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This episode’s interview with Dr. Peter Pry of the EMP Commission raises an awkward question: Is it possible that North Korea has already developed nuclear weapons that could cause the deaths of hundreds of millions of Americans by permanently frying the entire electrical infrastructure with a single high-altitude blast?  And if he doesn’t, could…

In this week’s episode I interview David Ignatius about the technology in his latest spy novel, The Paladin. Actually, while we do cover such tech issues as deepfakes, hacking back, Wikileaks, and internet journalism, the interview ranges more widely, from the steel industry of the 1970s, the roots of Donald Trump’s political worldview,…

John Yoo, Mark MacCarthy, and I kick off episode 329 of the Cyberlaw Podcast diving deep into what I call the cyberspace equivalent of a dumpster fire. There is probably a pretty good national security case for banning TikTok. In fact, China did a lot better than the Trump administration when it …

In our 326th episode of the Cyberlaw Podcast, Stewart Baker interviews Lauren Willard, who serves as Counselor to the Attorney General. Stewart is also joined Nick Weaver (@ncweaver), David Kris (@DavidKris), and Paul Rosenzweig (@RosenzweigP).

Our interview this week focuses on section 230 of the Communications Decency Act and features Lauren Willard,…

Our interview is with Bruce Schneier, who has coauthored a paper about how to push security back up the Internet-of-things supply chain: The reverse cascade: Enforcing security on the global IoT supply chain.  His solution is hard on IOT affordability and hard on big retailers and other middlemen, who will face new…

In the News Roundup, Dave Aitel (@daveaitel), Mark MacCarthy (@Mark_MacCarthy), and Nick Weaver (@ncweaver) and I discuss how French and Dutch investigators pulled off the coup of the year this April, when they totally pwned a shady “secure phone” system used by massive numbers of European criminals. Nick Weaver explains that hacking the phones…

This is the week when the movement to reform Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act got serious. The Justice Department released a substantive report suggesting multiple reforms. I was positive about many of them (my views here). Meanwhile, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) has proposed a somewhat similar set of changes in his…

On July 1, 2020, the California attorney general is expected to begin enforcing the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), California’s groundbreaking new privacy law which has been in effect since January 1, 2020. In addition, the attorney general is also finalizing regulations that interpret and build upon the CCPA. To minimize the risk of potentially…

Algorithms are at the heart of the Big Data/machine learning/AI changes that are propelling computerized decision-making. In their book, The Ethical Algorithm, Michael Kearns and Aaron Roth, two Computer Science professors at Penn, flag some of the social and ethical choices these changes are forcing upon us. My interview with them touches on many of the hot-button issues surrounding algorithmic decision-making. I disclose my views early: I suspect that much of the fuss over bias in machine learning is a way of smuggling racial and gender quotas and other academic social values into the algorithmic outputs. Michael and Aaron may not agree with that formulation, but the conversation provides a framework for testing it – and leaves me more skeptical about “bias hacking” of algorithmic outputs.

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Continue Reading Episode 291: Ethical Algorithms with Michael Kearns and Aaron Roth

If the surgeon about to operate on you has been disciplined for neglecting patients, wouldn’t you like to know? Well, the mandarins of the European Union privacy lobby beg to differ. Google has been told by a Dutch court not to index that story, and there seems to have been a six-month lag in disclosing even the court ruling. That’s part of this week’s News Roundup. Gus Hurwitz and I are appalled. I tout my long-standing view that in the end, privacy law just protects the privileged. Gus agrees.

The interview is with John Carlin, author of Dawn of the Code War. It’s a great inside story of how we came to indict China’s hacker-spies for attacking US companies.

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Continue Reading Episode 248: Tomayto, Tomahto: Right to be Forgotten Meets Right to Die