What is the federal government doing to get compromised hardware and software out of its supply chain? That’s what we ask Harvey Rishikof, coauthor of “Deliver Uncompromised,” and Joyce Corell, who heads the Supply Chain and Cyber Directorate at the National Counterintelligence and Security Center. There’s no doubt the problem is being admired to a fare-thee-well, and some evidence it’s also being addressed. Listen and decide!…
Continue Reading Episode 272: Illuminating supply chain security
If you’ve lost the Germans on privacy, you’ve lost Europe, and maybe the world. That’s the lesson that emerges from my conversation with David Kris and Paul Rosenzweig about the latest declaration that the German interior minister wants to force messaging apps to decrypt chats. This comes at the same time that industry and civil society groups are claiming that GCHQ’s “ghost proposal” for breaking end-to-end encryption should be rejected. The paper, signed by all the social media giants, says that GCHQ’s proposal will erode the trust that users place in Silicon Valley. I argue that that argument is well past its sell-by date.
Continue Reading Episode 266: Will an end to social media trust mean an end to end-to-end encryption?
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.…
The theme of this week’s podcast seems to be the remarkable reach of American soft power: Really, we elect Donald Trump, and suddenly everybody’s trolling. The Justice Department criminally charges a Russian troll factory’s accountant, and before David Kris can finish explaining it, she’s on YouTube, trolling the prosecutors with a housewife schtick. She’s not alone. Faced with the news that President Trump is using a commercial iPhone for many of his calls – and, Nate Jones points out, getting tapped by China, Russia, and others as a result – China has a suggestion that scores at the top of the POTUS Troll Scale. Tim Cook goes to Europe to troll Android – and me – with a speech that touches all my buttons: Europhilia, Apple sanctimony in pursuit of profit, and blind enthusiasm for privacy regulation. And when the Belgians ask for British help investigating a suspected GCHQ hack of a Belgian ISP, as David and I discuss, the British respond with what can only be described as understated trolling.…
Continue Reading Episode 237: I’d Like to Teach the World to Troll, in Perfect Harmony!
In Episode 226 of The Cyberlaw Podcast, Stewart departs for the wilderness, and the News Roundup team (Brian Egan with Matthew Heiman, Jim Lewis, and Dr. Megan Reiss) muddles through without him.
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Continue Reading Episode 226: Where are all my Twitter followers?
Our interview is with Megan Stifel, whose paper for Public Knowledge offers a new way of thinking about cybersecurity measures, drawing by analogy on the relative success of sustainability initiatives in spurring environmental consciousness. She holds up pretty well under my skeptical questioning.
In this week’s news, Congress and the Executive branch continue to fight over the bleeding body of ZTE, which has already lost nearly 40% of its market value. The Commerce Department has extracted a demanding compliance and penalty package from the Chinese telecom equipment manufacturer. The Senate, meanwhile, has amended the NDAA to overturn the package and re-impose what amounts to a death penalty (see section 1727). Brian Egan and I dig into the Senate’s language and conclude that it may do a lot less than the Senators think it does, and that may be the best news ZTE is going to get from Washington this year.
Judge Leon has approved the AT&T-Time Warner merger. Gus Hurwitz puts the ruling in context. His lesson: next time, the Justice Department needs better evidence.…
Continue Reading The Cyberlaw Podcast — Interview with Megan Stifel
Episode 219: Nick Bilton, Ross Ulbricht, and the Silk Road Bust
This episode features a conversation with Nick Bilton, author of American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road. His book, out today in paperback, tells the story of Ross Ulbricht, the libertarian who created the hidden Tor site…
Episode 218: The Mugshots.com Case: California Crazy Meets European Crazy
In this episode, Markham Erickson highlights the Mugshots.com prosecution. The site had a loathsome business model, publishing mugshots for free and charging hundreds of bucks to people who wanted the record of their arrests taken down. Now the owners are being prosecuted in a case…
In episode 212 of The Cyberlaw Podcast, Stewart Baker is at RSA, and Brian Egan, Maury Shenk, and Pete Jeydel of Steptoe are joined by David Kris and Nate Jones of Culper Partners LLC to cover the good, the bad and the ugly of the week that was.
UK cyber issues: Brian, Maury, David and…
Episode 201: Interview with Susan Landau
The crypto wars return to The Cyberlaw Podcast in episode 201, as I interview Susan Landau about her new book on the subject, Listening In: Cybersecurity in an Insecure Age. Susan and I have been debating each other for decades now, and this interview is no exception.
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