The Cyberlaw Podcast: How We Know the North Korean Embassy Break-In Wasn’t the Work of the CIA

In today’s News Roundup, Klon Kitchen adds to the North Korean Embassy invasion by an unknown group. Turns out some of the participants fled to the U.S. and lawyered up, but the real tipoff about attribution is that they’ve given some of the data they stole to the FBI. That rules out CIA involvement right there.

Nick Weaver talks about Hal Martin pleading guilty to unlawfully retaining massive amounts of classified NSA hacking data. It’s looking more and more as though Martin was just a packrat, making his sentence of nine years in prison about right. But as Nick points out, that leaves unexplained how the Russians got hold of so much NSA data themselves.

Paul Hughes explains the seamy Europolitics behind the new foreign investment regulations that will take effect this month.

Nick explains the deeply troubling compromise of update certs at ASUS and the company’s equally troubling response. I ask why the only agency with clear authority over an incident with important national security implications is the FTC.

Nick and I comment on the Federal Trade Commission’s pending investigation of the privacy practices of seven Internet service providers.

Speaking of sensitive data practices, Klon talks about the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States’ belated recognition that maybe the Chinese government shouldn’t have access to the most intimate desires of a portion of the U.S. LGBTQ community. I try to explain the difference between Tik Tok and Yik Yak and mostly fail.

Meanwhile, in splinternet news, the EU Parliament has approved the controversial Copyright Directive. A bunch of MEPs, soon to be running for reelection, claim they meant to vote against it, really, but somehow ended up voting for it.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development is suing Facebook for violating the Fair Housing Act. I ask listeners for help in finding guests who can talk about whether it’s a good idea to bar ad targeting that lets companies look for more customers like the ones they already have, even if their customers already skew toward particular genders and ethnicities.

Finally, Nick and I break down Gavin de Becker’s claim that the real killer in the Bezos sexting flap was Saudi Arabia. Plenty of smoke there, but the lack of a reference to any forensic evidence raises doubts about de Becker’s version of events.

Download the 257th Episode (mp3).

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The views expressed in this podcast are those of the speakers and do not reflect the opinions of the firm.