Episode #56: An Interview with Siobhan Gorman

Our guest for Episode 56 of the Cyberlaw Podcast is Siobhan Gorman, who broke many of the top cybersecurity stories for the Wall Street Journal until she left late last year to join the Brunswick Group, which does crisis communications for private companies.  Siobhan comments on the flood of attribution stories in recent days, including the US government’s almost casual attribution of the Sands Las Vegas cyberattack to Iran and the leaked attribution of the Saudi Aramco and US bank attacks to the same nation.  She also compares private sector cyber crisis planning to the US government’s coordination (or lack thereof) in responding to the Sony attack.

In other news, Stephanie Roy and I take a deep and slightly off-center dive into the FCC’s net neutrality ruling.  I predict that within five years the FCC will have used its new Title II authority to impose cybersecurity requirements on US ISPs.  (And in ten years, I suspect, there will be a debate in the FCC over whether to throttle or disfavor communications services that don’t cooperate with the FBI’s effort to deny perfectly encrypted security to criminals.) Stephanie demurs.

Michael Vatis and I chew over China’s “overdetermined” (h/t Mickey Kaus) policy of ousting American tech products in favor of Chinese competitors, the prospects of class action plaintiffs in the Komodia/Superfish/Lenovo flap, and NY financial regulator Benjamin Lawsky’s war on the password.

 

We finally get listener feedback to read on the air, as Michael Samway congratulates Nuala O’Connor for her masterly handling of, well, me.  Those who think they can do a better job of humiliating me will have their work cut out for them, but they’re welcome to try, sending emails to [e-mail] and voice mails to [phone].