We begin this episode with a quick tour of the Apple antitrust decision that pitted two Trump appointees against each other in a 5-4 decision. Matthew Heiman and I consider the differences in judging styles that produced the split and the role that 25 years of “platform billionaires” may have played in the decision.
Continue Reading Episode 264: Unpacking the Supreme Court’s decision in Pepper v. Apple
With apologies for the late post, Episode 263 of The Cyberlaw Podcast tells the sad tale of another US government leaker who unwisely trusted The Intercept not to compromise its source. As Nick Weaver points out, The Intercept also took forever to actually report on some of the material it received.
In other
In this episode, Nick Weaver and I discuss new Internet regulations proposed in the UK. He’s mostly okay with its anti-nudge code for kids, but not with requiring proof of age to access adult material. I don’t see the problem; after all, who wouldn’t want to store their passport information with Pornhub?
Continue Reading Episode 260: Sending our passports to Pornhub
Our News Roundup leads with the long, slow death of Section 230 immunity. Nick Weaver explains why he thinks social media’s pursuit of engagement has led to a poisonous online environment, and Matthew Heiman replays the astonishing international consensus that Silicon Valley deserves the blame – and the regulation – for all that ails the Internet. The UK is considering holding social media execs liable for “harmful” content on their platforms. Australia has already passed a law to punish social media companies for failure to remove “abhorrent violent material.” And Singapore is happily drafting behind the West, avoiding for once the criticism that its press controls are out of step with the international community. Even Mark Zuckerberg is reading the writing on the wall and asking for regulation. I note that lost in the one-minute hate directed at social media is any notion that other countries shouldn’t be able to tell Americans what they can and can’t read. I also wonder whether the consensus that platforms should be editors will add to conservative doubts about maintaining Section 230 at all – and in the process endanger the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement that would enshrine Section 230 in US treaty obligations.
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?”
Our guest is Peter W. Singer, co-author with Emerson T. Brooking of LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media. Peter’s book is a fine history of the way the Internet went wrong in the Age of Social Media. He thinks we’re losing the Like Wars, and I tend to agree. It’s a deep conversation that turns contentious when we come to his prescriptions, which I see as reinstating the lefty elite that ran journalism for decades, this time empowered by even less self-doubt – and AI that can reproduce its prejudices at scale and without transparency.
Our interview this week is with Hon. Michael Chertoff, my former boss at Homeland Security and newly minted author of Exploding Data: Reclaiming Our Cyber Security in the Digital Age. The conversation – and the book – is wide ranging and shows how much his views on privacy, data, and government have evolved in the decade since he left government. He’s a little friendlier to European notions of data protection, a little more cautious about government authority to access data, and even a bit more open to the idea of letting the victims of cyberattacks leave their networks to find their attackers (under government supervision, that is). It’s a thoughtful, practical meditation on where the digital revolution is taking us and how we should try to steer it.
Continue Reading Episode 231: Ah, September, when Europe unleashes a summer’s worth of crazy
Back for a rematch, John Lynch and I return to the “hackback” debate in episode 97, with Jim Lewis of CSIS providing color commentary. John Lynch is the head of the Justice Department’s computer crime section. We find more common ground than might be expected but plenty of conflict as well. I suggest that Sheriff Arpaio in Arizona may soon be dressing hackers in pink while deputizing backhackers, while Jim Lewis focuses on the risk of adverse foreign government reactions. We also consider when it’s lawful to use “web beacons” and whether trusted security professionals should be given more leeway to take action outside their customers’ networks. In response to suggestions that those who break into hacker hop points might be sued by the third parties who nominally own those hop points, I suggest that those parties could face counterclaims for negligence. We close with a surprisingly undogmatic discussion of Justice Department “no-action letters” for computer security practitioners considering novel forms of active defense.
Continue Reading Steptoe Cyberlaw Podcast – Interview with John Lynch
According to Dan Balz’s new book, the Obama campaign had its employees and volunteers log onto the campaign’s “Dashboard” application using their Facebook accounts, which allowed the campaign to see each person’s Facebook friend list. The campaign would then match the friends’ names to other information the campaign had amassed showing which of those
“Do Not Track” is the buzz phrase of the moment among Internet companies, the advertising industry, privacy advocates, and privacy regulators on both sides of the Atlantic. The problem is that the various parties don’t even agree on what the term means, as discussed in a recent New York Times piece by Edward Wyatt and