The Cyberlaw Podcast: North Korea’s Chances of Winning a 2040 Gold Medal in Basketball May Be Better than You Think

Richard Danzig, former Navy Secretary and a serious defense and technology thinker, speaks to us about the technology tsunami and what it means for the Pentagon. Among the risks: lots more accidents, some of them catastrophic, and “emergent” interactions among systems that no one predicts or prepares for. He calls for the Department of Defense to spend more time thinking about ways in which our weapons might kill us without any enemy action. Along the way, we ask the hard questions, including whether Kim Jung Un will use gene therapy to make his people smarter, dumber, or better basketball players.

In our news roundup, the House Judiciary Committee has struck the first blow in the 702 renewal debate. Paul Rosenzweig and I assess its bill and end up concluding that it does less damage to national security than expected, except for the unfortunate decision to sacrifice the possibility of conducting “about” collection.

Meanwhile, a turf fight inside Treasury has gotten vicious, with FinCEN lobbing (and leaking) “intelligence scandal” epithets at its sister Office of Intelligence and Analysis. Brian Egan doesn’t seem surprised about the fighting, while expressing skepticism about the likelihood of a real scandal. In the words of our President, “Sad!”

Irish courts have unsurprisingly punted on the use of standard contracts clauses to export data to the US, Michael Vatis tells us. The court has referred the hard issues to the European Court of Justice.

Speaking of sad, a third (or maybe a fourth) NSA staffer has taken Top Secret material home with disastrous results. Kaspersky’s software seems to have been great at spotting the classified malware on the staffer’s machine. The result, Paul notes, is that the malware ended up in Russian government hands, and Kaspersky’s reputation is toast in the West. Maybe it’s just a coincidence or maybe Kaspersky has given up wooing the West, but its latest report outs an unknown power that has been “piggybacking” on intrusions aimed at or run by Russian and Chinese hackers.

Finally, Brian discusses USTR’s use of the WTO to put a shot across China’s bow on that nation’s cybersecurity law.

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