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
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Episode 323: Hats off to the French! (And I don’t say that often.)
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…
Episode 286: Sandworm and the GRU’s global intifada
This episode is a wide-ranging interview with Andy Greenberg, author of Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin’s Most Dangerous Hackers. The book contains plenty of original reporting, served up with journalistic flair. It digs deep into some of the most startling and destructive cyberattacks of recent years, from two dangerous attacks on Ukraine’s power grid, to the multibillion-dollar NotPetya, and then to a sophisticated but largely failed effort to bring down the Seoul Olympics and pin the blame on North Korea. Apart from sophisticated coding and irresponsibly indiscriminate targeting, all these episodes have one thing in common. They are all the work of Russia’s GRU.
Andy persuasively sets out the attribution and then asks what kind of corporate culture supports such adventurism – and whether there is a strategic vision behind the GRU’s attacks. The interview convinced me at least that the GRU is pursuing a strategy of muscular nihilism – “our system doesn’t work, but yours too is based on fragile illusions.” It’s a kind of global cyber intifada, with all the dangers and all the self-defeating tactics of the original intifadas. Don’t disagree until you’ve listened!
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Continue Reading Episode 286: Sandworm and the GRU’s global intifada
Episode 281: Can the European Union order Twitter to silence President Trump?
Today’s episode opens with a truly disturbing bit of neocolonial judicial lawmaking from the Court of Justice of the European Union. The CJEU ruled that an Austrian court can order Facebook to take down statements about an Austrian politician. Called an “oaf” and a “fascist,” the politician more or less proved the truth of the accusations by suing to keep that and similar statements off Facebook worldwide. Trying to find allies for my proposal to adopt blocking legislation to protect the First Amendment from foreign government interference, I argue that President Trump should support such a law. After all, if he were ever to insult a European politician on Twitter, this ruling could lead to litigation that takes his Twitter account off the air. True, he could criticize the judges responsible for the judgment as “French” or “German” without upsetting CNN, but that would be cold comfort. At last, a legislative and international agenda for the Age of Trump!
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Continue Reading Episode 281: Can the European Union order Twitter to silence President Trump?
An Overview of Blockchain Cybersecurity Risks and Issues
Our blockchain colleagues recently published an article on the rapidly evolving landscape where blockchain intersects with data security and privacy. If you’ve ever wondered how blockchains can be considered secure even though hacks of cryptocurrency exchanges routinely make headlines, or whether distributing a permanent ledger to every participant in a network might run afoul of…
The Cyberlaw Podcast – The News Roundup
Cyberlaw Podcast alumnus Marten Mickos was called before the Senate Commerce Committee to testify about HackerOne’s bug bounty program. But the unhappy star of the hearings was Uber, which was heavily criticized for having paid out a large bonus under cloudy circumstances. Sen. Blumenthal and others on the Hill treated the payment as more…
The Cyberlaw Podcast – Interview with Tim Maurer
Episode 200: In which we turn fitness tracking into an entirely new 702 intelligence program
Whether they call it the fitbit or the “Ohsh*t!bit” governments are learning that the exercise internet of things is giving away their geospatial secrets at a rapid clip. Nick Weaver walks us through what most in the US would call…
The Cyberlaw Podcast — Interview with Elsa Kania
Episode 196: Did AlphaGo launch an arms race with China?
In this episode, I interview Elsa Kania, author of a Center for a New American Security report on China’s plan for military uses of artificial intelligence – a plan that seems to have been accelerated by the asymmetric impact of AlphaGo on the other…
Interview with Jeremy Rabkin
Episode 180: Robots and Cyber and Space, Oh My! The Pantsing of International Humanitarian Law
In a delightfully iconoclastic new book, Jeremy Rabkin and John Yoo take the air out of 75 years worth of inflated claims about the law of war. They do it, not for its own sake, though God knows that would…
Steptoe Cyberlaw Podcast – Interview with David Aitel
Episode 176: Governments to Internet: STFU
Everybody’s a critic, and everybody’s a censor, at least if you judge by today’s episode: Maury Shenk tells us the European Court of Justice will soon rule on its authority to censor what Americans read. Markham Erickson discusses the Ninth Circuit decision upholding national security letter gag orders. …