The Cyberlaw Podcast

In this episode, we welcome Nick Weaver back for a special appearance thanks to the time-shifting powers of podcast software. He does a sack dance over cryptocurrency, flagging both China’s ban on cryptocurrency transactions and the U.S. Treasury’s sanctioning of the SUEX crypto exchange.

Maury Shenk explains the plans that the Biden administration and the EU have for Big Tech and the rest of us. Hint: it involves more content moderation in support of, err, democracy.

Adam Candeub gives us a tour of Wall Street Journal’s the deeply reported series on Facebook’s difficulties managing the social consequences of, well, the internet, a responsibility that the press is determined to impose on the company. Among the quasi-scandals turned up by the Wall Street Journal is details on the list of “secret elite” of users protected from Facebook’s clunky and clueless content moderation algorithms. But really, in today’s world, true power is about escaping the clueless algorithms otherwise imposed on us by various authorities. We all aspire to join that elite. And perhaps we all can, if Ohio’s Attorney General and its latest Senate candidate get their way, making Google into a common carrier. (If that happens, we’ll credit Adam, who wrote an amicus brief in support.)

And what’s an elite without its hands on the levers of industry? China’s embrace of national champions on the world stage has forced a rethinking in the West of industrial policy. So, the auto industry’s commercial problem (they want cheap, plentiful, and antiquated chips for their cars) is suddenly a matter for White House meetings, and hints that the government might have its own supply allocation plans.

In fact, regulating the private sector is so in vogue, as long as it’s a tech-ish private sector, that California barely made news when it imposed a new and almost undefinable regulatory obligation on warehouse companies like Amazon. At bottom, I argue, this is yet another attempt to put workers back on top of the algorithm—by demanding that it explain itself.

Maury next takes us to the heart of algorithmic power and our unease with it, explaining that Google now admits that it has no idea how to make AI less toxic.

In quick hits:

• Washington whispers about Zoom’s ties to China have grown louder, as the U.S. government announces a national security review of its proposed acquisition of Five9 for $15 billion. 
• Contrary to my understanding, at least one former intel operative who went to work for the United Arab Emirates in Project Raven landed very much on his feet—as CTO at ExpressVPN, though company employees have been expressing unhappiness about his history.
• And podcast regular Dmitri Alperovitch has an op-ed in the New York Times that urges much tougher tactics in the fight against ransomware gangs. 

And more!

Download the 376th Episode (mp3) 

You can subscribe to The Cyberlaw Podcast using iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, Pocket Casts, or our RSS feed. As always, The Cyberlaw Podcast is open to feedback. Be sure to engage with @stewartbaker on Twitter. Send your questions, comments, and suggestions for topics or interviewees to [email protected]. Remember: If your suggested guest appears on the show, we will send you a highly coveted Cyberlaw Podcast mug!

The views expressed in this podcast are those of the speakers and do not reflect the opinions of their institutions, clients, friends, families, or pets.

Jordan Schneider rejoins us after too long an absence to summarize the tech policy coming out of Beijing today:  Any Chinese government agency with a beef against a tech company has carte blanche to at least try it out. From Didi and others being told to stop taking on subscribers to an end to Western IPOs, to the forced contributions to common welfare, China’s beefs with Big Tech sound a lot like those in the West (well, except for the complaints about AI-enabled censorship). What’s different is that China has freed up its agencies to actually throw sand in the gears of technology businesses. Jordan and I explore the downside of empowering agencies this way. First, it makes the Chinese government responsible for an enormous and hard to govern part of the economy, as the government’s problems with the overvalued property sector show. And it creates opportunities for companies that are better at politics than customer service to cripple their competitors.

Meanwhile, the U.S. government is trying out its own version of letting a thousand regulatory flowers bloom. Michael Weiner unpacks the new, amended complaint in FTC v. Facebook and concludes that the FTC has done a plausible job of meeting the objections that led the district court to throw out the first complaint.

Then he tells us the five buckets of sand the Biden administration is dumping into technology merger law in the hope of slowing a massive acquisition boom, from no longer granting early termination, insisting on future merger approvals in standard consent agreements, issuing “close at your own peril” letters when they haven’t finished their review, and replacing the Vertical Merger Guidelines issued in June 2020 with, uh, nothing.

Pete Jeydel takes us on a tour of Project Raven and the deferred prosecution agreements imposed on three former U.S. government hackers who sold their services too freely to the United Arab Emirates. The cases raise several novel legal issues, but one of the mysteries is why the prosecutors ultimately settled the cases without jail time. My guess? Graymail.

In quick hits and updates we note: That TikTok faces an Irish General Data Protection Regulation probe over children’s data and–more significantly–its transfers of data to China. What’s most remarkable to me is how long TikTok has staved off this scrutiny. Who says Donald Trump was bad for Chinese tech companies?

President Biden has nominated a 5th Federal Trade Commission Commissioner. Alvaro Bedoya is a Georgetown Law professor who writes about privacy and face recognition. There’s a lot of dumb stuff out there about AI bias and face recognition, but I’m pleased to say that it doesn’t look as though Prof. Bedoya wrote any of it.

The special prosecutor for Russia-Russia-Russia-gate has indicted a Perkins Coie lawyer for lying to the FBI general counsel while turning over a bunch of bogus evidence of Donald Trump’s ties to Russia. Turns out, I know all of the principals in this drama, and it’s uncomfortable.

Captain Obvious, speaking for the FBI, acknowledged that there is “no indication” Russia has cracked down on ransomware gangs after President Biden yelled at Vladimir Putin about them.

The 4th Circuit has tossed Wikimedia’s money-wasting lawsuit against the National Security Agency for its collection of overseas intelligence in the U.S.

And the Bolsonaro’s ban on social media censorship of politicians has been doubly overturned by the Brazilian Senate and its Supreme Court, leaving Bolsonaro’s decree in the same place as Florida’s (and, probably soon, Texas’s) effort to do something similar.

And more!

Download the 375th Episode (mp3)  

You can subscribe to The Cyberlaw Podcast using iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, Pocket Casts, or our RSS feed. As always, The Cyberlaw Podcast is open to feedback. Be sure to engage with @stewartbaker on Twitter. Send your questions, comments, and suggestions for topics or interviewees to [email protected]. Remember: If your suggested guest appears on the show, we will send you a highly coveted Cyberlaw Podcast mug!

The views expressed in this podcast are those of the speakers and do not reflect the opinions of their institutions, clients, friends, families, or pets.

The district court has ruled in the lawsuit between Epic and Apple over access to the Apple app store. Apple is claiming victory and Epic is appealing. But Apple’s victory is not complete, and may have a worm at its core. Jamil Jaffer explains.Surprised that ransomware gangs REvil and Groove are back—and thumbing their noses at President Biden? Dmitri Alperovitch isn’t. He explains why U.S. ransomware policy has failed so far.

WhatsApp has finally figured out how to let users encrypt their chat backups in the cloud, to the surprise of many users who didn’t realize their backups weren’t encrypted.

Speaking of the encryption debate, Dmitri notes that Proton Mail joined the scrum this week, in a way it no doubt regrets. After all its bragging that mail users’ privacy is “protected by Swiss law,” Proton Mail disclosed that Swiss law can be surprisingly law enforcement friendly. Responding to a French request through Europol, Swiss authorities ordered the service to collect metadata on a particular account and overrode what had been seen as a Swiss legal requirement that users be notified promptly of such actions. 

Is China suffering from Russia’s Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) envy? I ask and David Kris answers: It sure looks that way, as China has begun trying to rally Chinese in America to support Chinese government positions on things like the origin of COVID. So far, China’s record of success is as dismal as the GRU’s but I argue that it poses a bigger problem for the body politic and Chinese American interest groups.

Who’d have guessed? Turns out that the EU’s always-flakey General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) provision against allowing automated decision making that affects people isn’t just a charming nostalgia act; it’s yet another reason for Europe to be left behind in the technology race. Jamil reports on a high-powered UK task force recommendation that the Brits dump the provision in order to allow for the growth of an AI industry.

David and I debate the meaning of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro banning social networks from removing political posts.

And in a few quick hits:

• I praise the Biden administration (faintly) for finally kicking off serious negotiations with the EU about transatlantic data transfer.
• Dmitri dissects the undiplomatic speech of China’s ambassador to the U.S.
• David downloads the inside poop on smart toilets. Among other things, they’ll be identifying us with, uh, let’s just call it the opposite of facial recognition. 
• And Dmitri offers a solution for the dual European Community encryption story.

And more!

Download the 374th Episode (mp3) 

You can subscribe to The Cyberlaw Podcast using iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, Pocket Casts, or our RSS feed. As always, The Cyberlaw Podcast is open to feedback. Be sure to engage with @stewartbaker on Twitter. Send your questions, comments, and suggestions for topics or interviewees to [email protected]. Remember: If your suggested guest appears on the show, we will send you a highly coveted Cyberlaw Podcast mug!

The views expressed in this podcast are those of the speakers and do not reflect the opinions of their institutions, clients, friends, families, or pets.

Back at last from hiatus, the podcast finds a host of hot issues to cover. Matthew Heiman walks us through all the ways that China and the U.S. found to get in each other’s way on technology. China’s new data security and privacy laws take effect this fall, and in keeping with a longstanding theme of the podcast—that privacy law is mostly about protecting the privilege of the powerful—we muse on the ways that legal innovations in the West have empowered China’s rulers. The SEC is tightening the screws on Chinese companies that want to list on American exchanges. Meanwhile, SenseTime is going forward with a $2 billion IPO in Hong Kong despite being subject to the stiffest possible Commerce Department sanctions. Talk about decoupling!

In Washington, remarkably, a bipartisan breach notification law is moving “We Can’t Run a Twelfth-Century Regime Without WhatsApp!” through both House and Senate. Michael Ellis explains the unorthodox (but hardly unprecedented) path the law is likely to take—a “preconference” followed by attachment to the defense authorization bill scheduled to pass this fall. 

I ask Brian Egan for the tech fallout from the fall of the U.S.-backed regime in Afghanistan. All things considered, it’s modest. Despite hand-wringing over data left behind, that data may not be really accessible. Google isn’t likely to turn over government emails to the new regime, if only because US sanctions make that legally risky. The Taliban’s use of WhatsApp is likely to suffer from the same sanctions barrier.  I predict a Taliban complaint that it’s being forced to run a thirteenth century regime with twelfth century technology.

Meanwhile, Texas Republicans are on a roll, as Democrats forced to return to the State House sit on their hands. They’ve adopted a creative and aggressive antiabortion law that has proven a challenge to tech companies, which responded by canceling tech services for pro-life groups and promising to defend gig workers who are caught up in litigation. Texas has kept pace, adopting a bill that limits Silicon Valley censorship of political speech; it raises many of the same issues as the Florida statute, but without the embarrassing prostration before the Disney theme park empire. I ask whether Texas could have used the same tactics for its interpretation of Section 230 that it used in the abortion bill—authorizing private suits but not government enforcement. Such tactics work when there is a real possibility that the Supreme Court will overturn some settled circuit rulings, and section 230 is ripe for exactly that.

Matthew Heiman and I debate whether the Justice Department’s dropping of several Chinese visa fraud cases heralds a retrenchment in the department’s China Initiative.

Michael and I dig into the Apple decision to alienate the Guardians of Privacy in an effort to do something about child sex abuse material on iPhones—and Apple’s recent decision to alienate the rest of the country by casting doubt on whether it would ever do something about child sex abuse material on its phones.

Finally, in quick hits, Brian doubts the significance of claims that the Israeli government is launching an investigation of  NSO Group over spyware abuse. Michael picks apart the Cyberspace Solarium Commission’s report card on Congress’s progress implementing its recommendations. And Brian highlights the UK’s new and much tougher version of CFIUS, the National Security and Investment Act 2021. I turn that into career advice for our listeners.

And more!

Download the 373rd Episode (mp3)

You can subscribe to The Cyberlaw Podcast using iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, Pocket Casts, or our RSS feed. As always, The Cyberlaw Podcast is open to feedback. Be sure to engage with @stewartbaker on Twitter. Send your questions, comments, and suggestions for topics or interviewees to [email protected]. Remember: If your suggested guest appears on the show, we will send you a highly coveted Cyberlaw Podcast mug!

The views expressed in this podcast are those of the speakers and do not reflect the opinions of their institutions, clients, friends, families, or pets.

The Biden administration’s effort to counter ransomware may not be especially creative, but it is comprehensive. The administration is pushing all the standard buttons on the interagency dashboard, including the usual high-level task force and a $10 million reward program (but not including hackback authority for victims, despite headlines suggesting otherwise). And all the noise seems to be having some effect, as the RE ransomware gang's web sites have mysteriously shut down.

Our interview is with Josh Steinman, who served as the National Security Council’s Cybersecurity Senior Director for the entire Trump administration. He offers his perspective on the issues and the personalities that drove cybersecurity policy in those chaotic years. As a bonus, Josh and I dig into his public effort to find a suitable startup, an effort we have to cut short as I start getting too close to one of the more promising possibilities.

Nick Weaver reminds us (in song, no less) that the government’s efforts to stop scourges like Trickbot have a distinct whiff of Whack-a-Mole, and the same may be true of REvil.

Maury Shenk covers the Biden administration’s belated but well-coordinated international response to China’s irresponsible Microsoft Exchange hack, including the surprising revelation that China may be back to hacking like it’s 1999—relying on criminal hackers to serve the government’s ends.

In other China news, Maury Shenk and Pete Jeydel catalog the many ways that the current regime is demonstrating its determination to bring China’s tech sector to heel. It’s punishing Didi in particular for doing a U.S. IPO despite go-slow signals from Beijing. It’s imposing cybersecurity reviews on other companies that IPO outside China.  And it seems to be pressing for competition concessions that the big tech companies would have successfully resisted a few years ago.

It was a big week for state-sponsored attacks on secure communications. Nick and I dig in the FBI and Australian federal police coup in selling ANOM phones to criminal gangs. Previewing an article for Lawfare, I argue that the Australian police may have to answer tough questions about whether their legal authority for the phone’s architecture really avoided introducing a systemic weakness into the phone’s security.

Law enforcement agencies around the world could face even tougher questions if they’ve been relying on NSO or Candiru, Israeli firms that compromise mobile phones for governments. Both firms have been on the receiving end of harsh forensics analyses from Amnesty International and Citizen Lab. Nick thinks the highly specific and centralized target logs are particularly a problem for NSO’s claims that it doesn’t actually know the details of how its malware is deployed.

Pete Jeydel tells us that the administration is learning to walk and chew gum on cybersecurity at the same time. While coordinating pushes on Chinese and Russian hacks, it also managed to get big chunks of the government to turn in their federal cybersecurity homework on time. Pete talks us through one of those assignments, the NTIA’s paper setting minimum elements for a Software Bill of Materials.

It wouldn’t be the Cyberlaw Podcast without a brief rant on content moderation. The Surgeon General claimed this week that “Misinformation takes away our freedom to make informed decisions about our health.” He didn’t say that administration censorship would give us our freedom back, but that seems to be the administration’s confident view, as the President, no less, accuses Facebook of “killing people” by not jumping more quickly to toe the CDC’s official line.

And if you thought it would stop with social media, think again.  The White House is complaining that telecom carriers also should be screening text messages that are hostile to vaccinations.

Finally, just to show that the world has truly turned upside down, Maury reminds me that a German—German!—court has fined American social media for too enthusiastically censoring a lockdown protest video.

Pete tells us what’s in the new Colorado privacy bill. Short version: it joins Virginia’s in some of hosing down California’s excesses.

And in short takes:

• Maury explains Vietnam's version of China’s fifty-cent army.

• Nick explains why Psiphon is a better tool for evading Cuban censorship that the sleaze-infested Tor system.
• Maury updates me on the European Parliament LIBE committee’s latest proposal for accepting the U.S. intelligence community’s transatlantic surrender on data flows.
• And Pete tells us that the Securities and Exchange Commission may finally be putting the screws to companies that have been lax about reporting breaches to their investors.

And more!

Download the 371st Episode (mp3)  

You can subscribe to The Cyberlaw Podcast using iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, Pocket Casts, or our RSS feed. As always, The Cyberlaw Podcast is open to feedback. Be sure to engage with @stewartbaker on Twitter. Send your questions, comments, and suggestions for topics or interviewees to [email protected]. Remember: If your suggested guest appears on the show, we will send you a highly coveted Cyberlaw Podcast mug!

The views expressed in this podcast are those of the speakers and do not reflect the opinions of their institutions, clients, friends, families, or pets

We begin the episode with the Biden administration’s options for responding to continued Russian ransomware outrages. Dmitri Alperovitch reprises his advice in the Washington Post that Putin will only respond to strength and U.S. pressure. I agree but raise the question whether the U.S. has the tools to enforce another set of alleged red lines, given Putin’s enthusiasm and talent for crossing them. If jumping U.S. red lines were an Olympic sport, Russia would have retired the gold by now. Dmitri reminds us that Russian cooperation against cybercrime remains a mirage. He also urges that we keep the focus on ransomware and not the more recent attempt to hack the Republican National Committee.

The Biden White House has been busy this week, or at least Tim Wu has. When Wu took a White House job as special assistant to the president for technology and competition policy, some might have wondered why he did it. Now, Gus Hurwitz only after giving child abusers a six-month holiday from scrutiny tells us, it looks as though he was given carte blanche to turn his recent think tank paper into an executive order. Gus: Biden targets Big Tech in sweeping new executive order cracking down on anti-competitive practices. It’s a kitchen sink full of proposals, Mark MacCarthy notes, most of them more focused on regulation than competition. That observation leads to a historical diversion to the way Brandeisian competition policy aimed at smaller competitors and ended by creating bigger regulatory agencies and bigger companies to match.

We had to cover Donald Trump’s class actions against Twitter, Facebook, and Google, but if the time we devoted to the lawsuits was proportionate to their prospects for success, we’d have stopped talking in the first five seconds.  

Mark gives more time to a House Republican leadership plan to break up Big Tech and stop censorship. But the plan (or, to be fair, the sketch) is hardly a dramatic rebuke to Silicon Valley—and despite that isn’t likely to get far. Divisions in both parties’ House caucuses now seem likely to doom any legislative move against Big Tech in this Congress.

The most interesting tech and policy story of the week is the Didi IPO in the U.S., and the harsh reaction to it in Beijing. Dmitri tells us that the government has banned new distributions of Didi’s ride-sharing app and opened a variety of punitive regulatory investigations into the company. This has dropped Didi’s stock price, punishing the U.S. investors who likely pressed Didi to launch the IPO despite negative signals from Beijing.

Meanwhile, more trouble looms for the tech giant, as Senate conservatives object to Didi benefiting from U.S. investment and China makes clear that Didi will not be allowed to provide the data needed to comply with U.S. stock exchange rules.

Mark and Gus explain why 37 U.S. states are taking Google to court over its Play Store rules and why, paradoxically, Google’s light hand in the Play store could expose it more to antitrust liability than Apple’s famously iron-fisted rule.

Dmitri notes the hand-wringing over the rise of autonomous drone weapons but dismisses the notion that there’s something uniquely new or bad about the weapons (we’ve had autonomous, or at least automatic, submarine weapons, he reminds us, since the invention of naval mines in the 14th century).

In quick hits, Gus and Dmitri offer dueling perspectives on the Pentagon’s proposal to cancel and subdivide the big DOD cloud contract.

Gus tells us about the other Fortnite lawsuit against Apple over it app policy; this one is in Australia and was recently revived.

As I suspected, Tucker Carlson has pretty much drained the drama from his tale of having his communications intercepted by NSA. Turns out he’s been seeking an interview with Putin. And no one should be surprised that the NSA might want to listen to Putin.

The Indian government is telling its courts that Twitter has lost its 230-style liability protection in that country. As a result, it looks as though Twitter is rushing to comply with Indian law requirements that it has blown off so far. Still, the best part of the story is Twitter’s appointment of a “grievance officer.” Really, what could be more Silicon Valley Woke? I predict it’s only a matter of months before the whole Valley fills with Chief Grievance Officers, after which the Biden administration will appoint one for the Executive Branch.

And, finally, I give the EU Parliament credit for doing the right thing in passing legislation that lets companies look for child abuse on their platforms. Readers may remember that the problem was EU privacy rules that threatened to end monitoring for abuse all around the world. To make sure we remembered that this is still the same feckless EU Parliament as always, the new authority was grudgingly adopted only after giving child abusers a six-month holiday from scrutiny. It was also limited to three years, after which the Parliament seems to think that efforts to stop the sexual abuse of children will no longer be needed.

And More!                                                                                                                                  

Download the 370th Episode (mp3)  

You can subscribe to The Cyberlaw Podcast using iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, Pocket Casts, or our RSS feed. As always, The Cyberlaw Podcast is open to feedback. Be sure to engage with @stewartbaker on Twitter. Send your questions, comments, and suggestions for topics or interviewees to [email protected]. Remember: If your suggested guest appears on the show, we will send you a highly coveted Cyberlaw Podcast mug!

The views expressed in this podcast are those of the speakers and do not reflect the opinions of their institutions, clients, friends, families, or pets.

We begin the episode with a review of the massive Kaseya ransomware attack.

Dave Aitel digs into the technical aspects while Paul Rosenzweig and Matthew Heiman explore the policy and political  implications. But either way, the news is bad.

Then we come to the Florida “deplatforming” law, which a Clinton appointee dispatched in a cursory opinion last week. I’ve been in a small minority who thinks the law, far from being a joke, is likely to survive (at least in part) if it reaches the Supreme Court. Paul challenges me to put my money where my mouth is. Details to be worked out, but if a portion of the law survives in the top court, Paul will be sending a thousand bucks to Trumpista nonprofit. If not, I’ll likely be sending my money to the ACLU.

Surprisingly, our commentators mostly agree that both NSA and Tucker Carlson could be telling the truth, despite the insistence of their partisans that the other side must be lying. NSA gets unaccustomed praise for its … wait for it … rapid and PR-savvy response. That’s got to be a first.

 Paul and I conclude that Maine, having passed in haste the strongest state facial recognition ban yet, will likely find itself repenting at leisure. 

Matthew decodes Margrethe Vestager’s warning to Apple against using privacy, security to limit competition.

And I mock Apple for claiming to protect privacy while making employees wear body cams to preserve the element of surprise at the next Apple product unveiling. Not to mention the 2-billion-person asterisk attached to Apple’s commitment to privacy.

Dave praises NSA for its stewardship of a popular open source reverse engineering tool, Ghidra.

And everyone has a view about cops using YouTube’s crappy artificial intelligence takedown engine to keep people from posting videos of their conversations with cops. 

And more!

Download the 369th Episode (mp3) 

You can subscribe to The Cyberlaw Podcast using iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, Pocket Casts, or our RSS feed. As always, The Cyberlaw Podcast is open to feedback. Be sure to engage with @stewartbaker on Twitter. Send your questions, comments, and suggestions for topics or interviewees to [email protected]. Remember: If your suggested guest appears on the show, we will send you a highly coveted Cyberlaw Podcast mug!

The views expressed in this podcast are those of the speakers and do not reflect the opinions of their institutions, clients, friends, families, or pets

This episode offers an economical overview of the six antitrust reform bills reported out of the House Judiciary Committee last week. Michael Weiner and Mark MacCarthy give us the top line for all six (though only four would make substantial new policy). We then turn quickly to the odd-couple alliances supporting and opposing the bills, including my brief cameo appearance, in Rep. Jim Jordan’s opposition, on the gratifying ground (ok, among others) that Microsoft had never explained its suppression of my recent LinkedIn post. On the whole, I think Rep. Jordan is right; there’s very little in these bills that will encourage a diversity of viewpoints on social media or among its “trust and safety” bureaucrats.

Nick Weaver trashes the FBI for its prosecution of AnMing Hu. I’m more sympathetic, but neither of us thinks this will end well for the bureau or the China Initiative.

Adam Candeub makes his second appearance and does a fine job unpacking three recent decisions on the scope of Section 230. The short version: Facebook only partly beat the rap for sex trafficking in the Texas Supreme Court; SnapChat got its head handed to it in the speed filter case; and all the Socials won but faced persuasive dissents in a case over assistance to terrorist groups.

The long version: Silicon Valley has sold the courts a bill of goods on Section 230 for reasons that sounded good when the Internet was shiny and democratic and new. Now that disillusion has set in, the sweeping subsidy conferred by the courts is looking a lot less plausible. The wheels aren’t coming off Section 230 yet, but the paint is peeling, and Big Tech’s failure to get their reading of the law blessed by the Supreme Court ten years ago is going to cost them—mainly because their reading is inconsistent with some basic rules of statutory interpretation.

Nick and I engage on the torture indictments of executives who sold internet wiretapping capabilities to the Qaddafi regime.

Mark is unable to hose down my rant over Canada’s bone-stupid effort to impose Canadian content quotas on the internet and to write an online hate speech law of monumental vagueness. 

And in closing, Nick and I bid an appropriately raucous and conflicted adieu to the Hunter Thompson of Cybersecurity:  John McAfee.

And more!

Download the 368th Episode (mp3)

You can subscribe to The Cyberlaw Podcast using iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, Pocket Casts, or our RSS feed. As always, The Cyberlaw Podcast is open to feedback. Be sure to engage with @stewartbaker on Twitter. Send your questions, comments, and suggestions for topics or interviewees to [email protected]. Remember: If your suggested guest appears on the show, we will send you a highly coveted Cyberlaw Podcast mug!

The views expressed in this podcast are those of the speakers and do not reflect the opinions of their institutions, clients, friends, families, or pets.

We could not avoid President Biden’s trip to Europe this week. He made news (but only a little progress) on cybersecurity at every stop. Nick Weaver and I dig into the President’s consultations with Vladimir Putin, which featured veiled threats and a modest agreement on some sort of continuing consultations on protecting critical infrastructure.

Jordan Schneider sums up the G7 and NATO statements aligning with U.S. criticisms of China.

And our newest contributor, Michael Ellis, critiques the EU-U.S. consultations on technology, which featured a complete lack of U.S. resolve on getting an outcome on transatlantic data flows that would preserve US intelligence capabilities.

Michael also recaps the latest fallout from the Colonial Pipeline ransomware shutdown—new regulatory initiatives from TSA and a lot of bipartisan regulatory proposals in Congress.

I note the very unusual (or, maybe, all too usual) meaning given to “bipartisanship” on Capitol Hill.

Nick is not exactly mourning the multiple hits now being suffered by ransomware insurers, from unexpected losses to the ultimate in concentrated loss – gangs that hack the insurer first and then systematically extort all its ransomware insurance customers.

Jordan sums up China’s new data security law. He suggests that, despite the popular reporting on the law, which emphasizes the government control narrative, the motive for the law may be closer to the motive for data protection laws in the West—consumer suspicion over how private data is being used. I’m less convinced, but we have a nice discussion of how bureaucratic imperatives and competition work in the Peoples Republic of China.

Michael and Nick dig into the White Paper on FISA applications published by the outgoing chairman of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. Notably, in my mind, the White Paper does not cast doubt on the Justice Department’s rebuttal to a Justice Inspector General’s report suggesting that the FISA process is riddled with error. The paper also calls urgently for renewal of the expired FISA section 215 authority and suggests several constructive changes to the FISA paperwork flow.

In quick hits, Michael brings us up to date on the FCC’s contribution to technology decoupling from China: a unanimous vote to exclude Chinese companies from the U.S. telecom infrastructure and a Fifth Circuit decision upholding its decision to exclude Chinese companies from subsidized purchases by U.S. telecom carriers.  And Jordan reminds us just how much progress China has made in exploring space.

And more!

Download the 367th Episode (mp3)

You can subscribe to The Cyberlaw Podcast using iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, Pocket Casts, or our RSS feed. As always, The Cyberlaw Podcast is open to feedback. Be sure to engage with @stewartbaker on Twitter. Send your questions, comments, and suggestions for topics or interviewees to [email protected]. Remember: If your suggested guest appears on the show, we will send you a highly coveted Cyberlaw Podcast mug!

The views expressed in this podcast are those of the speakers and do not reflect the opinions of their institutions, clients, friends, families, or pets.

This week the Business Software Alliance issued a new report on AI bias. Jane Bambauer and I come to much the same conclusion: It is careful, well-written, and a policy catastrophe in the making. The main problem? It tries to turn one of the most divisive issues in American life into a problem to be solved by technology. Apparently because that has worked so well in areas like content suppression. In fact, I argue, the report will be seen by many, especially in the center and on the right, as an effort to impose proportional representation quotas by stealth in a host of places that have never been the objects of such policies before. Less controversial, but only a little, is the U.S. government’s attempt to make government data available for training more AI algorithms. Jane more or less persuades me that this effort too will end in tears or stasis. 

In cheerier news, the good guys got a couple of surprising wins this week. While encryption and bitcoin have posed a lot of problems for law enforcement in recent years, the FBI has responded with imagination and elan, at least if we can judge by two stories from last week. First, Nick Weaver takes us through the laugh-out-loud facts behind a, government-run encrypted phone for criminals complete with influencers, invitation-only membership, and nosebleed pricing to cement the phone’s exclusive status. Jane Bambauer unpacks some of the surprisingly complicated legal questions raised by the FBI’s creativity.

Paul Rosenzweig lays out the much more obscure facts underlying the FBI’s recovery of much of the ransom paid by Colonial Pipeline. There’s no doubt that the government surprised everyone by coming up with the private key controlling the bitcoin account. We’d like to celebrate the ingenuity behind the accomplishment, but the how it pulled it off, probably because it hopes to do the same thing again and can’t if it blows the secret. FBI isn’t actually explaining.

The Biden administration is again taking a shaky and impromptu Trump policy and giving it a sober interagency foundation.  This time it’s the TikTok and WeChat bans; these have been rescinded. But a new process has been put in place that could restore and even expand those bans in a matter of months. Paul and I disagree about whether the Biden administration will end up applying the Trump policy to TikTok or WeChat or to a much larger group of Chinese apps.

For comic relief, Nick regales us with Brian Krebs’s wacky story of the FSB’s weird and counterproductive attempt to secure communications to the FSB’s web site. 

Jane and I review the latest paper by Bruce Schneier (and Henry Farrell) on how to address the impact of technology on American democracy. We are not persuaded by its suggestion that our partisan divide can best be healed by more understanding, civility, and aggressive prosecutions of Republicans.

Finally, everyone confesses to some confusion about the claim that the Trump Justice Department breached norms in its criminal discovery motions that turned up records relating to prominent Democratic congressmen and at least one Trump administration official.

Best bet: this flap will turn out to be less interesting the more we learn. But I renew my appeal, this time aimed at outraged Democrats, for more statutory guardrails and safeguards against partisan misuse of national security authorities. Because that’s what we’ll need if we want to keep those authorities on the books.

And more!

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