The Cyberlaw Podcast

The Capitol Hill hearings featuring TikTok's CEO lead off episode 450 of the Cyberlaw Podcast. The CEO handled the endless stream of Congressional accusations and suspicion about as well as could have been expected.  And it did him as little good as a cynic would have expected. Jim Dempsey and Mark MacCarthy think Congress is moving toward action on Chinese IT products—probably in the form of the...

GPT-4's rapid and tangible improvement over ChatGPT has more or less guaranteed that it or a competitor will be built into most new and legacy information and technology (IT) products. Some applications will be pointless; but some will change users' world. In this episode, Sultan Meghji , Jordan Schneider, and Siobhan Gorman explore the likely impact of GPT4 from Silicon Valley to China .   Kurt S...

This episode of the Cyberlaw Podcast kicks off with the sudden emergence of a serious bipartisan effort to impose new national security regulations on what companies can be part of the U.S. Information Technology and content supply chain. Spurred by a stalled Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States negotiation with TikTok, Michael Ellis tells us, a dozen well-regarded Democrat and Rep...

As promised, the Cyberlaw Podcast devoted half of this episode to an autopsy of  Gonzalez v. Google LLC , the Supreme Court's first opportunity in a quarter century to construe section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. And an autopsy is what our panel— Adam Candeub , Gus Hurwitz , Michael Ellis and Mark MacCarthy —came to perform. I had already laid out my analysis and predictions in a separa...

This episode of the Cyberlaw Podcast opens with a look at some genuinely weird behavior by the Bing AI chatbot – dark fantasies, professions of love, and lies on top of lies – plus the factual error that wrecked the rollout of Google's AI search bot. Chinny Sharma and Nick Weaver explain how we ended up with AI that is better at BS'ing than at accurately conveying facts. This leads me to propose a...

The latest episode of The Cyberlaw Podcast gets a bit carried away with the China spy balloon saga. Guest host Brian Fleming, along with guests Gus Hurwitz , Nate Jones , and Paul Rosenzweig , share insights (and bad puns) about the latest reporting on the electronic surveillance capabilities of the first downed balloon, the Biden administration's "shoot first, ask questions later" response to the...

This episode of the Cyberlaw Podcast is dominated by stories about possible cybersecurity regulation. David Kris points us first to an article by the leadership of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Administration in Foreign Affairs. Jen Easterly and Eric Goldstein seem to take a tough line on "Why Companies Must Build Safety Into Tech Products." But for all the tough language, one word...

The big cyberlaw story of the week is the Justice Department's antitrust lawsuit against Google and the many hats it wears in the online ad ecosystem. Lee Berger explains the Justice Department's theory, which is not dissimilar to the Texas attorney general's two-year-old claims. When you have lost both the Biden administration and the Texas attorney general, I suggest, you cannot look too many pl...

We kick off a jam-packed episode of the Cyberlaw Podcast by flagging the news that ransomware revenue fell substantially in 2022. There is lots of room for error in that Chainalysis finding, Nick Weaver notes, but the effect is large. Among the reasons to think it might also be real is resistance to paying ransoms on the part of companies and their insurers, who are especially concerned about liab...

In this bonus episode of the Cyberlaw Podcast, I interview Andy Greenberg, long-time WIRED reporter, about his new book, " Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency. " This is Andy's second author interview on the Cyberlaw Podcast . He also came on to discuss an earlier book, Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers. The...

The Cyberlaw Podcast kicks off 2023 by staring directly into the sun(set) of Section 702 authorization. The entire panel, including guest host Brian Fleming and guests Michael Ellis   and David Kris, debates where things could be headed this year as the clock is officially ticking on FISA Section 702 reauthorization . Although there is agreement that a straight reauthorization is unlikely in today...

Our first episode for 2023 features Dmitri Alperovitch, Paul Rosenzweig, and Jim Dempsey trying to cover a months' worth of cyberlaw news.  Dmitri and I open with an effort to summarize the state of the tech struggle between the U.S. and China. I think recent developments show the U.S. doing better than expected. U.S. companies like Facebook and Dell are engaged in voluntary decoupling as they ima...

This bonus episode is an interview with Josephine Wolff and Dan Schwarcz , who along with Daniel Woods have written an article with the same title as this pos t . Their thesis is that breach lawyers have lost perspective in their no-holds-barred pursuit of attorney-client privilege to protect the confidentiality of forensic reports that diagnose the breach. Remarkably for a law review article, it...

It's been a news-heavy week, but we have the most fun in this episode with ChatGPT. Jane Bambauer , Richard Stiennon, and I pick over the astonishing number of use cases and misuse cases disclosed by the release of ChatGPT for public access. It is talented—writing dozens of term papers in seconds . It is sociopathic—the term papers are full of falsehoods, down to the made-up citations to plausible...

This episode of the Cyberlaw Podcast delves into the use of location technology in two big events—the surprisingly outspoken lockdown protests in China and the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. Both were seen as big threats to the government, and both produced aggressive police responses that relied heavily on government access to phone location data. Jamil Jaffer and Mark MacCarthy walk us through...

We spend much of this episode of the Cyberlaw Podcast talking about toxified technology – new tech that is being demonized for a variety of reasons. Exhibit One, of course, is "spyware," essentially hacking tools that allow governments to access phones or computers otherwise closed to them, usually by end-to-end encryption. The Washington Post and the New York Times have led a campaign to turn NSO...

The Cyberlaw Podcast leads with the legal cost of Elon Musk's anti-authoritarian takeover of Twitter. Turns out that authority figures have a lot of weapons, many grounded in law, and Twitter is at risk of being on the receiving end of those weapons.  Brian Fleming explores the apparently unkillable notion that the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. (CFIUS) should review Musk's Twitter de...

We open this episode of the Cyberlaw Podcast by considering the (still evolving) results of the 2022 midterm election. Adam Klein and I trade thoughts on what Congress will do. Adam sees two years in which the Senate does nominations, the House does investigations, and neither does much legislation—which could leave renewal of the critically important intelligence authority, Section 702 of the For...

The war that began with the Russian invasion of Ukraine grinds on. Cybersecurity experts have spent much of 2022 trying to draw lessons about cyberwar strategies from the conflict.  Dmitri Alperovitch takes us through the latest lessons, cautioning that all of them could look different in a few months, as both sides adapt to the others' actions.  David Kris joins Dmitri to evaluate a Microsoft rep...

You heard it on the Cyberlaw Podcast first, as we mash up the week's top stories:  Nate Jones commenting on Elon Musk's expected troubles running Twitter at a profit and Jordan Schneider noting the U.S. government's creeping, halting moves to constrain TikTok's sway in the U.S. market. Since Twitter has never made a lot of money, even before it was carrying loads of new debt, and since pushing Tik...

This episode features Nick Weaver , Dave Aitel and I covering a Pro Publica story (and forthcoming book ) on the difficulties the FBI has encountered in becoming the nation's principal resource on cybercrime and cybersecurity. We end up concluding that, for all its successes, the bureau's structural weaknesses in addressing cybersecurity are going to haunt it for years to come. Speaking of hauntin...

David Kris opens this episode of the Cyberlaw Podcast by laying out some of the massive disruption that the Biden Administration has kicked off in China's semiconductor industry— and its Western suppliers . The reverberations of the administration's new measures will be felt for years, and the Chinese government's response, not to mention the ultimate consequences, remains uncertain. Richard Stien...

It's been a jam-packed week of cyberlaw news, but the big debate of the episode is triggered by the White House blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights . I've just released a long post about the campaign to end "AI bias" in general, and the blueprint in particular. In my view, the bill of rights will end up imposing racial and gender (and intersex!) quotas on a vast swath of American life. Nick Weaver...

We open today's episode by teasing the Supreme Court's decision to review whether section 230 protects big platforms from liability for materially assisting terror groups whose speech they distribute (or even recommend). I predict that this is the beginning of the end of the house of cards that aggressive lawyering and good press have built on the back of section 230. Why? Because Big Tech stayed...

This episode features a much deeper, and more diverse, examination of the Fifth Circuit decision upholding Texas's social media law. We devote the last half of the episode to a structured dialogue about the opinion between Adam Candeub and Alan Rozenshtein . Both have written about it already, Alan critically and Adam supportively . I lead off, arguing that, contrary to legal Twitter's dismissive...