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.

Continue Reading Episode 288: Mistrusting Google

Paul Rosenzweig leads off with This Week in China Tech Fear – an enduring and fecund feature in Washington these days. We cover the Trump Administration’s plan to blacklist up to five Chinese surveillance companies, including Hikvision, for contributing to Uighur human rights violations in the West of China, DHS’s rather

This episode features an interview with Michael Tiffany, the co-founder and president of White Ops and a deep student of how to curtail adtech fraud. Michael explains the adtech business, how fraudsters take advantage of its structure, and what a coalition of law enforcement and tech companies did to wreck one of the most successful fraud networks, known as 3ve. You can read more about the take down in the joint White Ops and Google report, “The Hunt for 3ve.”

Continue Reading Episode 242: Nobody Trolls Like the Russians

Podcast 114Our guest for episode 114 is General Michael Hayden, former director of the NSA and CIA; he also confirms that he personally wrote every word of his fine book, Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror.   In a sweeping interview, we cover everything from Jim Comey’s performance at the AG’s hospital bedside (and in the Clinton email investigation) to whether the missed San Diego 9/11 calls were discovered before or after the 215 program was put in place.  Along the way, we settle the future of Cyber Command,  advise the next President on intelligence, and lay out the price the intelligence community is paying for becoming so darned good at hunting terrorists.
Continue Reading Steptoe Cyberlaw Podcast – Interview with General Hayden

General Keith Alexander, the head of US Cyber Command and the National Security Agency, testified to Congress yesterday that China continues to hack into “defense industrial base companies” and steal military technology (see Don Reisinger‘s latest blog post). And he confirmed what was widely believed already—that China was responsible for the hacks on