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The Cyberspace Solarium Commission’s report was released into the teeth of the COVID-19 crisis and hasn’t attracted the press it probably deserved. But the commissioners included four sitting Congressmen who plan to push for adoption of its recommendations. And the Commission is going to be producing more material – and probably more press attention – over the coming weeks. In this episode, I interview Sen. Angus King, co-chair of the Commission, and Dr. Samantha Ravich, one of the commissioners.

We focus almost exclusively on what the Commission’s recommendations mean for the private sector. The Commission has proposed a remarkably broad range of cybersecurity measures for business. The Commission recommends a new products liability regime for assemblers of final goods (including software) who don’t promptly patch vulnerabilities. It proposes two new laws requiring notice not only of personal data breaches but also of other significant cyber incidents. It calls for a federal privacy and security law – without preemption. It updates Sarbanes-Oxley to include cybersecurity principles. And lest you think the Commission is in love with liability, it also proposed liability immunities for critical infrastructure owners operating under government supervision during a crisis. We cover all these proposals, plus the Commission’s recommendation of a new role for the Intelligence Community in providing support to critical US companies.…

Continue Reading Episode 311: What the Cyberspace Solarium Report Means for the Private Sector

We’re still on hiatus, but we’re back again this week with another bonus episode. Our next season will feature an interview with Bruce Schneier, cryptography, computer science, and privacy guru, about his latest book, Click Here to Kill Everybody: Security and Survival in a Hyper-connected World. So it only seems appropriate to revisit my May 2015 interview with Bruce about his earlier work, the best-selling Data and Goliath – a book I annotated every few pages of with the words, “Bruce, you can’t possibly really believe this.” And that’s pretty much how the interview goes, as Bruce and I mix it up over hackbacks, whether everyone but government should be allowed to use Big Data tools, Edward Snowden, whether “mass surveillance” has value in fighting terrorism, and whether damaging cyberattacks are really infrequent and hard to attribute. We disagree mightily – and with civility.

We’ll be back in September with another edition of Blockchain Takes Over the Cyberlaw Podcast, followed by the new interview with Bruce Schneier.…

Continue Reading Bonus: Interview with Bruce Schneier (2015)

Our guest commentator for episode 74 is Catherine Lotrionte, a recognized expert on international cyberlaw and the associate director of the Institute for Law, Science and Global Security at Georgetown University.  We dive deep on the United Nations Group of Government Experts, and the recent agreement of that group on a few basic norms…