Brian Egan hosts this episode of the podcast, as Stewart Baker is hiking the wilds of New Hampshire with family. Nick Weaver joins the podcast to discuss the week in ransomware, as DOJ gets serious, and the gangs do too. Justice has a new ransomware task force, and the gangs have asked for $50
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Episode 353: The Former Lingerie Salesman Who Has Putin’s Knickers in a Twist
This week we interview Eliot Higgins, founder and executive director of the online investigative collective Bellingcat and author of We Are Bellingcat.
Bellingcat has produced remarkable investigative scoops on everything from Saddam’s use of chemical weapons to exposing the Russian FSB operatives who killed Sergei Skripal with Novichok, and, most impressive, calling a…
Episode 347: Cybersecurity – A British Perspective
The US has never really had a “cyberczar.” Arguably, though, the UK has. The head of the National Cyber Security Center combines the security roles of NSA and DHS’s CISA. To find out how cybersecurity issues look from that perspective, we interview Ciaran Martin, the first director of the NCSC.
In the news…
Episode 344: China and the CIA: A Wilderness of Mirror Imaging
In this episode, I interview Zach Dorfman about his excellent reports in Foreign Policy about US-China intelligence competition in the last decade. Zach is a well-regarded national security journalist, a Senior Staff Writer at the Aspen Institute’s Cyber and Technology program, and a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs.…
Episode 336: Trumping Schrems II
Our interview this week is a deep dive into the mess created by the EU Court of Justice in Schrems II – and some pretty good ideas for how companies might avoid the mess as proposed in a U.S. Government white paper. I interview Brad Wiegmann, Senior Counselor for the National Security Division…
Episode 334: Fight Like a Canadian
This episode features an interview with Ronald Deibert, Professor of Political Science, and Director of the Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, University of Toronto. We talk about his new book, Reset: Reclaiming the Internet for Civil Society. We also talk about the unique Canadian talent…
Episode 333: Interview with David Ignatius
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,…
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 329: Dumpster Fire in Cyberspace
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 …