The Cyberlaw Podcast

Apr 22 2024 100 ep. 53 mins 752
The Cyberlaw Podcast artwork

The Cyberlaw Podcast is a weekly interview series and discussion offering an opinionated roundup of the latest events in technology, security, privacy, and government. It features in-depth interviews of a wide variety of guests, including academics, politicians, authors, reporters, and other technology and policy newsmakers. Hosted by cybersecurity attorney Stewart Baker, whose views expressed are his own.

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World on the Brink with Dmitri Alperovitch

Apr 22 2024 49 mins  
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 bo

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

Apr 11 2024 71 mins  
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, but the news commentary is done for now.) Perhaps it’s appropriate, then, for our two lead stories to revive a theme from the 90s – who�

Taking AI Existential Risk Seriously

Apr 02 2024 61 mins  
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

The Fourth Antitrust Shoe Drops, on Apple This Time

Mar 25 2024 46 mins  
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 written complaint accusing Apple of improperly monopolizing the market for “performance smartphones.” The market definition will be a weak

Social Speech and the Supreme Court

Mar 19 2024 60 mins  
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

Preventing Sales of Personal Data to Adversary Nations

Mar 14 2024 31 mins  
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 traded commodity. This, in turn, has produced a variety of policy proposals – comprehensive privacy regulation, a weird proposal from Sen. Wyd

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

Mar 13 2024 56 mins  
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. Bran

Regulating personal data for national security

Mar 07 2024 53 mins  
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 allies. Adam Hickey, whose old office is drafting the rules, explains the history of the initiative, which stems from endless Committee on Fo

Are AI models learning to generalize?

Feb 20 2024 49 mins  
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

Death, Taxes, and Data Regulation

Feb 16 2024 64 mins  
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 lawsuit against data broker Kochava and the forthcoming executive order restricting certain bulk sensitive data flows to China and other countr