Episode 187: Interviewing Tom Bossert
I had a chance to talk to Tom Bossert, President Trump’s Homeland Security Adviser, on the record, and we’re releasing the conversation as a bonus episode of the Cyberlaw Podcast. The talk ranges from Peggy Noonan’s observations on White House staff work to the vast improvement in the West Wing’s
Episode 186: What Stephen Paddock Can Tell Us About 702 Reform
Our interview is another in our series on section 702 reform, featuring Mieke Eoyang of the National Security Program at Third Way and Jamil Jaffer of George Mason University and IronNet Security. They begin with the history of the program but quickly focus on
Today’s news roundup features Shane Harris of the Wall Street Journal, Brian Egan, and Alan Cohn discussing stories that Shane wrote last week. Out of the box, we work through the hall of mirrors that the Kaspersky hacking story has become.
The Russian hacking story is biting more companies than just Kaspersky. Turns
Episode 183: North Korea’s Chances of Winning a 2040 Gold Medal in Basketball May Be Better than You Think
Richard Danzig, former Navy Secretary and a serious defense and technology thinker, speaks to us about the technology tsunami and what it means for the Pentagon. Among the risks: lots more accidents, some of them
Episode 179: Interview with Jeanette Manfra
Our interview is with Jeanette Manfra, DHS’s Assistant Secretary for Cyber Security and Communications. We cover her agency’s binding directive to other civilian agencies to purge Kaspersky software from their systems, and her advice to victims of the Equifax breach (and to doctors who think that Abbott Labs’
Episode 178: The Evil Dolphin Episode
The Cyberlaw Podcast kicks off a series exploring section 702 – the half-US/half-foreign collection program that has proven effective against terrorists while also proving controversial with civil liberties groups. With the program due to expire on December 31, we’ll examine the surveillance controversies spawned by the program. Today, we
Episode 170
This week’s episode is a news roundup without interview. We lead with the Senate’s overwhelming adoption of unexpectedly tough Russia sanctions along with the Iran sanctions bill. The mainstream press has emphasized that the bill will lock the Obama sanctions into legislation, but Anthony Rapa explains that the bigger story is just how
Does the FISA court perform a recognizably judicial function when it reviews 702 minimization procedures for compliance with the fourth amendment? Our guest for episode 115 is Orin Kerr, GWU professor and all-round computer crime guru, and Orin and I spend a good part of the interview puzzling over Congress’s mandate that the FISA court review what amounts to a regulation for compliance with an amendment that is usually invoked only in individual cases. Maybe, I suggest, the recent court ruling on 702 minimization and the fourth amendment doesn’t make sense from an article III point of view because the FISA judges long ago graduated from deciding cases and controversies to acting as special masters to oversee the intelligence community. We also explore an upcoming Orin Kerr law review piece on how judicial construction of the fourth amendment should be influenced by statutes that play in the same sandbox.
Continue Reading Steptoe Cyberlaw Podcast – Interview with Orin Kerr
Our guest for episode 114 is General Michael Hayden, former director of the NSA and CIA; he also confirms that he personally wrote every word of his fine book, Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror. In a sweeping interview, we cover everything from Jim Comey’s performance at the AG’s hospital bedside (and in the Clinton email investigation) to whether the missed San Diego 9/11 calls were discovered before or after the 215 program was put in place. Along the way, we settle the future of Cyber Command, advise the next President on intelligence, and lay out the price the intelligence community is paying for becoming so darned good at hunting terrorists.
Continue Reading Steptoe Cyberlaw Podcast – Interview with General Hayden
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