Steptoe Cyberlaw Podcast: Hostfull II

Due to technical difficulties, the interview for the 103rd episode will be released as a separate post next week.  In the news roundup, we explore Apple’s brief against providing additional assistance to the FBI in its investigation of the San Bernardino killings. Michael Vatis finds good and bad in the brief – some entirely plausible arguments about burden mixed with implausible ones aimed more at the public than at the magistrate judge. I suggest that the burden argument may be weaker than it seems, both because the costs can be spread over many requests for assistance and because the accounting of work to be done feels “as padded as a no-bid government contract offer.” Which, now that the FBI has offered to pay Apple’s costs, is pretty much exactly what it is.

In other news, Michael and Jason Weinstein look at the California AG’s breach report, and its unlikely suggestion that the states adopt a unified approach to breach reporting. And I offer highlights and lowlights from the DHS guidelines for information sharing, shining particular light on a troubling proposal that some shared fields will have to be scrubbed by human beings before the information is passed on to at-risk sysadmins. In the words of Silicon Valley, human review doesn’t scale.

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