The Cyberlaw Podcast is back from August hiatus, and the theme of the episode seems to be the way other countries are using the global success of U.S. technology to impose their priorities on the U.S. Exhibit 1 is the EU’s Digital Services Act , which took effect last month. Michael Ellis spells out a few of the act’s sweeping changes in how U.S. tech companies must operate – nominally in Europe but as a practical matter in the U.S. as well. The largest platforms will be heavily regulated , with...
Sep 06, 2023•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 470
In our last episode before the August break, the Cyberlaw Podcast drills down on the AI industry leaders’ trip to Washington , where they dutifully signed up to what Gus Hurwitz calls “a bag of promises.” Gus and I parse the promises, some of which are empty, others of which have substance. Along the way, we examine the EU’s struggling campaign to lobby other countries to adopt its AI regulation framework. Really, guys, if you don’t want to be called regulatory neocolonialists, maybe you shouldn...
Jul 26, 2023•55 min•Ep. 469
This episode of the Cyberlaw Podcast kicks off with a stinging defeat for the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which could not persuade the courts to suspend the Microsoft-Activision Blizzard acquisition. Mark MacCarthy says that the FTC’s loss will pave the way for a complete victory for Microsoft, as other jurisdictions trim their sails. We congratulate Brad Smith, Microsoft’s President, whose policy smarts likely helped to construct this win. Meanwhile, the FTC is still doubling down on its de...
Jul 18, 2023•55 min•Ep. 468
It’s surely fitting that a decision released on July 4 would set off fireworks on the Cyberlaw Podcast. The source of the drama was U.S. District Court Judge Terry Doughty’s injunction prohibiting multiple federal agencies from leaning on social media platforms to suppress speech the agencies don’t like. Megan Stifel, Paul Rosenzweig, and I could not disagree more about the decision, which seems quite justified to me, given the aggressive White House communications telling the platforms whose sp...
Jul 11, 2023•51 min•Ep. 467
Geopolitics has always played a role in prosecuting hackers. But it’s getting a lot more complicated, as Kurt Sanger reports. Responding to a U.S. request, a Russian cybersecurity executive has been arrested in Kazakhstan , accused of having hacked Dropbox and Linkedin more than ten years ago. The executive, Nikita Kislitsin, has been hammered by geopolitics in that time. The firm he joined after the alleged hacking, Group IB, has seen its CEO arrested by Russia for treason—probably for getting ...
Jul 05, 2023•53 min•Ep. 466
Max Schrems is the lawyer and activist behind two (and, probably soon, a third) legal challenge to the adequacy of U.S. law to protect European personal data. Thanks to the Federalist Society’s Regulatory Transparency Project, Max and I were able to spend an hour debating the law and policy behind Europe’s generation-long fight with the United States over transatlantic data flows. It’s civil, pointed, occasionally raucous, and wide-ranging – a fun, detailed introduction to the issues that will a...
Jul 03, 2023•58 min•Ep. 465
Sen. Schumer (D-N.Y.) has announced an ambitious plan to produce a bipartisan AI regulation program in a matter of months. Jordan Schneider admires the project; I’m more skeptical. The rest of our commentators, Chessie Lockhart and Michael Ellis, also weigh in on AI issues. Chessie lays out the case against panicking over existential AI threats, this week canvassed in the MIT Technology Review . I suggest that anyone complaining that the EU or China is getting ahead of the U.S. in AI regulation ...
Jun 28, 2023•46 min•Ep. 464
Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) is to moral panics over privacy what Andreessen Horowitz is to cryptocurrency startups. He’s constantly trying to blow life into them, hoping to justify new restrictions on government or private uses of data. His latest crusade is against the intelligence community’s purchase of behavioral data, which is generally available to everyone from Amazon to the GRU. He has launched his campaign several times, introducing legislation, holding up Avril Haines’s confirmation ove...
Jun 21, 2023•59 min•Ep. 463
It was a disastrous week for cryptocurrency in the United States, as the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) filed suit against the two biggest exchanges , Binance and Coinbase, on a theory that makes it nearly impossible to run a cryptocurrency exchange that is competitive with overseas exchanges. Nick Weaver lays out the differences between “process crimes” and “crime crimes,” and how they help distinguish the two lawsuits. The SEC action marks the end of an uneasy truce, but not the end of t...
Jun 13, 2023•49 min•Ep. 462
This episode of the Cyberlaw Podcast kicks off with a spirited debate over AI regulation. Mark MacCarthy dismisses AI researchers’ recent call for attention to the existential risks posed by AI; he thinks it’s a sci-fi distraction from the real issues that need regulation —copyright, privacy, fraud, and competition. I’m utterly flummoxed by the determination on the left to insist that existential threats are not worth discussing, at least while other, more immediate regulatory proposals have not...
Jun 06, 2023•1 hr•Ep. 461
In this bonus episode of the Cyberlaw Podcast, I interview Jimmy Wales , the cofounder of Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a rare survivor from the Internet Hippie Age, coexisting like a great herbivorous dinosaur with Facebook, Twitter, and the other carnivorous mammals of Web 2.0. Perhaps not coincidentally, Jimmy is the most prominent founder of a massive internet institution not to become a billionaire. We explore why that is, and how he feels about it. I ask Jimmy whether Wikipedia’s model is sustai...
Jun 01, 2023•41 min•Ep. 460
This episode of the Cyberlaw Podcast features the second half of my interview with Paul Stephan, author of The World Crisis and International Law . But it begins the way many recent episodes have begun, with the latest AI news. And, since it’s so squarely in scope for a cyberlaw podcast, we devote some time to the so-appalling- you-have-to-laugh-to keep-from-crying story of the lawyer who relied on ChatGPT to write his brief . As Eugene Volokh noted in his post, the model returned exactly the ca...
May 31, 2023•1 hr 16 min•Ep. 459
This episode features part 1 of our two-part interview with Paul Stephan, author of The World Crisis and International Law —a deeper and more entertaining read than the title suggests. Paul lays out the long historical arc that links the 1980s to the present day. It’s not a pretty picture, and it gets worse as he ties those changes to the demands of the Knowledge Economy. How will these profound political and economic clashes resolve themselves? We’ll cover that in part 2. Meanwhile, in this epi...
May 23, 2023•1 hr 24 min•Ep. 458
Maury Shenk opens this episode with an exploration of three efforts to overcome notable gaps in the performance of large language AI models. OpenAI has developed a tool meant to address the models’ lack of explainability. It uses, naturally, another large language model to identify what makes individual neurons fire the way they do. Maury is skeptical that this is a path forward, but it’s nice to see someone trying. The other effort, Anthropic’s creation of an explicit “constitution” of rules fo...
May 16, 2023•50 min•Ep. 457
The “godfather of AI” has left Google, offering warnings about the existential risks for humanity of the technology . Mark MacCarthy calls those risks a fantasy, and a debate breaks out between Mark, Nate Jones, and me. There’s more agreement on the White House summit on AI risks, which seems to have followed Mark’s “let’s worry about tomorrow tomorrow” prescription. I think existential risks are a bigger concern, but I am deeply skeptical about other efforts to regulate AI, especially for bias,...
May 09, 2023•59 min•Ep. 456
We open this episode of the Cyberlaw Podcast with some actual news about the debate over renewing section 702 of FISA. That’s the law that allows the government to target foreigners for a national security purpose and to intercept their communications in and out of the U.S. A lot of attention has been focused on what happens to those communications after they’ve been intercepted and stored, and particularly whether the FBI should get a second court authorization—maybe even a warrant based on pro...
May 02, 2023•56 min•Ep. 455
The latest episode of The Cyberlaw Podcast was not created by chatbots (we swear!). Guest host Brian Fleming, along with guests Jay Healey , Maury Shenk , and Nick Weaver , discuss the latest news on the AI revolution including Google’s efforts to protect its search engine dominance, a fascinating look at the websites that feed tools like ChatGPT (leading some on the panel to argue that quality over quantity should be goal), and a possible regulatory speed bump for total AI world domination , at...
Apr 25, 2023•53 min•Ep. 454
Every government on the planet announced last week an ambition to regulate artificial intelligence. Nate Jones and Jamil Jaffer take us through the announcements. What’s particularly discouraging is the lack of imagination, as governments dusted off their old prejudices to handle this new problem. Europe is obsessed with data protection , the Biden administration just wants to talk and wait and talk some more , while China must have asked ChatGPT to assemble every regulatory proposal for AI ever...
Apr 19, 2023•47 min•Ep. 453
We do a long take on some of the AI safety reports that have been issued in recent weeks. Jeffery Atik first takes us through the basics of attention based AI , and then into reports from OpenAI and Stanford on AI safety. Exactly what AI safety covers remains opaque (and toxic, in my view, after the ideological purges committed by Silicon Valley’s “trust and safety” bureaucracies) but there’s no doubt that a potential existential issue lurks below the surface of the most ambitious efforts. Wheth...
Apr 11, 2023•55 min•Ep. 452
Dmitri Alperovitch joins the Cyberlaw Podcast to discuss the state of semiconductor decoupling between China and the West. It’s a broad movement, fed by both sides. China has announced that it’s investigating Micron to see if its memory chips should still be allowed into China’s supply chain (spoiler: almost certainly not). Japan has tightened up its chip-making export control rules , which will align it with U.S. and Dutch restrictions, all with the aim of slowing China’s ability to make the mo...
Apr 04, 2023•42 min•Ep. 451
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 bipartisan Restricting the Emergence of Security Threats that Risk Information and Communications Tec...
Mar 28, 2023•53 min•Ep. 450
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 Sanger joins us to explain why Ukraine’s IT Army of volunteer hackers creates political, legal, and may...
Mar 23, 2023•55 min•Ep. 449
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 Republican senators have joined to endorse the Restricting the Emergence of Security Threats that Risk ...
Mar 14, 2023•55 min
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 separate article for the Volokh Conspiracy, contending that both Gonzalez and Google would lose. All our pa...
Feb 28, 2023•54 min
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 scheme to ensure that China’s autocracy never gets its AI capabilities off the ground. One thing th...
Feb 22, 2023•56 min
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 latest “flying objects,” and whether we should all spend more time worrying about China’s hackers a...
Feb 14, 2023•53 min
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, “regulation,” is entirely missing from the piece. Meanwhile, the cybersecurity strategy that the W...
Feb 07, 2023•46 min
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 places for friends—and certainly not to Brussels, which is also pursuing similar claims of its own. So...
Jan 31, 2023•55 min
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 liability for payments to sanctioned ransomware gangs. I also note that a fascinating additional insight...
Jan 24, 2023•45 min
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. They are both excellent cybersecurity stories. “Tracers in the Dark”, I suggest, is a kind of sequel to...
Jan 21, 2023•44 min
