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This episode’s interview with Dr. Peter Pry of the EMP Commission raises an awkward question: Is it possible that North Korea has already developed nuclear weapons that could cause the deaths of hundreds of millions of Americans by permanently frying the entire electrical infrastructure with a single high-altitude blast?  And if he doesn’t, could…

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 …

Our interview in this episode is with Glenn Gerstell, freed at last from some of the constraints that come with government service. We cover the Snowden leaks, how private and public legal work differs (hint: it’s the turf battles), Cyber Command, Russian election interference, reauthorization of FISA, and the daunting challenges the US (and its Intelligence Community) will face as China’s economy begins to reinforce its global security ambitions.…

Continue Reading Episode 304: Unfiltered: An interview with NSA’s former general counsel

This Week in the Great Decoupling: The Commerce Department has rolled out proposed telecom and supply chain security rules that never once mention China. More accurately, the Department has rolled out a sketch of its preliminary thinking about proposed rules. Brian Egan and I tackle the substance and history of the proposal and conclude that the government is still fighting about the content of a policy it’s already announced. And to show that decoupling can go both ways, a US-based chip-tech group is moving to Switzerland to reassure its Chinese participants. Nick Weaver and I conclude that there’s a little less here than Reuters seems to think.…

Continue Reading Episode 290: The Right to be Forgotten Shoots the Shark

We open the episode with David Kris’s thoughts on the two-years-late CFIUS investigation of TikTok, its Chinese owner, ByteDance, and ByteDance’s US acquisition of the lip-syncing company Musical.ly. Our best guess is that this unprecedented reach-back investigation will end in a more or less precedented mitigation agreement.…

Continue Reading Episode 285: ByteDance bitten by CFIUS

Joel Trachtman thinks it’s a near certainty that the WTO agreements will complicate US efforts to head off an IoT cybersecurity meltdown, and there’s a real possibility that a US cybersecurity regime could be held to violate our international trade obligations. Claire Schachter and I dig into the details of the looming…

In today’s News Roundup, Klon Kitchen adds to the North Korean Embassy invasion by an unknown group. Turns out some of the participants fled to the US and lawyered up, but the real tipoff about attribution is that they’ve given some of the data they stole to the FBI. That rules out CIA involvement right there.

Nick Weaver talks about Hal Martin pleading guilty to unlawfully retaining massive amounts of classified NSA hacking data. It’s looking more and more as though Martin was just a packrat, making his sentence of nine years in prison about right. But as Nick points out, that leaves unexplained how the Russians got hold of so much NSA data themselves.

Paul Hughes explains the seamy Europolitics behind the new foreign investment regulations that will take effect this month.…

Continue Reading Episode 257: How we know the North Korean Embassy break-in wasn’t the work of the CIA

I know. That could be any national strategy written in the last 15 years. And that’s the point. In our interview, Dr. Amy Zegart and I discuss the national cyber strategy and what’s wrong with it, along with the culture clash between DOD and Silicon Valley (especially Google), and whether the Mueller report should lead to a similarly thorough investigation into how the Intelligence Community and Justice handled the allegations at the start of the Trump Administration. Plus, Amy answers this burning question: “If a banana republic is a country where losing an election means getting criminally investigated, what do you call a country where winning an election means you get criminally investigated?”…

Continue Reading Episode 256: National Bloviation Strategy

In our interview, Elsa Kania and Sam Bendett explain what China and Russia have learned from the American way of warfighting – and from Russia’s success in Syria. The short answer: everything. But instead of leaving us smug, I argue it ought to leave us worried about surprise. Elsa and Sam both try to predict where the surprises might come from. Yogi Berra makes an appearance.…

Continue Reading Episode 255: Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery: Russia and China revamp their military technologies

We interview Dmitri Alperovitch of CrowdStrike on the company’s 2019 Global Threat Report, which features a ranking of Western cyber adversaries based on how long it takes each of them to turn a modest foothold into code execution on a compromised network. The Russians put up truly frightening numbers – from foothold to execution in less than twenty minutes – but the real surprise is the North Koreans, who clock in at 2:20. The Chinese take the bronze at just over 4 hours. Dmitri also gives props to a newcomer – South Korea – whose skills are substantial.…

Continue Reading Episode 252: In the cyber adversary Olympics, it’s Russia for the gold and North Korea (!) for the silver