The Cyberlaw Podcast

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 weakness for the government throughout the case, but the complaint does a good job of identifying ways in which Apple has built a moat around its business without an obvious benefit for its customers.  The complaint focuses on Apple’s discouraging of multipurpose apps and cloud streaming games, its lack of message interoperability, the tying of Apple watches to the iPhone to make switching to Android expensive, and its insistence on restricting digital wallets on its platform.  This lawsuit will continue well into the next presidential administration, so much depends on the outcome of the election this fall.

 

Volt Typhoon is still in the news, Andrew Adams tells us, as the government continues to sound the alarm about Chinese intent to ravage American critical infrastructure in the event of a conflict.  Water systems are getting most of the attention this week.  I can’t help wondering how we expect the understaffed and underresourced water and sewage companies in this country to defeat sophisticated state-sponsored attackers. This leads Cristin and i to a discussion of how the SEC’s pursuit of CISO Tim Brown and demands for more security disclosures will improve the country’s cybersecurity.  Short answer: It won’t.

 

Cristin covers the legislative effort to force a divestiture of Tiktok. The bill has gone to the Senate, where it is moving slowly, if at all. Speaking as a parent of teenagers and voters, Cristin is not surprised. Meanwhile, the House has sent a second bill to the Senate by a unanimous vote. This one would block data brokers from selling American’s data to foreign adversaries. Andrew notes that the House bill covers data brokers.  Other data holders, like Google and Apple, would face a similar restriction, under executive order, so the Senate will have plenty of opportunity to deal with Chinese access to American personal data.

 

In the wake of the Murthy argument over administration jawboning in favor of censorship of mostly right-wing posts,  Andrew reports that the FBI has resumed outreach to social media companies, at least where it identifies foreign influence campaigns. And the FDA, which piled on to criticize ivermectin advocates, has withdrawn its dubious and condescending tweets.

 

 Cristin reports on the spyware agreement sponsored by the United States. It has collected several new supporters. Whether this will reduce spyware installations or simply change the countries that supply the spyware remains to be seen.

Direct download: The_Cyberlaw_Podcast_498.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 2:00am EDT

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.

 

Direct download: The_Cyberlaw_Podcast_497.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 4:00am EDT

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. Wyden (D-OR) to ensure that the US governments cannot buy such data while China and Russia can, and most recently an Executive Order to prohibit or restrict commercial transactions affording China, Russia, and other adversary nations with access to Americans’ bulk sensitive personal data and government related data. 

To get a deeper understanding of the executive order, and the Justice Department’s plans for implementing it, Stewart interviews Lee Licata, Deputy Section Chief for National Security Data Risk.

Direct download: The_Cyberlaw_Podcast_496.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 12:46pm EDT

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.
Direct download: TheCyberlawPodcast-495.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 1:13pm EDT

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 Foreign Investment in the United States efforts to impose such controls on a company-by-company basis. Now, with an executive order as the foundation, the Department of Justice has published an advance notice of proposed rulemaking that promises what could be years of slow-motion regulation. Faced with a similar issue—the national security risk posed by connected vehicles, particularly those sourced in China—the Commerce Department issues a laconic notice whose telegraphic style contrasts sharply with the highly detailed Justice draft.

I take a stab at the riskiest of ventures—predicting the results in two Supreme Court cases about social media regulations adopted by Florida and Texas. Four hours of strong appellate advocacy and a highly engaged Court make predictions risky, but here goes. I divide the Court into two camps—the Justices (Thomas, Alito, probably Gorsuch) who think that the censorship we should worry about comes from powerful speech-monopolizing platforms and the Justices (Kavanagh, the Chief) who see the cases through a lens that values corporate free speech. Many of the remainder (Kagan, Sotomayor, Jackson) see social media content moderation as understandable and justified, but they’re uneasy about the power of large platforms and reluctant to grant a sweeping immunity to those companies. To my mind, this foretells a decision striking down the laws insofar as they restrict content moderation. But that decision won’t resolve all the issues raised by the two laws, and industry’s effort to overturn them entirely on the current record is also likely to fail. There are too many provisions in those laws that some of the justices considered reasonable for Netchoice to win a sweeping victory. So I look for an opinion that rejects the “private censorship” framing but expressly leaves open or even approves other, narrower measures disciplining platform power, leaving the lower courts to deal with them on remand.

Kurt Sanger and I dig into the Securities Exchange Commission's amended complaint against Tim Brown and SolarWinds, alleging material misrepresentation with respect to company cybersecurity. The amended complaint tries to bolster the case against the company and its CISO, but at the end of the day it’s less than fully persuasive. SolarWinds didn’t have the best security, and it was slow to recognize how much harm its compromised software was causing its customers. But the SEC’s case for disclosure feels like 20-20 hindsight. Unfortunately, CISOs are likely to spend the next five years trying to guess which intrusions will look bad in hindsight. 

I cover the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) release of version 2.0 of the Cybersecurity Framework, particularly its new governance and supply chain features.

Adam reviews the latest update on section 702 of FISA, which likely means the program will stumble into 2025, thanks to a certification expected in April. We agree that Silicon Valley is likely to seize on the opportunity to engage in virtue-signaling litigation over the final certification.

Kurt explains the remarkable power of adtech data for intelligence purposes, and Senator Ron Wyden’s (D-OR) effort to make sure such data is denied to U.S. agencies but not to the rest of the world. He also pulls Adam and me into the debate over whether we need a federal backup for cyber insurance. Bruce Schneier thinks we do, but none of us is persuaded.

Finally, Adam and I consider the divide between CISA and GOP election officials. We agree that it has its roots in CISA’s imprudently allowing election security mission creep, from the cybersecurity of voting machines to trying to combat “malinformation,” otherwise known as true facts that the administration found inconvenient. We wish CISA well in the vital job of protecting voting machines and processes, as long as it manages in this cycle to stick to its cyber knitting. 

Download 494th 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

Direct download: TheCyberlawPodcast-494.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 11:13am EDT

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, 

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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.

Direct download: TheCyberlawPodcast-492.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:54pm EDT

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 countries of concern. Nate and Brian then discuss whether Congress has a realistic path to end the Section 702 reauthorization standoff before the April expiration and debate what to make of a recent multilateral meeting in London to discuss curbing spyware abuses. Gus and Jane then talk about the big news for cord-cutting sports fans, as well as Amazon’s ad data deal with Reach, in an effort to understand some broader difficulties facing internet-based ad and subscription revenue models. Nate considers the implications of Ukraine’s “defend forward” cyber strategy in its war against Russia. Jane next tackles a trio of stories detailing challenges, of the policy and economic varieties, facing Meta on the content moderation front, as well as an emerging problem policing sexual assaults in the Metaverse. Bringing it back to data, Gus wraps the news roundup by highlighting a novel FTC case brought against Blackbaud stemming from its data retention practices. In this week’s quick hits, Gus and Jane reflect on the FCC’s ban on AI-generated voice cloning in robocalls, Nate touches on an alert from CISA and FBI on the threat presented by Chinese hackers to critical infrastructure, Gus comments on South Korea’s pause on implementation of its anti-monopoly platform act and the apparent futility of nudges (with respect to climate change attitudes or otherwise), and finally Brian closes with a few words on possible broad U.S. import restrictions on Chinese EVs and how even the abundance of mediocre AI-related ads couldn’t ruin Taylor Swift’s Super Bowl.  

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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.

Direct download: TheCyberlawPodcast-491.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 4:48pm EDT

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:

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.

Direct download: TheCyberlawPodcast-490.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 11:48am EDT

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 fake Biden robocall urged people not to vote in the New Hampshire primary. Second, a bot purporting to offer Dean Phillips’s views on the issues was sanctioned by OpenAI because it didn’t have Phillips’s consent. Third, fake nudes of Taylor Swift led to a ban on Twitter searches for her image. And, finally, podcasters used AI to resurrect George Carlin and got sued by his family. The moral panic over AI fakery meant that all of these stories were long on “end of the world” and short on “we’ll live through this.”

Regulators of AI are not doing a better job of maintaining perspective. Mark MacCarthy reports that New York City’s AI hiring law, which has punitive disparate-impact disclosure requirements for automated hiring decision engines, seems to have persuaded NYC employers that they aren’t making any automated hiring decisions, so they don’t have to do any disclosures. Not to be outdone, the European Court of Justice has decided that pretty much any tool to aid in decisions is likely to be an automated decision making technology subject to special (and mostly nonsensical) data protection rules.

Is AI regulation creating its own backlash? Could be. Sultan and I report on a very plausible Republican plan to attack the Biden AI executive order on the ground that its main enforcement mechanism relies, the Defense Production Act, simply doesn’t authorize what the order calls for.

Speaking of regulation, Maury Shenk covers the EU’s application of the Digital Markets Act to big tech companies like Apple and Google. Apple isn’t used to being treated like just another company, and its contemptuous response to the EU’s rules for its app market could easily lead to regulatory sanctions. Looking at Apple’s proposed compliance with the California court ruling in the Epic case and the European Digital Market Act, Mark says it's time to think about price regulating mobile app stores.

Even handing out big checks to technology companies turns out to be harder than it first sounds. Sultan and I talk about the slow pace of payments to chip makers, and the political imperative to get the deals done before November (and probably before March). 

Senator Ron Wyden, D-Ore. is still flogging NSA and the danger of government access to personal data. This time, he’s on about NSA’s purchases of commercial data. So far, so predictable. But this time, he’s misrepresented the facts by saying without restriction that NSA buys domestic metadata, omitting NSA’s clear statement that its netflow “domestic” data consists of communications with one end outside the country.  

Maury and I review an absent colleague’s effort to construct a liability regime for insecure software. Jim Dempsey's proposal looks quite reasonable, but Maury reminds me that he and I produced something similar twenty years ago, and it’s not even close to adoption anywhere in the U.S.  

I can’t help but rant about Amazon’s arrogant, virtue-signaling, and customer-hating decision to drop a feature that makes it easy for Ring doorbell users to share their videos with the police. Whose data is it, anyway, Amazon? Sadly, we know the answer. 

It looks as though there’s only one place where hasty, ill-conceived tech regulation is being rolled back. Maury reports on the People’s Republic of China, which canned its video game regulations, and its video game regulator for good measure, and started approving new games at a rapid clip, after a proposed regulatory crackdown knocked more than $60 bn off the value of its industry. 

We close the news roundup with a few quick hits:

Finally, as a listener bonus, we turn to Rob Silvers, Under Secretary for Policy at the Department of Homeland Security and Chair of the Cyber Safety Review Board (CSRB). Under Rob’s leadership, DHS has proposed legislation to give the CSRB a legislative foundation. The Senate homeland security committee recently held a hearing about that idea. Rob wasn’t invited, so we asked him to come on the podcast to respond to issues that the hearing raised – conflicts of interest, subpoena power, choosing the incidents to investigate, and more.

Download 489th 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.

Direct download: TheCyberlawPodcast-489.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 11:06am EDT

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.

Direct download: TheCyberlawPodcast-488.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 11:17am EDT