Was Iran’s cyberattack that bricked vast numbers of Saudi Aramco computers justified by a similar attack on the National Iranian Oil Company a few months’ earlier? Does NSA have the ability to “replay” and attribute North Korean attacks on companies like Sony? And how do the last six NSA directors stack up against each other?
Steptoe Cyberlaw Podcast – Interview with Gen. Michael Hayden
Want to see cyber attribution and deterrence in action? In August, a hacker pulled the names of US military personnel and others out of a corporate network and passed them to ISIL. British jihadist Junaid Hussain exulted when ISIL released the names. “They have us on their ‘hit list,’ and we have them on ours too…,” he tweeted. On the whole, I’d rather be on theirs. Two weeks after his tweet, Hussain was killed in a US airstrike, and two months after that, the hacker was arrested in Malaysia (subscription required) on a US warrant.
We explore that story and more with Gen. Michael Hayden, the only person to serve as both Director of the National Security Agency and of the Central Intelligence Agency. Gen. Hayden explains why he differs with FBI director Comey on encryption and with the European Court of Justice on whether the US sufficiently respects privacy rights, along with other topics.
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Steptoe Cyberlaw Podcast – Interview with Rebecca Richards
In this week’s episode, our guest is Rebecca Richards, NSA’s director of privacy and civil liberties. We ask the tough questions: Is her title an elaborate hoax or is she the busiest woman on the planet? How long will it be before privacy groups blame the Seattle Seahawks’ loss on NSA’s policy of intercepting
Steptoe Cyberlaw Podcast – Interview with David Sanger
Our guest for Episode 50 of the Steptoe Cyberlaw Podcast is David Sanger, the New York Times reporter who broke the detailed story of Stuxnet in his book, Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power. David talks about his latest story, recounting how North Korea developed its
Steptoe Cyberlaw Podcast – Interview with Dmitri Alperovich
This week in NSA: We take a look at the other half of the Lofgren amendment, which prohibits NSA and CIA from asking a company to “alter its product or service to permit electronic surveillance.” So if Mullah Omar orders a phone from Amazon, the government can’t ask Amazon to put a bug in it
Steptoe Cyberlaw Podcast – Interview with Ralph Langner
This week in NSA: The House passes an NDAA amendment to regulate “secondary” searches of 702 data, and the prize for Dumbest NSA Story of the Month Award goes to Andrea Peterson of the Washington Post for exposing NSA’s shocking use of “Skilz points” to encourage its analysts to use new tools to do their
Steptoe Cyberlaw Podcast – Interview with Paul Rosenzweig
Our guest for the week, Paul Rosenzweig, is as knowledgeable as anyone about cybersecurity and intelligence law. He blogs on the topics for Lawfare, writes for the Homeland Security Institute, consults for Red Branch Consulting, and lectures for the Great Courses on Audible.
So this week we let him comment on the stories
Steptoe Cyberlaw Podcast – Interview with Congressman Mike Pompeo
This week’s interview is with Rep. Mike Pompeo, a member of the House Intelligence Committee who joined the House in 2010 after three careers, any one of which would have been enough for an ordinary man. First in his class in West Point, he left the Army to study law at Harvard, where he
Steptoe Cyberlaw Podcast – Interview with Ron Deibert
We begin this week’s podcast with Edward Snowden’s NBC interview and the kerfuffle over his claim to have raised concerns about the agency’s intelligence programs before he launched his campaign of leaks. That leads us (or me, at least) to a meditation on Snowden’s style of truth-telling, which turns out to be almost indistinguishable from,
“Fast Eddie” Snowden’s Problem with the Truth
The NBC interview with Edward Snowden was instructive in several ways. He continues to present himself as a reasonable man who tried to stop illegal programs but was left with no option but to go public. But the more closely you listen, especially when he says things that can be checked against the record, the