The Cyberlaw Podcast leads with the legal cost of Elon Musk’s anti-authoritarian takeover of Twitter. Turns out that authority figures have a lot of weapons, many grounded in law, and Twitter is at risk of being on the receiving end of those weapons. Brian Fleming explores the apparently unkillable notion that the Committee on
Data security
Episode 416: “The First Thing We Do, Let’s Hack All the Lawyers”
Dave Aitel introduces a deliciously shocking story about lawyers as victims and – maybe – co-conspirators in the hacking of adversaries’ counsel to win legal disputes. The trick, it turns out, is figuring out how to benefit from hacked documents without actually dirtying one’s hands with the hacking. And here too, a Shakespearean Henry…
Episode 384: What to Do About Deplatformed Data?
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…
Episode 381: Raven Mad
In this episode, Dave Aitel and I dig into the new criminal law the House intelligence committee has proposed for workers at intelligence agencies. The proposal is driven by the bad decisions of three intel agency alumni who worked for the UAE, doing phone hacking and other intrusions under the sobriquet of Project…
Episode 380: The FBI Laughs Last
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…
Episode 362: The Biden Cybersecurity Executive Order – CISA as CISO
Our interview is with, Brandon Wales, acting head of the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and Jen Daskal, Deputy General Counsel for Cyber and Technology Law at DHS. We dig deep into the latest Executive Order on cybersecurity. There’s a lot to say. The EO is focused largely…
Episode 339: The Privacy and Europocrisy Oversight Board
This is my favorite story of the episode. David Kris covers a report from the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board on the enormous value that European governments get in fighting terrorism from the same American surveillance programs that European institutions have been fighting for twenty years to shut down. It’s a delightful takedown…
Episode 331: Damned if You Do, Damned if You Don’t (Pay the Ransom)
In this episode, Jamil Jaffer, Bruce Schneier, and I mull over the Treasury announcement that really raises the stakes even higher for ransomware victim. The message from Treasury seems to be that if the ransomware gang is the subject of OFAC sanctions, as many are, the victim needs to call Treasury…
Episode 330: US-China Tech Divide – Where Will it End?
Our news roundup is dominated by the seemingly endless ways that the US and China can find to quarrel over tech policy. The Commerce Department’s plan to use an executive order to cut TikTok and WeChat out of the US market have now been enjoined. But the $50 Nick Weaver bet me that TikTok…
Episode 327: “I’ll Take Hacking Tesla for One Million Dollars, Alex”
In our 327th episode of the Cyberlaw Podcast, Stewart is joined by Nick Weaver (@ncweaver), David Kris (@DavidKris), and Dave Aitel (@daveaitel). We are back from hiatus, with a one-hour news roundup to cover the big stories of the last month. Pride of place goes to the WeChat/Tiktok mess, which just gets messier…