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This Week in Mistrusting Google: Klon Kitchen points to a Wall Street Journal story about all the ways Google tweaks its search engine to yield results that look machine-made but aren’t. He and I agree that most of these tweaks have understandable justifications – but you have to trust Google not to misuse them. And increasingly no one does. The same goes for Google’s foray into amassing and organizing health data on millions of Americans. It’s a nothing-burger with mayo, unless you mistrust Google. Since mistrusting Google is a growth industry, it’s getting a lot of attention, including from HHS investigators. Matthew Heiman explains, and when he’s done, my money is on Google surviving that investigation comfortably. The capital of mistrusting Google is Brussels, and not surprisingly, Maury Shenk tells us that the EU has forced Google to modify its advertising protocols to exclude data on health-related sites visited by its customers.

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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.

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Our News Roundup leads with the long, slow death of Section 230 immunity. Nick Weaver explains why he thinks social media’s pursuit of engagement has led to a poisonous online environment, and Matthew Heiman replays the astonishing international consensus that Silicon Valley deserves the blame – and the regulation – for all that ails the Internet. The UK is considering holding social media execs liable for “harmful” content on their platforms. Australia has already passed a law to punish social media companies for failure to remove “abhorrent violent material.” And Singapore is happily drafting behind the West, avoiding for once the criticism that its press controls are out of step with the international community. Even Mark Zuckerberg is reading the writing on the wall and asking for regulation. I note that lost in the one-minute hate directed at social media is any notion that other countries shouldn’t be able to tell Americans what they can and can’t read. I also wonder whether the consensus that platforms should be editors will add to conservative doubts about maintaining Section 230 at all – and in the process endanger the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement that would enshrine Section 230 in US treaty obligations.

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In the News Roundup, Nick Weaver and I offer very different assessments of Australia’s controversial encryption bill. Nick’s side of the argument is bolstered by Denise Howell, the original legal podcaster, with 445 weekly episodes of This Week in Law to her credit.

Later in the program, I interview Rep. Jim Langevin (D-RI), who’s a force for cybersecurity both on the Homeland Security Committee and on the Armed Services subcommittee that oversees Cyber Command and DARPA – a subcommittee that insiders expect him to be chairing in the next Congress.

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Episode 223 with David Sanger: A war reporter for the cyber age

I interview David Sanger in this episode on his new book, The Perfect Weapon – War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age. It is an instant history of how the last five years have transformed the cyberwar landscape as dozens of countries follow a path first broken by Stuxnet. And then, to our horror, branch out into new and highly successful ways of waging cyberwar. Mostly against us.  David depicts an Obama administration paralyzed by the Rule of Lawyers and a fear that our opponents would always have one more rung than we did on the escalation ladder. The Trump administration also takes its lumps, sometimes fairly and sometimes not. At center stage in the book is Putin’s uniquely brazen and uniquely impactful use of information warfare, but the North Koreans and the Chinese also play major roles.  It is as close to frontline war reporting as cyber conflict is likely to get.

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Episode 221: Daugherty’s Revenge

The 11th Circuit’s LabMD decision is a dish served cold for Michael Daugherty, the CEO of the defunct company. The decision overturns decades of FTC jurisdiction, acquired over the years by a kind of bureaucratic adverse possession. Thanks to the LabMD opinion, practically all the FTC’s privacy and security consent decrees are at risk of being at least partly unenforceable — and if the dictum holds, the FTC may have to show that everything it views as an “unfair” lack of security is actually a negligent security practice.

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The Cyberlaw Podcast – Interview with Chris Bing and Patrick Howell O’Neill

Episode 211: Senators Markey and Blumenthal bury the lede

Our interview is with Chris Bing and Patrick Howell O’Neill of Cyberscoop. They’ve broken two cyberscoops in the last week or so. First, an in-depth look at Kaspersky’s outing of a US cyberespionage program…