Steptoe Cyberlaw Podcast, Episode #68: An Interview with Julian Sanchez

Our guests for Episode 68 include Julian Sanchez, senior fellow at the CATO Institute where he studies issues at the busy intersection of technology, privacy, and civil liberties, with a particular focus on national security and intelligence surveillance. They also include the entire May meeting of ISSA- NOVA, which kindly invited the Cyberlaw Podcast to go walkabout once again. The audience provides useful feedback on several of the topics covered in this episode. We begin with This Week in NSA.  And even though we had no idea how the Senate process would end up, neither it turns out did Majority Leader McConnell or anyone else. Our remarks on the Congressional dynamic remain as relevant now as when we made them, despite our intimations of obsolescence. We also cover an early judicial decision on insurance coverage for data breaches (subscription required), the US indictment of (another!) six Chinese economic espionage agents, and the personal data orphaned by Radio Shack’s bankruptcy. More importantly, we seize on a flimsy pretext to revisit Max Mosley’s five-hour, five hooker sadomasochistic orgy (subscription required) and his self-defeating efforts to wipe it from the internet by threats of lawsuit. It turns out he’s now reached a settlement with Google. I speculate that perhaps we’ve misread Mosley all this time. Maybe he’s doing this because of the Streisand effect, not in spite of it. It’s like he wants the internet to punish him, or something … Returning to serious coverage, we note that CCIPS and the Justice Department may be suffering from Baker Derangement Syndrome in the face of my defense of private cyber-investigation that goes beyond network boundaries. The Department’s latest effort involves persuading CSIS and a group of CISOs to join a draft paper that looks suspiciously like a DOJ brief in opposition to the Cyberlaw Podcast. And the supposed consensus among CISOs that’s identified in the paper breaks down quickly, rejected ten to one in an informal poll of the ISSA-NOVA audience. Julian and I mix it up over the new, revived Crypto Wars, as I challenge the claim that building access to encryption systems is always a bad idea. That, I say, will come as news to all the network security administrators who access end-to-end TLS sessions on a routine basis because the security consequences of not “breaking” that crypto are worse than the corporate front door. He recommends that I ask Dan Kaminsky to comment on that statement, and since Dan will be a guest on the podcast soon, we’ll all get to hear his answer. The Cyberlaw Podcast is now open to feedback.  Send your questions, suggestions for interview candidates, or topics to CyberlawPodcast@steptoe.com.  If you’d like to leave a message by phone, contact us at +1 202 862 5785. Download the sixty-eighth episode (mp3). Subscribe to the Cyberlaw Podcast here. We are also now on iTunes and Pocket Casts! The views expressed in this podcast are those of the speakers and do not reflect the opinions of the firm.