The Cyberlaw Podcast

Okay, yes, I promised to take a hiatus after episode 500. Yet here it is a week later, and I'm releasing episode 501. Here's my excuse. I read and liked Dmitri Alperovitch's book, "World on the Brink: How America Can Beat China in the Race for the 21st Century." I told him I wanted to do an interview about it. Then the interview got pushed into late April because that's when the book is actually coming out. So sue me. I'm back on hiatus. The conversation in the episode begins with Dmitri's background in cybersecurity and geopolitics, beginning with his emigration from the Soviet Union as a child through the founding of Crowdstrike and becoming a founder of Silverado Policy Accelerator and an advisor to the Defense Department. Dmitri shares his journey, including his early start in cryptography and his role in investigating the 2010 Chinese hack of Google and other companies, which he named Operation Aurora. Dmitri opens his book with a chillingly realistic scenario of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. He explains that this is not merely a hypothetical exercise, but a well-researched depiction based on his extensive discussions with Taiwanese leadership, military experts, and his own analysis of the terrain. Then, we dive into the main themes of his book -- which is how to prevent his scenario from coming true. Dmitri stresses the similarities and differences between the US-Soviet Cold War and what he sees as Cold War II between the U.S. and China. He argues that, like Cold War I, Cold War II will require a comprehensive strategy, leveraging military, economic, diplomatic, and technological deterrence. Dmitri also highlights the structural economic problems facing China, such as the middle-income trap and a looming population collapse. Despite these challenges, he stresses that the U.S. will face tough decisions as it seeks to deter conflict with China while maintaining its other global obligations. We talk about diversifying critical supply chains away from China and slowing China's technological progress in areas like semiconductors. This will require continuing collaboration with allies like Japan and the Netherlands to restrict China's access to advanced chip-making equipment. Finally, I note the remarkable role played in Cold War I by Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, two influential national security advisers who were also first-generation immigrants. I ask whether it's too late to nominate Dmitri to play the same role in Cold War II. You heard it here first!

This episode is notable not just for cyberlaw commentary, but for its imminent disappearance from these pages and from podcast playlists everywhere. Having promised to take stock of the podcast when it reached episode 500, I've decided that I, the podcast, and the listeners all deserve a break. So I'll be taking one after the next episode. No final decisions have been made, so don't delete your subscription, but don't expect a new episode any time soon. It's been a great run, from the dawn of the podcast age, through the ad-fueled podcast boom, which I manfully resisted, to the market correction that's still under way. It was a pleasure to engage with listeners from all over the world. Yes, even the EU! As they say, in the podcast age, everyone is famous for fifteen people. That's certainly been true for me, and I'll always be grateful for your support – not to mention for all the great contributors who've joined the podcast over the years Back to cyberlaw, there are a surprising number of people arguing that there's no reason to worry about existential and catastrophic risks from proliferating or runaway AI risks. Some of that is people seeking clever takes; a lot of it is ideological, driven by fear that worrying about the end of the world will distract attention from the dire but unidentified dangers of face recognition. One useful antidote is the Gladstone Report, written for the State Department's export control agency. David Kris gives an overview of the report for this episode of the Cyberlaw Podcast. The report explains the dynamic, and some of the evidence, behind all the doom-saying, a discussion that is more persuasive than its prescriptions for regulation. Speaking of the dire but unidentified dangers of face recognition, Paul Stephan and I unpack a New York Times piece saying that Israel is using face recognition in its Gaza conflict. Actually, we don't so much unpack it as turn it over and shake it, only to discover it's largely empty. Apparently the editors of the NYT thought that tying face recognition to Israel and Gaza was all we needed to understand that the technology is evil. More interesting is the story arguing that the National Security Agency, traditionally at the forefront of computers and national security, may have to sit out the AI revolution. The reason, David tells us, is that NSA's access to mass quantities of data for training is complicated by rules and traditions against intelligence agencies accessing data about Americans. And there are few training databases not contaminated with data about and by Americans. While we're feeling sorry for the intelligence community as it struggles with new technology, Paul notes that Yahoo News has assembled a long analysis of all the ways that personalized technology is making undercover operations impossible for CIA and FBI alike. Michael Ellis weighs in with a review of a report by the Foundation for the Defence of Democracies on the need for a US Cyber Force to man, train, and equip fighting nerds for Cyber Command. It's a bit of an inside baseball solution, heavy on organizational boxology, but we're both persuaded that the current system for attracting and retaining cyberwarriors is not working. In the spirit of "Yes, Minister," we must do something, and this is something. In that same spirit, it's fair to say that the latest Senate Judiciary proposal for a "compromise" 702 renewal bill is nothing much – a largely phony compromise chock full of ideological baggage. David Kris and I are unimpressed, and surprised at how muted the Biden administration has been in trying to wrangle the Democratic Senate into producing a workable bill. Paul and Michael review the latest trouble for TikTok – a likely FTC lawsuit over privacy. Michael and I puzzle over the stories claiming that Meta may have "wiretapped" Snapchat analytic data. It comes from a trial lawyer suing Meta, and there are a lot of unanswered questions, such as whether users consented to the collection of the data. In the end, we can't help thinking that if Meta had 41 of its lawyers review the project, they found a way to avoid wiretapping liability. The most intriguing story of the week is the complex and surprising three- or four-cornered fight in northern Myanmar over hundreds of thousands of women trapped in call centers to run romance and pig-butchering scams. Angry that many of the women and many victims are Chinese, China fostered a warlord's attack on the call centers that freed many women, and deeply embarrassed the current Myanmar ruling junta and its warlord allies, who'd been running the scams. And we thought our southern border was a mess! And in quick hits: · Elon Musk's X Corp has lost lawsuit against the left-wing smear artists at CCDH · AT&T has lost millions of customer records in a data breach · Utah has passed an: AI regulation bill · The US is still in the cyber sanctions business, tagging several Russian fintech firms and a collection of Chinese state hackers. · The SEC isn't done investigating SolarWinds; now it's investigating companies harmed by the supply chain attack. · Apple's reluctant compliance with EU law has attracted the expected EU investigation of its app store policies App Store changes rejected: Apple could be fined 10% of global turnover · And in a story that will send chills through large parts of the financial and tech elite, it turns out that Jeffrey Epstein's visitor records didn't die with him. Thanks to geolocation adtech, they can be reconstructed.

The Supreme Court is getting a heavy serving of first amendment social media cases. Gus Hurwitz covers two that made the news last week. In the first, Justice Barrett spoke for a unanimous court in spelling out the very factbound rules that determine when a public official may use a platform's tools to suppress critics posting on his or her social media page. Gus and I agree that this might mean a lot of litigation, unless public officials wise up and simply follow the Court's broad hint: If you don't want your page to be treated as official, simply say up top that it isn't official. The second social media case making news was being argued as we recorded. Murthy v. Missouri appealed a broad injunction against the US government pressuring social media companies to take down posts the government disagrees with. The Court was plainly struggling with a host of justiciability issues and a factual record that the government challenged vigorously. If the Court reaches the merits, it will likely address the question of when encouraging the suppression of particular speech slides into coerced censorship. Gus and Jeffrey Atik review the week's biggest news – the House has passed a bill to force the divestment of TikTok, despite the outcry of millions of influencers. Whether the Senate will be quick to follow suit is deeply uncertain. Melanie Teplinsky covers the news that data about Americans' driving habits is increasingly being sent to insurance companies to help them adjust their rates. Melanie also describes the FCC's new Cyber Trust Mark for IOT devices. Like the Commission, our commentators think this is a good idea. Gus takes us back to more contest territory: What should be done about the use of technology to generate fake pictures, especially nude fake pictures. We also touch on a UK debate about a snippet of audio that many believe is a fake meant to embarrass a British Labour politician. Gus tells us the latest news from the SVR's compromise of a Microsoft network. This leads us to a meditation on the unintended consequences of the SEC's new cyber incident reporting requirements. Jeffrey explains the bitter conflict over app store sales between Apple and Epic games. Melanie outlines a possible solution to the lack of cybersecurity standards (not to mention a lack of cybersecurity) in water systems. It's interesting but it's too early to judge its chances of being adopted. Melanie also tells us why JetBrains and Rapid7 have been fighting over "silent patching." Finally, Gus and I dig into Meta's high-stakes fight with the FTC, and the rough reception it got from a DC district court.

Kemba Walden and Stewart revisit the National Cybersecurity Strategy a year later. Sultan Meghji examines the ransomware attack on Change Healthcare and its consequences. Brandon Pugh reminds us that even large companies like Google are not immune to having their intellectual property stolen. The group conducts a thorough analysis of a "public option" model for AI development. Brandon discusses the latest developments in personal data and child online protection. Lastly, Stewart inquires about Kemba's new position at Paladin Global Institute, following her departure from the role of Acting National Cyber Director.

We begin this episode with Paul Rosenzweig describing major progress in teaching AI models to do text-to-speech conversions. Amazon flagged its new model as having "emergent" capabilities in handling what had been serious problems – things like speaking with emotion, or conveying foreign phrases. The key is the size of the training set, but Amazon was able to spot the point at which more data led to unexpected skills. This leads Paul and me to speculate that training AI models to perform certain tasks eventually leads the model to learn "generalization" of its skills. If so, the more we train AI on a variety of tasks – chat, text to speech, text to video, and the like – the better AI will get at learning new tasks, as generalization becomes part of its core skill set. It's lawyers holding forth on the frontiers of technology, so take it with a grain of salt. Cristin Flynn Goodwin and Paul Stephan join Paul Rosenzweig to provide an update on Volt Typhoon, the Chinese APT that is littering Western networks with the equivalent of logical land mines. Actually, it's not so much an update on Volt Typhoon, which seems to be aggressively pursuing its strategy, as on the hyperventilating Western reaction to Volt Typhoon. There's no doubt that China is playing with fire, and that the United States and other cyber powers should be liberally sowing similar weapons in Chinese networks. But the public measures adopted by the West do not seem likely to effectively defeat or deter China's strategy. The group is less impressed by the New York Times' claim that China is pursuing a dangerous electoral influence campaign on U.S. social media platforms. The Russians do it better, Paul Stephan says, and even they don't do it well, I argue. Paul Rosenzweig reviews the House China Committee report alleging a link between U.S. venture capital firms and Chinese human rights abuses. We agree that Silicon Valley VCs have paid too little attention to how their investments could undermine the system on which their billions rest, a state of affairs not likely to last much longer. Paul Stephan and Cristin bring us up to date on U.S. efforts to disrupt Chinese and Russian hacking operations. We will be eagerly waiting for resolution of the European fight over Facebook's subscription fee and the move by websites to "Pay or Consent" privacy terms fight. I predict that Eurocrats' hypocrisy will be tested by an effort to rule for elite European media sites, which already embrace "Pay or Consent" while ruling against Facebook. Paul Rosenzweig is confident that European hypocrisy is up to the task. Cristin and I explore the latest White House enthusiasm for software security liability. Paul Stephan explains the flap over a UN cybercrime treaty, which is and should be stalled in Turtle Bay for the next decade or more. Cristin also covers a detailed new Google TAG report on commercial spyware. And in quick hits, House Republicans tried and failed to find common ground on renewal of FISA Section 702 I recommend Goody-2, the 'World's 'Most Responsible' AI Chatbot Dechert has settled a wealthy businessman's lawsuit claiming that the law firm hacked his computer Imran Khan is using AI to make impressively realistic speeches about his performance in Pakistani elections The Kids Online Safety Act secured sixty votes in the U.S. Senate, but whether the House will act on the bill remains to be seen Download 492nd 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 CyberlawPodcast@gmail.com. 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.

It was a week of serious cybersecurity incidents paired with unimpressive responses. As Melanie Teplinsky reminds us, the U.S. government has been agitated for months about China's apparent strategic decision to hold U.S. infrastructure hostage to cyberattack in a crisis. Now the government has struck back at Volt Typhoon, the Chinese threat actor pursuing that strategy. It claimed recently to have disrupted a Volt Typhoon botnet by taking over a batch of compromised routers. Andrew Adams explains how the takeover was managed through the court system. It was a lot of work, and there is reason to doubt the effectiveness of the effort. The compromised routers can be re-compromised if they are turned off and on again. And the only ones that were fixed by the U.S. seizure are within U.S. jurisdiction, leaving open the possibility of DDOS attacks from abroad. And, really, how vulnerable is our critical infrastructure to DDOS attack? I argue that there's a serious disconnect between the government's hair-on-fire talk about Volt Typhoon and its business-as-usual response. Speaking of cyberstuff we could be overestimating, Taiwan just had an election that China cared a lot about. According to one detailed report, China threw a lot of cyber at Taiwanese voters without making much of an impression. Richard Stiennon and I mix it up over whether China would do better in trying to influence the 2024 outcome here. While we're covering humdrum responses to cyberattacks, Melanie explains U.S. sanctions on Iranian military hackers for their hack of U.S. water systems. For comic relief, Richard lays out the latest drama around the EU AI Act, now being amended in a series of backroom deals and informal promises. I predict that the effort to pile incoherent provisions on top of anti-American protectionism will not end in a GDPR-style triumph for Europe, whose market is now small enough for AI companies to ignore if the regulatory heat is turned up arbitrarily. The U.S. is not the only player whose response to cyberintrusions is looking inadequate this week. Richard explains Microsoft's recent disclosure of a Midnight Blizzard attack on the company and a number of its customers. The company's obscure explanation of how its technology contributed to the attack and, worse, its effort to turn the disaster into an upsell opportunity earned Microsoft a patented Alex Stamos spanking. Andrew explains the recent Justice Department charges against three people who facilitated the big $400m FTX hack that coincided with the exchange's collapse. Does that mean it wasn't an inside job? Not so fast, Andrew cautions. The government didn't recover the $400m, and it isn't claiming the three SIM-swappers it has charged are the only conspirators. Melanie explains why we've seen a sudden surge in state privacy legislation. It turns out that industry has stopped fighting the idea of state privacy laws and is now selling a light-touch model law that skips things like private rights of action. I give a lick and a promise to a "privacy" regulation now being pursued by CFPB for consumer financial information. I put privacy in quotes, because it's really an opportunity to create a whole new market for data that will assure better data management while breaking up the advantage of incumbents' big data holdings. Bruce Schneier likes the idea. So do I, in principle, except that it sounds like a massive re-engineering of a big industry by technocrats who may not be quite as smart as they think they are. Bruce, if you want to come on the podcast to explain the whole thing, send me an email! Spies are notoriously nasty, and often petty, but surely the nastiest and pettiest of American spies, Joshua Schulte, was sentenced to 40 years in prison last week. Andrew has the details. There may be some good news on the ransomware front. More victims are refusing to pay. Melanie, Richard, and I explore ways to keep that trend going. I continue to agitate for consideration of a tax on ransom payments. I also flag a few new tech regulatory measures likely to come down the pike in the next few months. I predict that the FCC will use the TCPA to declare the use of AI-generated voices in robocalls illegal. And Amazon is likely to find itself held liable for the safety of products sold by third parties on the Amazon platform. Finally, a few quick hits: Amazon has abandoned its iRobot acquisition, thanks to EU "competition" regulators, with the likely result that iRobot will cease competing David Kahn, who taught us all the romance of cryptology, has died at 93 Air Force Lt. Gen. Timothy Haugh is taking over Cyber Command and NSA from Gen. Nakasone And for those suffering from Silicon Valley Envy (lookin' at you, Brussels), 23andMe offers a small corrective. The company is now a rare "reverse unicorn" – having fallen in value from $6 Billion to practically nothing Download 490th 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 CyberlawPodcast@gmail.com. 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 Supreme Court heard argument last week in two cases seeking to overturn the Chevron doctrine that defers to administrative agencies in interpreting the statutes that they administer. The cases have nothing to do with cybersecurity, but Adam Hickey thinks they're almost certain to have a big effect on cybersecurity policy. That's because Chevron is going to take a beating, if it survives at all. That means it will be much tougher to repurpose existing law to deal with new regulatory problems. Given how little serious cybersecurity legislation has been passed in recent years, any new cybersecurity regulation is bound to require some stretching of existing law – and to be easier to challenge. Case in point: Even without a new look at Chevron, the EPA was balked in court when it tried to stretch its authorities to cover cybersecurity rules for water companies. Now, Kurt Sanger tells us, EPA, FBI, and CISA have combined to release cybersecurity guidance for the water sector. The guidance is pretty generic; and there's no reason to think that underfunded water companies will actually take it to heart. Given Iran's interest in causing aggravation and maybe worse in that sector, Congress is almost certainly going to feel pressure to act on the problem. CISA's emergency cybersecurity directives to federal agencies are a library of flaws that are already being exploited. As Adam points out, what's especially worrying is how quickly patches are being turned into attacks and deployed. I wonder how sustainable the current patch system will prove to be. In fact, it's already unsustainable; we just don't have anything to replace it. The good news is that the Russians have been surprisingly bad at turning flaws into serious infrastructure problems even for a wartime enemy like Ukraine. Additional information about Russia's attack on Ukraine's largest telecom provider suggests that the cost to get infrastructure back was less than the competitive harm the carrier suffered in trying to win its customers back. Companies are starting to report breaches under the new, tougher SEC rule, and Microsoft is out of the gate early, Adam tells us. Russian hackers stole the company's corporate emails, it says, but it insists the breach wasn't material. I predict we'll see a lot of such hair splitting as companies adjust to the rule. If so, Adam predicts, we're going to be flooded with 8-Ks. Kurt notes recent FBI and CISA warnings about the national security threat posed by Chinese drones. The hard question is what's new in those warnings. A question about whether antitrust authorities might investigate DJI's enormous market share leads to another about the FTC's utter lack of interest in getting guidance from the executive branch when it wanders into the national security field. Case in point: After listing a boatload of "sensitive location data" that should not be sold, the FTC had nothing to say about the personal data of people serving on U.S. military bases. Nothing "sensitive" there, the FTC seems to think, at least not compared to homeless shelters and migrant camps. Michael Ellis takes us through Apple's embarrassing failure to protect users of its Airdrop feature. Adam is encouraged by a sign of maturity on the part of OpenAI, which has trimmed its overbroad rules on not assisting military projects. Apple, meanwhile, is living down to the worst Big Tech caricature in handling the complaints of app developers about its app store. Michael explains how Apple managed to beat 9 out of 10 claims brought by Epic and still ended up looking like the sorest of losers. Michael takes us inside a new U.S. surveillance court just for Europeans, but we end up worrying about the risk that the Obama administration will come back to make new law that constrains the Biden team. Adam explains yet another European Court of Justice decision on GDPR. This time, though, it's a European government in the dock. The result is the same, though: national security is pushed into a corner, and the data protection bureaucracy takes center stage. We end with the sad disclosure that, while bad cyber news will continue, cyber-enabled day drinking will not, as Uber announces the end of Drizly, its liquor delivery app. Download 488th 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 CyberlawPodcast@gmail.com. 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.

It's the last and probably longest Cyberlaw Podcast episode of 2023. To lead off, Megan Stifel takes us through a batch of stories about ways that AI, and especially AI trust and safety, manage to look remarkably fallible. Anthropic released a paper showing that race, gender, and age discrimination by AI models was real but could be dramatically reduced by instructing The Model to "really, really, really" avoid such discrimination. (Buried in the paper was the fact that the original, severe AI bias disfavored older white men, as did the residual bias that asking nicely didn't eliminate.) Bottom line from Anthropic seems to be, "Our technology is a really cool toy, but don't use if for anything that matters.") In keeping with that theme, Google's highly touted OpenAI competitor Gemini was release to mixed reviews when the model couldn't correctly identify recent Oscar winners or a French word with six letters (it offered "amour"). The good news was for people who hate AI's ham-handed political correctness; it turns out you can ask another AI model how to jailbreak your model, a request that can make the task go 25 times faster. This could be the week that determines the fate of FISA section 702, David Kris reports. It looks as though two bills will go to the House floor, and only one will survive. Judiciary's bill is a grudging renewal of 702 for a mere three years, full of procedures designed to cripple the program. The intelligence committee's bill beats the FBI around the head and shoulders but preserves the core of 702. David and I explore the "queen of the hill" procedure that will allow members to vote for either bill, both, or none, and will send to the Senate the version that gets the most votes. Gus Hurwitz looks at the FTC's last-ditch appeal to stop the Microsoft-Activision merger. The best case, he suspects, is that the appeal will be rejected without actually repudiating the pet theories of the FTC's hipster antitrust lawyers. Megan and I examine the latest HHS proposal to impose new cybersecurity requirements on hospitals. David, meanwhile, looks for possible motivations behind the FBI's procedures for companies who want help in delaying SEC cyber incident disclosures. Then Megan and I consider the tough new UK rules for establishing the age of online porn consumers. I think they'll hurt Pornhub's litigation campaign against states trying to regulate children's access to porn sites. The race to 5G is over, Gus notes, and it looks like even the winners lost. Faced with the threat of Chinese 5G domination and an industry sure that 5G was the key to the future, many companies and countries devoted massive investments to the technology, but it's now widely deployed and no one sees much benefit. There is more than one lesson here for industrial policy and the unpredictable way technologies disseminate. 23andme gets some time in the barrel, with Megan and I both dissing its "lawyerly" response to a history of data breaches – namely changing its terms of service it harder for customers to sue for data breaches. Gus reminds us that the Biden FCC only took office in that last month or two, and it is determined to catch up with the FTC in advancing foolish and doomed regulatory initiatives. This week's example, remarkably, isn't net neutrality. It's worse. The Commission is building a sweeping regulatory structure on an obscure section of the 2021 infrastructure act that calls for the FCC to "facilitate equal access to broadband internet access service...": Think we're hyperventilating? Read Commissioner Brendan Carr's eloquent takedown of the whole initiative. Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) has a been in his bonnet over government access to smartphone notifications. Megan and I do our best to understand his concern and how seriously to take it. Wrapping up, Gus offers a quick take on Meta's broadening attack on the constitutionality of the FTC's current structure. David takes satisfaction from the Justice Department's patient and successful pursuit of Russian Hacker Vladimir Dunaev for his role in creating TrickBot. Gus notes that South Korea's law imposing internet costs on content providers is no match for the law of supply and demand. Finally, in quick hits we cover: The guilty plea of the founder of a cryptocurrency exchange accused of money laundering. Rumors that the ALPHV ransomware site has been taken down by law enforcement IBM's long-term quantum computing research milestones The UK's antitrust throat-clearing about the OpenAI-Microsoft tie-up And Europe's low-on-details announcement of a deal on the world's first comprehensive AI rules Download 485th 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 CyberlawPodcast@gmail.com. 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 OpenAI corporate drama came to a sudden end last week. So sudden, in fact, that the pundits never quite figured out What It All Means. Jim Dempsey and Michael Nelson take us through some of the possibilities. It was all about AI accelerationists v. decelerationists. Or it was all about effective altruism. Or maybe it was Sam Altman's slippery ambition. Or perhaps a new AI breakthrough – a model that can actually do more math than the average American law student. The one thing that seems clear is that the winners include Sam Altman and Microsoft, while the losers include illusions about using corporate governance to engage in AI governance. The Google antitrust trial is over – kind of. Michael Weiner tells us that all the testimony and evidence has been gathered on whether Google is monopolizing search, but briefs and argument will take months more – followed by years more fighting about remedy if Google is found to have violated the antitrust laws. He sums up the issues in dispute and makes a bold prediction about the outcome, all in about ten minutes. Returning to AI, Jim and Michael Nelson dissect the latest position statement from Germany, France, and Italy. They see it as a repudiation of the increasingly kludgey AI Act pinballing its way through Brussels, and a big step in the direction of the "light touch" AI regulation that is mostly being adopted elsewhere around the globe. I suggest that the AI Act be redesignated the OBE Act in recognition of how thoroughly and frequently it's been overtaken by events. Meanwhile, cyberwar is posing an increasing threat to civil aviation. Michael Ellis covers the surprising ways in which GPS spoofing has begun to render even redundant air navigation tools unreliable. Iran and Israel come in for scrutiny. And it won't be long before Russia and Ukraine develop similarly disruptive drone and counterdrone technology. It turns out, Michael Ellis reports, that Russia is likely ahead of the U.S. in this war-changing technology. Jim brings us up to date on the latest cybersecurity amendments from New York's department of financial services. On the whole, they look incremental and mostly sensible. Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) is digging deep into his Golden Oldies collection, sending a letter to the White House expressing shock to have discovered a law enforcement data collection that the New York Times (and the rest of us) discovered in 2013. The program in question allows law enforcement to get call data but not content from AT&T with a subpoena. The only surprise is that AT&T has kept this data for much more than the industry-standard two or three years and that federal funds have helped pay for the storage. Michael Nelson, on his way to India for cyber policy talks, touts that nation's creative approach to the field, as highlighted in Carnegie's series on India and technology. He's less impressed by the UK's enthusiasm for massive new legislative initiatives on technology. I think this is Prime Minister Rishi Sunak trying to show that Brexit really did give the UK new running room to the right of Brussels on data protection and law enforcement authority. Download 483rd 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 CyberlawPodcast@gmail.com. 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.

That, at least, is what I hear from my VC friends in Silicon Valley. And they wouldn't get an argument this week from EU negotiators facing what looks like a third rewrite of the much-too -early AI Act. Mark MacCarthy explains that negotiations over an overhaul of the act demanded by France and Germany led to a walkout by EU parliamentarians. The cause? In their enthusiasm for screwing American AI companies, the drafters inadvertently screwed a French and a German AI aspirant Mark is also our featured author for an interview about his book, "Regulating Digital Industries: How Public Oversight Can Encourage Competition, Protect Privacy, and Ensure Free Speech" I offer to blurb it as "an entertaining, articulate and well-researched book that is egregiously wrong on almost every page." Mark promises that at least part of my blurb will make it to his website. I highly recommend it to Cyberlaw listeners who mostly disagree with me – a big market, I'm told. Kurt Sanger reports on what looks like another myth about Russian cyberwarriors – that they can't coordinate with kinetic attacks to produce a combined effect. Mandiant says that's exactly what Sandworm hackers did in Russia's most recent attack on Ukraine's grid. Adam Hickey, meanwhile, reports on a lawsuit over internet sex that drove an entire social media platform out of business. Meanwhile, Meta is getting beat up on the Hill and in the press for failing to protect teens from sexual and other harms. I ask the obvious question: Who the heck is trying to get naked pictures of Facebook's core demographic? Mark explains the latest EU rules on targeted political ads – which consist of several perfectly reasonable provisions combined with a couple designed to cut the heart out of online political advertising. Adam and I puzzle over why the FTC is telling the U.S. Copyright Office that AI companies are a bunch of pirates who need to be pulled up short. I point out that copyright is a multi-generational monopoly on written works. Maybe, I suggest, the FTC has finally combined its unfairness and its anti-monopoly authorities to protect copyright monopolists from the unfairness of Fair Use. Taking an indefensible legal position out of blind hatred for tech companies? Now that I think about it, that is kind of on-brand for Lina Khan's FTC. Adam and I disagree about how seriously to take press claims that AI generates images that are biased. I complain about the reverse: AI that keeps pretending that there are a lot of black and female judges on the European Court of Justice. Kurt and Adam reprise the risk to CISOs from the SEC's SolarWinds complaint – and all the dysfunctional things companies and CISOs will soon be doing to save themselves. In updates and quick hits: Adam and I flag some useful new reports from Congress on the disinformation excesses of 2020. We both regret the fact that those excesses now make it unlikely the U.S. will do much about foreign government attempts to influence the 2024 election. I mourn the fact that we won't be covering Susannah Gibson again. Gibson raised campaign funds by doing literally what most politicians only do metaphorically. She has, gone down to defeat in her Virginia legislative race. In Cyberlaw Podcast alumni news, Alex Stamos and Chris Krebs have sold their consulting firm to SentinelOne. They will only be allowed back on the podcast if they bring the Gulfstream. I also note that Congress is finally starting to put some bills to renew section 702 of FISA into the hopper. Unfortunately, the first such bill, a merger of left and right extremes called the Government Surveillance Reform Act, probably should have gone into the chipper instead. Download 481st 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 CyberlawPodcast@gmail.com. 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.

I take advantage of Scott Shapiro's participation in this episode of the Cyberlaw Podcast to interview him about his book, Fancy Bear Goes Phishing – The Dark History of the Information Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks. It's a remarkable tutorial on cybersecurity, told through stories that you'll probably think you already know until you see what Scott has found by digging into historical and legal records. We cover the Morris worm, the Paris Hilton hack, and the earliest Bulgarian virus writer's nemesis. Along the way, we share views about the refreshing emergence of a well-paid profession largely free of the credentialism that infects so much of the American economy. In keeping with the rest of the episode, I ask Bing Image Creator to generate alternative artwork for the book. In the news roundup, Michael Ellis walks us through the "sweeping"™ White House executive order on artificial intelligence. The tl;dr: the order may or may not actually have real impact on the field. The same can probably be said of the advice now being dispensed by AI's "godfathers."™ -- the keepers of the flame for AI existential risk who have urged that AI companies devote a third of their R&D budgets to AI safety and security and accept liability for serious harm. Scott and I puzzle over how dangerous AI can be when even the most advanced engines can only do multiplication successfully 85% of the time. Along the way, we evaluate methods for poisoning training data and their utility for helping starving artists get paid when their work is repurposed by AI. Speaking of AI regulation, Nick Weaver offers a real-life example: the California DMV's immediate suspension of Cruise's robotaxi permit after a serious accident that the company handled poorly. Michael tells us what's been happening in the Google antitrust trial, to the extent that anyone can tell, thanks to the heavy confidentiality restrictions imposed by Judge Mehta. One number that escaped -- $26 billion in payments to maintain Google as everyone's default search engine – draws plenty of commentary. Scott and I try to make sense of CISA's claim that its vulnerability list has produced cybersecurity dividends. We are inclined to agree that there's a pony in there somewhere. Nick explains why it's dangerous to try to spy on Kaspersky. The rewards my be big, but so is the risk that your intelligence service will be pantsed. Nick also notes that using Let's Encrypt as part of your man in the middle attack has risks as well – advice he probably should deliver auf Deutsch. Scott and I cover a great Andy Greenberg story about a team of hackers who discovered how to unlock a vast store of bitcoin on an IronKey but may not see a payoff soon. I reveal my connection to the story. Michael and I share thoughts about the effort to renew section 702 of FISA, which lost momentum during the long battle over choosing a Speaker of the House. I note that USTR has surrendered to reality in global digital trade and point out that last week's story about judicial interest in tort cases against social media turned out to be the first robin in what now looks like a remake of The Birds. Download 479th 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 CyberlawPodcast@gmail.com. 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 of the Cyberlaw Podcast delves into a False Claims Act lawsuit against Penn State University by a former CIO to one of its research units. The lawsuit alleges that Penn State faked security documents in filings with the Defense Department. Because it's a so-called qui tam case, Tyler Evans explains, the plaintiff could recover a portion of any funds repaid by Penn State. If the employee was complicit in a scheme to mislead DoD, the False Claims Act isn't limited to civil cases like this one; the Justice Department can pursue criminal sanctions too–although Tyler notes that, so far, Justice has been slow to take that step. In other news, Jeffery Atik and I try to make sense of a New York Times story about Chinese bitcoin miners setting up shop near a Microsoft data center and a DoD base. The reporter seems sure that the Chinese miners are doing something suspicious, but it's not clear exactly what the problem is. California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) is widely believed to be positioning himself for a Presidential run, maybe as early as next year. In that effort, he's been able to milk the Sacramento Effect, in which California adopts legislation that more or less requires the country to follow its lead. One such law is the DELETE (Data Elimination and Limiting Extensive Tracking and Exchange) Act, which, Jim Dempsey reports, would require all data brokers to delete the personal data of anyone who makes a request to a centralized California agency. This will be bad news for most data brokers, and good news for the biggest digital ad companies like Google and Amazon, since those companies acquire their data directly from their customers and not through purchase. Another California law that could have similar national impact bans social media from "aiding or abetting" child abuse. This framing is borrowed from FOSTA (Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act)/SESTA (Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act), a federal law that prohibited aiding and abetting sex trafficking and led to the demise of sex classified ads and the publications they supported around the country. I cover the overdetermined collapse of EPA's effort to impose cybersecurity regulation on the nation's water systems. I predict we won't see an improvement in water system cybersecurity without new legislation. Justin lays out how badly the Senate is fracturing over regulation of AI. Jeffery and I puzzle over the Commerce Department's decision to allow South Korean DRAM makers to keep using U.S. technology in their Chinese foundries. Jim lays out the unedifying history of Congressional and administration efforts to bring a hammer down on TikTok while Jeffery evaluates the prospects for Utah's lawsuit against TikTok based on a claim that the app has a harmful impact on children. Finally, in what looks like good news about AI transparency, Jeffery covers Anthropic's research showing that–sometimes–it's possible to identify the features that an AI model is relying upon, showing how the model weights features like law talk or reliance on spreadsheet data. It's a long way from there to understanding how the model makes its recommendations, but Anthropic thinks we've moved from needing more science to needing more engineering. Download 477th 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 CyberlawPodcast@gmail.com. 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.