The Steptoe Cyberlaw Podcast: The TechProm Episode with Nuala O'Connor

It’s an extended news roundup with plenty of debate between me and Nuala O’Connor, the President and CEO of the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT). We debate whether and how CDT should pay more attention to Chinese technology abuses and examine the EU ministers’ long list of privacy measures to be rolled back and security measures to be beefed up in the wake of the Brussels and Paris Daesh attacks.

Meredith Rathbone reports on the sanctions case of the decade, as ZTE gets hit with a bag full of bricks – or is it marshmallows? – for its role in flouting US export controls. We speculate about why the US danced an enforcement two-step in this case – and who its next dance partner might be.

The Justice Department has launched a second set of indictments against foreign cyber hackers, this time aimed at Iranians who DDOS’s US banks and tried to flood the basements of Rye, NY, suburbanites. Michael Vatis and I speculate on whether other finance ministers might agree that sanctions should be imposed on those who hack banks – and on whether the Southern District will overreach in its forfeiture tactics.

I fume over the French bureaucracy’s claim that it can regulate what Americans are allowed to read on line. Nuala weighs in, and we find ourselves – mirabile dictu – in broad agreement about the dangers of the “right to be forgotten.”

I confess to uncharacteristically muted views about whether NSA should share raw traffic with other agencies. Nuala almost does the same.

And as a palate cleanser, who can resist a bitter, pointless turf fight, complete with public disparagement of one regulator by another? Hatfield v. McCoy? Stalin v. Trotsky? Hamilton v. Burr? They got nothin’ on FTC v. FCC, as FCC Commissioner Ohlhausen makes the imprudent decision to hold up FTC’s inscrutable security regulation as a gold standard – just when LabMD is making it look more like a protection racket.

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