Surveillance & Privacy

The Lawfare Podcast: Asaf Lubin on Regulating Commercial Spyware

Alan Z. Rozenshtein, Asaf Lubin, Jen Patja
Wednesday, August 9, 2023, 8:00 AM
Given the increasingly pervasive use of spyware by governments to spy, how should it be regulated?

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The increasingly pervasive use and abuse of spyware by governments around the world has led to calls for regulation and even outright bans. How should these technologies be controlled? Asaf Lubin, an Associate Professor of Law at Indiana University's Maurer School of Law, thinks that the best path forward is an international agreement that would regulate, but not outlaw, these important national security and crime-fighting tools. He's just published a paper for Laware's ongoing Digital Social Contract research paper series making his case for what he calls the Commercial Spyware Accreditation System. 

Alan Rozenshtein, Associate Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota and Senior Editor at Lawfare spoke with Asaf about why current efforts to control spyware are insufficient and why only a global regime can do the job.


Alan Z. Rozenshtein is an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota Law School, Research Director and Senior Editor at Lawfare, a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, and a Term Member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Previously, he served as an Attorney Advisor with the Office of Law and Policy in the National Security Division of the U.S. Department of Justice and a Special Assistant United States Attorney in the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Maryland.
Asaf Lubin is an Associate Professor of Law at Indiana University Maurer School of Law, a Fellow at the Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research at Indiana University, an Affiliated Fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School, and a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.
Jen Patja is the editor and producer of the Lawfare Podcast and Rational Security. She currently serves as the Co-Executive Director of Virginia Civics, a nonprofit organization that empowers the next generation of leaders in Virginia by promoting constitutional literacy, critical thinking, and civic engagement. She is the former Deputy Director of the Robert H. Smith Center for the Constitution at James Madison's Montpelier and has been a freelance editor for over 20 years.

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