There’s a fine line between legislation addressing deepfakes and legislation that is itself a deep fake. Nate Jones reports on the only federal legislation addressing the problem so far. I claim that it is well short of a serious regulatory effort – and pretty close to a fake law.

In contrast, India seems serious about imposing liability on companies whose unbreakable end-to-end crypto causes harm, at least to judge from the howls of the usual defenders of such crypto. David Kris explains how the law will work. I ask why Silicon Valley gets to impose the externalities of encryption-facilitated crime on society without consequence when we’d never allow tech companies to say that society should pick up the tab for their pollution because their products are so cool. In related news, the FBI may be turning the Pensacola military terrorism attack into a slow-motion replay of the San Bernardino fight with Apple, this time with more top cover.

Continue Reading Episode 295: The line between deepfake legislation and deeply fake legislation

European news and sensibilities dominate episode 112.  I indulge in some unseemly gloating about Europe’s newfound enthusiasm for the PNR data it wasted years of my life trying to negotiate out of the US counterterrorism toolbox.  I pester our guest, Eric Jensen, about his work on the Talinn 2.0 manual covering the law of cyberwar; the manual seems to offer an ever-more-European take on cyberweapons and the law of armed conflict.  And if you think that’s a compliment, you haven’t been listening.
Continue Reading Steptoe Cyberlaw Podcast – Interview with Eric Jensen

Doing our best to avoid turning this into the Applelaw podcast, episode 105 begins with Maury Shenk unpacking the new US-EU Privacy Shield details.  His take: more hassles for companies accused of noncompliance, more detailed privacy disclosures and compliance obligations for most members, and a modicum of pain for the intelligence community, but it’s still basically the same framework as the Safe Harbor.
Continue Reading Steptoe Cyberlaw Podcast – Interview with Robin Weisman and Peter Van Valkenburgh

Live from RSA, it’s episode 104, with special guest Jim Lewis, CSIS’s renowned cybersecurity expert and Steptoe’s own Alan Cohn.  We do an extended news roundup before an RSA audience that yields several good questions for the panel.  We had invited Bruce Sewell, Apple’s General Counsel, to participate, but he didn’t show.  So we felt no constraint as we alternately criticized and mocked Apple’s legal arguments for not providing assistance to the FBI in gaining access to the San Bernardino terrorist’s phone.  We review the bidding on encryption on Capitol Hill and observe that the anti-regulatory forces have lost ground as a result of the fight Apple has picked. That leads into a discussion of China’s backdoors into the iPhone and Baidu’s role in compromising users of its products. 
Continue Reading Steptoe Cyberlaw Podcast – Interview with Jim Lewis

We devote episode 100 to “section 702” intelligence – the highly productive counterterrorism program that collects data on foreigners from data stored on US servers.  What’s remarkable about the program is its roots:  President Bush’s decision to ignore the clear language of FISA and implement collection without judicial approval.  That decision has now been ratified by Congress – and will be ratified again in 2017 when the authority for it ends.  But what does it say about the future of intelligence under law that our most productive innovation in intelligence only came about because the law was broken?  Our guest for the episode, David Kris, thinks that President Bush might have been able to persuade Congress to approve the program in 2001 if he’d asked.  David may be right; he is a former Assistant Attorney General for National Security, the coauthor of the premier sourcebook on intelligence under law, “National Security Investigations & Prosecutions,” and the General Counsel of Intellectual Ventures.  But what I find surprising is how little attention has been paid to the question.  How about it?  Is George Bush to FISA what Abraham Lincoln was to habeas corpus?

My interview with David leaves Lincoln to the history books and instead focuses entirely on section 702.  David lays out the half-dozen issues likely to be addressed during the debate over reauthorization, including the risk that the legislation will attract efforts to limit overseas signals intelligence, now governed mainly by Executive Order 12333.  He then pivots to the issues he thinks Congress should grapple with but probably won’t – from the growing ambiguity of location as a proxy for US citizenship to the failure of current intelligence law to adequately extract intelligence from the technologies that have emerged since 9/11, particularly social media and advertising technology.
Continue Reading Steptoe Cyberlaw Podcast – Interview with David Kris