Episode 169. In Which Ben Wittes Gets to the Right of Stewart Baker, to the Likely Eventual Embarrassment of Them Both
In the news roundup, Benjamin Wittes makes a cameo appearance, defending Jim Comey (but not the FBI) from my suggestion that leaking has a long and unattractive history at the FBI. Brian Egan takes
It’s an extended news roundup with plenty of debate between me and Nuala O’Connor, the President and CEO of the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT). We debate whether and how CDT should pay more attention to Chinese technology abuses and examine the EU ministers’ long list of privacy measures to be rolled back and security measures to be beefed up in the wake of the Brussels and Paris Daesh attacks.
Continue Reading Steptoe Cyberlaw Podcast – Interview with Nuala O’Connor
Over the past few years, the US government has invested heavily in trying to create international norms for cyberspace. We’ve endlessly cajoled other nations to agree on broad principles about internet freedom and how the law of war applies to cyberconflicts. Progress has been slow, especially with countries that might actually face us in a
Our guest for Episode 62 is is Dmitri Alperovitch, co-founder and CTO of CrowdStrike Inc. and former Vice President of Threat Research at McAfee. Dmitri unveils a new Crowdstrike case study in which his company was able to impose high costs on an elite Chinese hacking team. The hackers steadily escalated the sophistication of
Our guest for episode 61 of the Cyberlaw podcast is Joseph Nye, former dean of the Kennedy School at Harvard and three-time national security official for State, Defense, and the National Intelligence Council. We get a magisterial overview of the challenge posed by cyberweapons, how they resemble and differ from nuclear weapons, and (in
Richard Bejtlich is our guest for episode 59 of the Cyberlaw Podcast. Richard is the Chief Security Strategist at FireEye, an adviser to Threat Stack, Sqrrl, and Critical Stack, and a fellow at Brookings. We explore the significance of China’s recently publicized acknowledgment that it has a cyberwar strategy, FireEye’s disclosure of
Our guest for Episode 50 of the Steptoe Cyberlaw Podcast is David Sanger, the New York Times reporter who broke the detailed story of Stuxnet in his book, Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power. David talks about his latest story, recounting how North Korea developed its
Our interview focuses on Shane Harris and his new book, @War: The Rise of the Military-Internet Complex. It’s a good read and a good book, marred by the occasional deployment of easy lefty tropes – government contractors are mercenaries, the military sees war as an opportunity to expand turf, cybersecurity is a threat to
This week’s cyberlaw podcast begins as always with the week in NSA. We suspect that a second tech exec meeting with the President (for two hours!) bodes ill for the intelligence community, or at least the 215 metadata program, as does the shifting position of usually stalwart NSA supporters like Dianne Feinstein and Dutch Ruppersberger.
The old Cold War export control alliance, now known as the Wassenaar Arrangement, hasn’t exactly been a hotbed of new controls since Russia joined the club. But according to the Financial Times, the 41-nation group is preparing a broad new set of controls on complex surveillance and hacking software and cryptography. I suspect that the