptocurrency, flagging both China’s ban on cryptocurrency transactions and the U.S. Treasury’s sanctioning of the SUEX crypto exchange.

Maury Shenk explains the plans that the Biden administration and…

The Biden administration’s effort to counter ransomware may not be especially creative, but it is comprehensive. The administration is pushing all the standard buttons on the interagency dashboard, including the usual high-level task force and a $10 million reward program (but not including hackback authority for victims, despite headlines suggesting otherwise. And all the…

We begin the episode with the Biden administration’s options for responding to continued Russian ransomware outrages. Dmitri Alperovitch reprises his advice in the Washington Post that Putin will only respond to strength and U.S. pressure. I agree but raise the question whether the U.S. has the tools to enforce another set of alleged red…