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

Who’s the Bigger Cybersecurity Risk – Microsoft or Open Source?

14 days ago 1h 11m

There’s a whiff of Auld Lang Syne about episode 500 of the Cyberlaw Podcast, since after this it will be going on hiatus for some time and maybe forever. (Okay, there will be an interview with Dmitri Alperovich about his forthcoming book, bu

Taking AI Existential Risk Seriously

23 days ago 1h 1m

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 Fourth Antitrust Shoe Drops, on Apple This Time

1 month ago 46m 25s

The Biden administration has been aggressively pursuing antitrust cases against Silicon Valley giants like Amazon, Google, and Facebook. This week it was Apple’s turn. The Justice Department (joined by several state AGs) filed a gracefully wri

Social Speech and the Supreme Court

Mar 19th, 2024 1h

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 det

Preventing Sales of Personal Data to Adversary Nations

Mar 14th, 2024 31m 52s

This bonus episode of the Cyberlaw Podcast focuses on the national security implications of sensitive personal information. Sales of personal data have been largely unregulated as the growth of adtech has turned personal data into a widely trad

The National Cybersecurity Strategy – How Does it Look After a Year?

Mar 13th, 2024 56m 30s

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 imm

Regulating personal data for national security

Mar 7th, 2024 53m 10s

The United States is in the process of rolling out a sweeping regulation for personal data transfers. But the rulemaking is getting limited attention because it targets transfers to our rivals in the new Cold War – China, Russia, and their all

Google’s Gemini tells us exactly what’s wrong with Silicon Valley

Feb 27th, 2024 55m 4s

This episode of the Cyberlaw Podcast kicks off with the Babylon Bee’s take on Google Gemini’s woke determination to inject a phony diversity into images of historical characters, The Bee purports to quote a black woman commenting on the AI engi

Are AI models learning to generalize?

Feb 20th, 2024 49m 37s

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 lik

Death, Taxes, and Data Regulation

Feb 16th, 2024 1h 4m

On the latest episode of The Cyberlaw Podcast, guest host Brian Fleming, along with panelists Jane Bambauer, Gus Hurwitz, and Nate Jones, discuss the latest U.S. government efforts to protect sensitive personal data, including the FTC’s lawsui

Serious threats, unserious responses

Feb 6th, 2024 54m 19s

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 hosta

Going Deep on Deep Fakes—Plus a Bonus Interview with Rob Silvers on the Cyber Safety Review Board.

Jan 30th, 2024 1h 12m

It was a big week for deep fakes generated by artificial intelligence. Sultan Meghji, who’s got a new AI startup, walked us through three stories that illustrate the ways AI will lead to more confusion about who’s really talking to us. First, a

High Court, High Stakes for Cybersecurity

Jan 23rd, 2024 44m 56s

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 Ada

Triangulating Apple

Jan 9th, 2024 1h 22m

Returning from winter break, this episode of the Cyberlaw Podcast covers a lot of ground. The story I think we’ll hear the most about in 2024 is the remarkable exploit used to compromise several generations of Apple iPhone. The question I think

Do AI Trust and Safety Measures Deserve to Fail?

Dec 12th, 2023 1h 17m

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

Making the Rubble Bounce in Montana

Dec 5th, 2023 1h 1m

In this episode, Paul Stephan lays out the reasoning behind U.S. District Judge Donald W. Molloy’s decision enjoining Montana’s ban on TikTok. There are some plausible reasons for such an injunction, and the court adopts them. There are also l

Rohrschach AI

Nov 28th, 2023 58m 8s

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 accelerati

Defenestration at OpenAI

Nov 21st, 2023 42m 38s

Paul Rosenzweig brings us up to date on the debate over renewing section 702, highlighting the introduction of the first credible “renew and reform” measure by the House Intelligence Committee. I’m hopeful that a similarly responsible bill wil

The Brussels Defect: Too Early is Worse Than Too Late. Plus: Mark MacCarthy’s Book on ”Regulating Digital Industries.”

Nov 14th, 2023 1h

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

Putting the SEC in Infosec

Nov 7th, 2023 51m 27s

In a law-packed Cyberlaw Podcast episode, Chris Conte walks us through the long, detailed, and justifiably controversial SEC enforcement action against SolarWinds and its top infosec officer, Tim Brown. It sounds to me as though the SEC’s exp

Fancy Bear Goes Phishing

Oct 31st, 2023 59m 30s

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 tutori

Administration Fails Forward on China Chip Exports

Oct 24th, 2023 54m 36s

This episode of the Cyberlaw Podcast begins with the administration’s aggressive new rules on chip exports to China. Practically every aspect of the rules announced just eight months ago was sharply tightened, Nate Jones reports. The changes ar

Will CISOs Have to Choose Between Getting Rich or Going to Jail?

Oct 17th, 2023 44m 46s

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 De

Bonus Episode

Oct 16th, 2023 56m 30s

The debate over section 702 of FISA is heating up as the end-of-year deadline for reauthorization draws near. The debate can now draw upon a report from the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. That report was not unanimous. In the int