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If your podcast feed has suddenly become a steady diet of more or less the same COVID-19 stories, here’s a chance to listen to cyber experts talk about what they know about – cyberlaw. Our interview is with Elsa Kania, adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security and one of the most prolific students of China, technology, and national security. We talk about the relative strengths and weaknesses of the artificial intelligence ecosystems in the two countries.…

Continue Reading Episode 306: The (almost) COVID-19-free episode

This episode features an interview on the Bezos phone flap with David Kaye and Alex Stamos. David is a UN Special Rapporteur and clinical professor of law at UC Irvine who first drew attention to an FTI Consulting report concluding that the Saudis did hack Bezos’ phone. Alex is director of the Stanford Internet Observatory and was the CSO at Facebook; he thinks the technical case against the Saudis needs work, and he calls for a supplemental forensic review of the phone.…

Continue Reading Episode 297: Did the Saudi Crown Prince hack Jeff Bezos’s phone?

The Foreign Agent Registration Act is having a moment – in fact its best year since 1939, as the Justice Department charges three people with spying on Twitter users for Saudi Arabia. Since they were clearly acting like spies but not stealing government secrets or company intellectual property, FARA seems to be the only law that they could be charged with violating. Nate Jones and I debate whether the Justice Department can make the charges stick.…

Continue Reading Episode 287: Plumbing the depths of artificial stupidity

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

You knew we’d go there. I talk about Congresswoman Katie Hill’s “throuple” pics and whether the rush to portray her as a victim of revenge porn raises questions about revenge porn laws themselves. Paul Rosenzweig, emboldened by twin tweets – from President Trump calling Never-Trumpers like him “human scum” and from Mark Hamill welcoming him to the Rebel Scum Alliance – takes issue with me.…

Continue Reading Episode 284: A throuple can keep a secret – if a couple of them are dead

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

FTC Commissioner Noah Phillips
FTC Commissioner Noah Phillips

Our guest for the interview is Noah Phillips, recently appointed FTC Commissioner and former colleague of Stewart Baker at Steptoe. Noah fields questions about the European Union, privacy, and LabMD, about whether Silicon Valley suppression of conservative speech should be a competition law issue, about how foreign governments’ abuse of merger approvals can be disciplined, and much more.

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Continue Reading Episode 228: Best idea yet for derailing the Kavanaugh nomination

Episode 221: Daugherty’s Revenge

The 11th Circuit’s LabMD decision is a dish served cold for Michael Daugherty, the CEO of the defunct company. The decision overturns decades of FTC jurisdiction, acquired over the years by a kind of bureaucratic adverse possession. Thanks to the LabMD opinion, practically all the FTC’s privacy and security consent decrees are at risk of being at least partly unenforceable — and if the dictum holds, the FTC may have to show that everything it views as an “unfair” lack of security is actually a negligent security practice.…

Continue Reading The Cyberlaw Podcast – News Roundup