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322. Bill Barr Crosses the Rubicon

For the first time in twenty years, the Justice Department is finally free to campaign for the encryption access bill it has always wanted.  Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), and Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) introduced the Lawful Access To Encrypted Data Act. (Ars Technica, Press Release) As Nick Weaver points out in the news roundup, this bill is not a compromise. It’s exactly what DOJ wants – a mandate that every significant service provider or electronic device maker build in the ability, when served with a warrant, to decrypt any data it has encrypted. 

In our interview, Under Secretary Chris Krebs, head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, drops in for a chat on election security, cyberespionage aimed at coronavirus researchers, why CISA needs new administrative subpoena authority, the value of secure DNS, and how cybersecurity has changed in the three years since he took his job.

Germany’s highest court has ruled that the German competition authority can force Facebook to obtain user consent for internal data sharing, to prevent abuse of a dominant position in the social networking market. Maury Shenk and I are dubious about the use of competition law for privacy enforcement. Those doubts could also send the ruling to a still higher forum – the European Court of Justice. 

You might think that NotPetya is three years in the rear-view mirror, but the idea of spreading malware via tax software, pioneered by the GRU with NotPetya, seems to have inspired a copycat in China. Maury reports that a Chinese bank is requiring foreign firms to install a tax app that, it turns out, has a covert backdoor. (Ars Technica, Report, NBC)

The Assange prosecution is looking less like a first amendment case and more like a garden variety hacking conspiracy thanks to the government’s amended indictment. (DOJ, Washington Post) And, as usual, the more information we have about Assange, the worse he looks.

Jim Carafano, new to the podcast, argues that face recognition is coming no matter how hard the press and NGOs work to demonize it. And working hard they are. The ACLU has filed a complaint against the Detroit police, faulting them for arresting the wrong man based on a faulty match provided by facial recognition software. (Ars Technica, Complaint)

The Facebook advertiser moral panic is gaining adherents, including Unilever and Verizon, but Nick and I wonder if the reason is politics or a collapse in ad budgets. Whatever the cause, it’s apparently led Mark Zuckerberg to promise more enforcement of Facebook’s policies.

 In short hits, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security sent a letter to chief executives of five large tech companies asking them to ensure social media platforms are not used to incite violence. Twitter has permanently suspended the account of leak publisher DDoSecrets. (Ars Technica, Cyber Scoop). Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) was told what he must have known when he filed his case: he cannot sue Twitter for defamation over tweets posted by a parody account posing as his cow. (Ars Technica, Ruling) Nick explains why it’s good news all around as Comcast partners with Mozilla to deploy encrypted DNS lookups on the Firefox browser. And Burkov gets a nine-year sentence for his hacking. 

Download the 322nd Episode (mp3). 

You can subscribe to The Cyberlaw Podcast using iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, Pocket Casts, or our RSS feed. As always, The Cyberlaw Podcast is open to feedback. Be sure to engage with @stewartbaker on Twitter. Send your questions, comments, and suggestions for topics or interviewees to CyberlawPodcast@steptoe.com. Remember: If your suggested guest appears on the show, we will send you a highly coveted Cyberlaw Podcast mug!

The views expressed in this podcast are those of the speakers and do not reflect the opinions of their institutions, clients, friends, families, or pets.

321. Using the internet to cause emotional distress is a felony?

This is the week when the movement to reform Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act got serious. The Justice Department released a substantive report suggesting multiple reforms. I was positive about many of them (my views here). Meanwhile, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) has proposed a somewhat similar set of changes in his bill, introduced this week. Nate Jones and I dig into the provisions, and both of us expect interest from Democrats as well as Republicans. 

 The National Security Agency has launched a pilot program to provide secure DNS resolver services for US defense contractors. If that’s such a good idea, I ask, why doesn’t everybody do it, and Nick Weaver tells us they can. Phil Reitinger’s Global Cyberalliance offers Quad9 for this purpose. 

 Gus Hurwitz brings us up to date on a host of European cyberlaw developments, from terror takedowns (Reuters, Tech Crunch) to competition law to the rise of a disturbingly unaccountable and self-confident judiciary. Microsoft’s Brad Smith, meanwhile, wins the prize for best marriage of business self-interest and Zeitgeist in the twenty-first century.

Hackers used LinkedIn’s private messaging feature to send documents containing malicious code which defense contractor employees were tricked into opening. Nick points out just what a boon LinkedIn is for cyberespionage (including his own), and I caution listeners not to display their tats on LinkedIn.

 Speaking of fools who kind of have it coming, Nick tells the story of the now former eBay executives who have been charged with sustained and imaginatively-over-the-top harassment of the owners of a newsletter that had not been deferential to eBay. (Wired, DOJ)

 It’s hard to like the defendants in that case, I argue, but the law they’ve been charged under is remarkably sweeping. Apparently it’s a felony to intentionally use the internet to cause substantial emotional distress. Who knew? Most of us who use Twitter thought that was its main purpose. I also discover that special protections under the law are extended not only to prevent internet threats and harassment of service animals but also horses of any kind. Other livestock are apparently left unprotected. PETA, call your office.

Child abusers cheered when Zoom buckled to criticism of its limits on end-to-end encryption, but Nick insists that the new policy offers safeguards for policing misuse of the platform. (Ars Technica, Zoom)

 I take a minute to roast Republicans in Congress who have announced that no FISA reauthorization will be adopted until John Durham’s investigation of FISA abuses is done, which makes sense until you realize that the FISA provisions up for reauthorization have nothing to do with the abuses Durham is investigating. So we’re giving international terrorists a break from scrutiny simply because the President can’t keep the difference straight.

 Nate notes that a story previewed in April has now been confirmed: Team Telecom is recommending the blocking of a Hong Kong-US undersea cable over national security concerns.

 Gus reminds us that a bitter trade fight between the US and Europe over taxes on Silicon Valley services is coming. (Politico, Ars Technica)

 Nick and I mourn the complete meltdown of mobile phone contact tracing. I argue that from here on out, some portion of coronavirus deaths should be classified as mechanogenic (caused by engineering malpractice). Nick proposes instead a naming convention built around the Therac-25. 

And we close with a quick look at the latest data dump from Distributed Denial of Secrets. Nick thinks it’s strikingly contemporaneous but also surprisingly unscandalizing.

Download the 321st Episode (mp3). 

You can subscribe to The Cyberlaw Podcast using iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, Pocket Casts, or our RSS feed. As always, The Cyberlaw Podcast is open to feedback. Be sure to engage with @stewartbaker on Twitter. Send your questions, comments, and suggestions for topics or interviewees to CyberlawPodcast@steptoe.com. Remember: If your suggested guest appears on the show, we will send you a highly coveted Cyberlaw Podcast mug!

The views expressed in this podcast are those of the speakers and do not reflect the opinions of their institutions, clients, friends, families, or pets.

 

Reforming section 230 of the Communications Decency Act

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act seems to inspire bipartisan antipathy.

Joe Biden said it “should be revoked, immediately,” and President Trump characteristically topped that by tweeting “REVOKE 230!”

They’re both right, at least directionally. Section 230, which dates to 1996,  shields platforms from civil liability stemming from third-party content on their sites. It has been central to the success of crowdsourced platforms like YouTube, Twitter and Facebook, protecting them from potentially staggering liability for the online misbehavior of their users. But by exempting the platforms from the usual rules of liability, Section 230 is also a kind of subsidy, and one that protects some of the biggest companies in the world from expensive litigation.

Such a subsidy made more sense in 1996, when there were only 36 million internet users in the world. Now that 4.6 billion people regularly go online, it’s fair to ask why the U.S. should give internet platforms a sweeping exemption from the laws that govern everyone else. In recent years, more and more politicians on either side of the aisle have been pointedly asking this question, though perhaps for different reasons: Some Democrats still blame social media for making Trump’s election possible, while Republicans fault the industry for how publicly it has regretted its role in the 2016 campaign.

But revoking Section 230 is not a good idea. Mad as people may be at the platforms, those companies will need at least some liability protection if they’re going to keep giving us the crowdsourced content we all consume today. Platforms particularly need protection from defamation liability, which falls on both the author and the publisher. No social media company can police its content for libelous posts. The platforms simply are not equipped to evaluate which statements are true and which are false and defamatory.

That doesn’t end the debate, though. The industry may need an exemption from defamation liability, but why should it be immune if it ignores user misconduct that is entirely predictable and largely preventable? That question led Congress, on an overwhelmingly bipartisan basis, to amend Section 230 by  adopting FOSTA, the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act of 2017. FOSTA withdrew immunity from online platforms that knowingly let their users facilitate sex trafficking. And it turned out that most platforms didn’t need protection for facilitating sex trafficking. A few online sites that depended on prostitution ad revenue went out of business, but Big Social Media continued to thrive.

So the next questions for Section 230 skeptics on both sides of the aisle should be, “Where else has Congress given social media an immunity it didn’t need? And how can policymakers chip away at this overgenerous subsidy without putting at risk the survival of social media?”

The most thoughtful answers I’ve seen come from a Justice Department report released this month. Without grandstanding, it offers several proposals that ought to have bipartisan appeal.

The report begins by acknowledging that social media companies still need protection from liability for things they can’t be expected to police, like defamation. But the report sees a vast difference between being unable to stop criminal behavior and actively promoting it, as the sex trafficking sites did before FOSTA. It draws a simple lesson in FOSTA’s success—the online platforms worth propping up don’t need immunity for facilitating or soliciting illegal conduct.

The Justice Department also suggests that platforms should be required to go further in regulating user conduct— they should face liability if they fail to take reasonable steps to prevent the distribution of child sex abuse materials and terrorist and cyberstalking content. The only thing surprising about this proposal is that Section 230 doesn’t already demand it; the law confers its immunity without asking the platforms to do anything at all in return. It’s past time to spell out exactly what is expected of platforms in exchange for the subsidy they receive. Reasonable efforts to stop things like child sex abuse is certainly not too much to ask.

Among its other suggestions for trimming Section 230 immunity, the report rejects the extreme applications of the law that have gained currency since 1996. Most notably, online platforms have argued that Section 230 creates an immunity from antitrust claims. This is outrageous. If today’s monolithic platforms use their control of the national discourse to suppress criticism of their power or praise for their competitors, they don’t deserve immunity; they deserve an injunction and treble damages. Similarly, there’s no justification for extending platforms’ defamation immunity to the point where they can ignore court libel rulings without consequences (as, for example, Yelp has done).

So far, so bipartisan. If a reformed Section 230 forces social media to be more cautious about facilitating criminal conduct online, neither party will weep. There’s less unanimity about reforming a second immunity granted by Section 230. (Yes, there are two!) The second immunity protects the platforms not when they allow speech but when they suppress it. Conservatives think (rightly, in my view) that Silicon Valley tilts against them in these decisions, whether the result is a takedown or a warning label or a “shadow ban.”

The second immunity protects online platforms from liability when they take down content that is sexual, violent, harassing or “otherwise objectionable,” as long as they act in “good faith.” In an age when everyone objects to everything, this language invites weaponization. It is only prudent for Congress to narrow the definition of “otherwise objectionable” speech so that the provision gives special protection to the platforms mainly when they’re taking down speech that violates the law.

Republicans who think they’ve been victimized by social media censorship will of course find something to support here, but so too can anyone else uncomfortable with letting a handful of Silicon Valley monoliths decide what can and can’t be said online. For starters, unlike the first immunity, which protects against the clear risk of ruinous defamation liability, it’s not even fully clear what lurking liability the second immunity is needed to head off. Successful lawsuits for refusing to publish someone else’s work are not exactly thick on the ground.

The Justice Department’s other recommendation here is to attach some more tangible standards to the statute’s requirement that content be policed in “good faith.” To meet this requirement, the department urges, content moderation policies should be stated “plainly and with particularity” and takedown decisions should be notified in a timely way and explain “with particularity the factual basis for the restriction.” This will certainly be popular on the right, which thinks it’s unfairly targeted for suppression. But plenty of speakers on the left feel the same way. The only obvious cure for the widespread mistrust of platforms is for them to embrace greater transparency and candor. They have resisted, sometimes with good reason, sometimes without; but “trust us” is no longer a persuasive argument. This proposal would encourage them to move away from their largely opaque content moderation practices.

In short, and surely surprising to some, this Justice Department has made a real contribution toward bipartisan reform of Section 230. The temptation among Democrats will be to score partisan points by dismissing the report.

That would be a mistake.

Because, having embraced a candidate tied to the unrealistic position that “section 230 should be revoked, immediately,” Democrats are going to need more workable solutions that keep the essential core of Section 230 while cutting  back the platforms’ now-unjustifiable government subsidy.

And, when they go looking for those ideas, they’re going to find that a big chunk of them are already in this report.

320. Hackers for Hire

Our interview this week is with Chris Bing, a cybersecurity reporter with Reuters, and John Scott-Railton, Senior Researcher at Citizen Lab and PhD student at UCLA. John coauthored Citizen Lab’s report last week on BellTroX and Indian hackers for hire, and Chris reported for Reuters on the same organization’s activities – and criminal exposure – in the United States.

The most remarkable aspect of the story is how thoroughly normalized the hacking of legal and lobbying opponents seems to have become, at least in parts of the US legal and investigative ecosystem. I suggest that instead of a long extradition battle, the US should give the head of BellTroX a ticket to the US and a guaranteed income for the next few years as a witness against his customers.

In the news roundup, Nick Weaver tells the remarkable story of how Facebook funded an exploit aimed at taking down a particularly vile online abuser of young girls -- one who was rendered nearly invulnerable by his use of TAILS, the secure, thumb drive-based communication system (Vice, Gizmodo). This is a great story because it really doesn’t conform to any of the stilted narratives into which most internet security stories are usually jammed.

Nick also notes Big Tech’s pledge to do more to stop child abuse online. I suggest that only Dr. Evil would be impressed by the amounts of money being invested in the campaign.

Well, another week, another Zoom bomb.  Now the company is taking heat because it terminated several Tiananmen Square commemorative Zoom sessions after China complained (NYT, Zoom). David Kris and I don’t think Zoom had much choice about cutting off the Chinese customers.  Terminating the US account holder who organized a session, however, was a bad move – and one that’s since been corrected by the company.

Nate Jones and I square off again for Round 545 on content moderation, spurred this time by reports that Sen. Josh Hawley is drafting legislation inspired by the Trump Administration’s Section 230 Executive Order. Meanwhile several Republican senators are pushing the FCC to act on the order. Nate and I find rare bipartisan common ground on the proposal that Congress require social media companies to take down foreign government online propagands – and maybe work with the US government to stop it at the source.

David reports on a (deservedly) obscure EU cloud independence project. It seems to have been embraced by Microsoft, which I accuse of going full AT&T – embracing government regulation as a competitive differentiator. As if to prove my point, Microsoft announces that it’s getting out of the business of doing facial recognition for the police – until it can persuade Congress to regulate its competitors.  

Why are spies targeting vaccine research? Nate has the answer; he draws on the excellent Risky Biz newsletter analysis of what drives COVID-19 cyberespionage.

Nick flags the potential significance of ARM wrestling, as the UK chip designer ARM fights its JV partner for control of its Chinese joint venture. In a story that made the cut because of Twitter and Linkedin feedback, Nick assigns a “moderate” threat label to the latest Universal Plug n Pwn exploit. (It’s only moderate because there are so many pwned IOT devices already in a position to DDOS targets of opportunity.)

In quick hits, I note that Israel has halted its controversial use of intelligence capabilities to monitor the spread of the coronavirus, but the government reserves the right to revive monitoring if a second wave shows up (JPost, Yahoo). Poor Brewster Kahle is looking like an internet hippie who fell asleep at Woodstock and woke up at Altamont. The Internet Archive is ending its program of offering free, unrestricted copies of e-books, but the publishers who sued over that program may decide to keep suing until they’ve broken his entire “digital library” model, and maybe the Internet Archive as well (NYT, Ars Technica). That would be a shame. Finally, even if you have a thousand talents, honesty may not be one of them. Charles Lieber, the Harvard University professor arrested for lying about his lucrative China thousand-talents contracts, has now been indicted on false statement charges.

Download the 320th Episode (mp3).

You can subscribe to The Cyberlaw Podcast using iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, Pocket Casts, or our RSS feed. As always, The Cyberlaw Podcast is open to feedback. Be sure to engage with @stewartbaker on Twitter. Send your questions, comments, and suggestions for topics or interviewees to CyberlawPodcast@steptoe.com. Remember: If your suggested guest appears on the show, we will send you a highly coveted Cyberlaw Podcast mug!

The views expressed in this podcast are those of the speakers and do not reflect the opinions of their institutions, clients, friends, families, or pets.

319. AI Means Superfuzzing plus Whaling at Scale

Our interview with Ben Buchanan begins with his report on how artificial intelligence may influence national security and cybersecurity. Ben’s quick takes: AI is better for defense than offense, and probably even better for propaganda. The fun part of the interview, in my view, is Ben’s explanation of how to poison the AI that’s trying to hack you – and the scary possibility that China is already experimenting with poisoning Silicon Valley’s content moderation AI.

By popular request, we revisited a story we skipped last week; this time we do a pretty deep dive on the ruling that Capital One can’t claim attorney-client work product privilege in an intrusion response report that Mandiant prepared for the bank after the breach. Steptoe litigator Charles Michael  and I talk about how IR firms and CISOs should respond to the decision, assuming it stands up on appeal.

Maury Shenk notes the latest of about a hundred warnings, this time from Christopher Krebs, the director of DHS’s cybersecurity agency and the head of Britain’s GCHQ, that China’s intelligence service ­– and every other intelligence service on the planet – seem to be targeting COVID-19 research. I ask whether sauce for the Western goose should be sauce for the Chinese gander.

Maury takes us through the week in internet copyright fights. The most overdetermined takedown in history comes when a Trump-hating social media company combines with ideological copyright enforcement and the world’s dumbest content bots to remove a Trump campaign video tribute to George Floyd. The video is still available on Trump’s YouTube channel.

Maury and I puzzle over Instagram’s failure to provide a license to users of its embedding API. This could mean an unwelcome surprise for users who believed that embedding images, rather than hosting them directly, provides insulation against copyright claims.

Finally, much as I love Brewster Kahle, I’m afraid that his latest campaign marks a transition from internet hippie to “holy fool” – and maybe a broke one at that. His Internet Archive, the online library best known for maintaining the Internet Wayback Machine, makes scanned copies of books available to the public on terms that resemble a library’s -- one person gets one copy for a few weeks and then it goes to the next reader. The setup was arguably legal – and no one was suing – until Kahle decided to respond to covid-19 by letting people download more books than his company had paid for. Now he faces an ugly copyright lawsuit.

Speaking of ugly lawsuits, Mark MacCarthy and Paul Rosenzweig comment on the Center for Democracy and Technology’s complaint that Trump violated tech companies’ right to free speech with his executive order on section 230. (Reuters – NYT) I doubt this lawsuit will get far.

This Week in Working the Ref: Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg are facing harsh criticism from users, competitors, and civil rights organizations for failing to censor people those groups hate. (Ars Technica – Politico). Meanwhile, Snap scores points by ending promotion of Trump’s account after concluding that his tweets about official action were incitements to violence. I can’t help wondering what Snap would have done with FDR’s December 8 “day that will live in infamy” speech.

Where is Nate Jones when you need him?  He would love this story: A Twitter user sacrificed a Twitter account to show that Trump is treated differently than others by the platform. Of course, the panel notes, that’s pretty much what Twitter says it does.

In quick hits, I serve notice that no one should be surprised if Justice brings an adtech antitrust suit against Google. The Israeli government announces an attack on its infrastructure -- long after it retaliated against Iran for launching the attack. And a pretty good state-level hacker – probably not the Russians, I argue – is targeting industrial firms.

Listen to Episode 319 here: [embed]https://www.steptoe.com/podcasts/TheCyberlawPodcast-319.mp3[/embed]

And download the 319th Episode here (mp3).

You can subscribe to The Cyberlaw Podcast using iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, Pocket Casts, or our RSS feed. As always, The Cyberlaw Podcast is open to feedback. Be sure to engage with @stewartbaker on Twitter. Send your questions, comments, and suggestions for topics or interviewees to CyberlawPodcast@steptoe.com. Remember: If your suggested guest appears on the show, we will send you a highly coveted Cyberlaw Podcast mug!

318. Dark Mirror – Interviewing Bart Gellman

This episode features an in-depth (and occasionally contentious) interview with Bart Gellman about his new book, Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the American Surveillance State, which can be found on his website and on Amazon. I’m tagged in the book as having been sharply critical of Gellman’s Snowden stories, and I live up to the billing in this interview. He responds to my critique in good part. Gellman offers detailed insights into Edward Snowden’s motives and relationships to foreign governments, as well as how journalism – and journalistic lawyering – is done in the Big Leagues.

Our news roundup focuses heavily on the Trump Administration’s executive order on section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (Wall Street Journal – Washington Post). I end up debating all three of my co-panelists – Nate Jones, Nick Weaver, and Evelyn Douek, rejoining us on a particularly good day, given her expertise. We agree to disagree on whether Silicon Valley applies its rules in a fashion that discriminates against conservatives. More interesting is the rough consensus that Silicon Valley’s heavy influence over our speech is worth worrying about and that transparency is one of the better ways to discipline that influence. No one but me is willing to consider the possibility that the executive order represents a good step toward transparency.

Nate and I find much room to agree, though, on the tragicomedy emerging from the reauthorization of three relatively straightforward FISA provisions. Stay tuned for a House-Senate conference, plus heavy lobbying of the President.

Nick explains NSA’s outing of Russian military hackers targeting mail relay software (CyberScoop – NSA).

Nate and I cover the latest in US-China decoupling – the FCC and Justice Department enthusiasm for kicking Chinese telecom firms out of the country and, in a possible new front, heavy scrutiny being given to Chinese-built transformers.

Evelyn tells us that, as a visa holder, she’s definitely hoping that the courts overturn US rules forcing visa applicants to disclose their social media handles. I predict that her hopes will be dashed.

Finally, Nick explains who needs a “quantum holographic catalyzer” to protect against 5G telecom emissions.  Quick answer: No one.  It’s a fake cure for fake malady.

Listen to episode 318 now.

You can subscribe to The Cyberlaw Podcast using iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, Pocket Casts, or our RSS feed. As always, The Cyberlaw Podcast is open to feedback. Be sure to engage with @stewartbaker on Twitter. Send your questions, comments, and suggestions for topics or interviewees to CyberlawPodcast@steptoe.com. Remember: If your suggested guest appears on the show, we will send you a highly coveted Cyberlaw Podcast mug!

The views expressed in this podcast are those of the speakers and do not reflect the opinions of their institutions, clients, friends, families, or pets.

The Cyberlaw Podcast conspiracy, revealed. Maybe.

In the 2020s, one fears, everyone will feature in a conspiracy theory for fifteen minutes. In an effort to get in front of this development, and the inevitable Twitter mob to follow, I will now disclose the secret symbol that I anticipate will drive future conspiracy theories about the Cyberlaw Podcast.

Many readers are familiar with the podcasts's logo, shown to the right. 

Less familiar to readers under 70 is the image to the left. It is a 1957 cartoon published in Pravda, the Soviet Union's dominant newspaper, to mark the surprise launch of a Soviet satellite into earth orbit -- well ahead of anything the United States was able to do.

It triumphantly shows little Soviet Sputnik beaming its signal back to a smiling world (well, as close to smiling as anyone in the Soviet Union ever seemed to get in public). It was a remarkable achievement, and one that the Soviets turned into a great propaganda coup.

The similarities could be a complete coincidence uncovered by a listener who's also a Soviet history buff, but where's the fun in that? Future conspiracy buffs will surely find a secret message hidden in the podcast's choice of logo. But what message? Some may think it's a dog whistle to rally Russian revanchists to our audience. Those who believe I'm an egregious statist will no doubt see it as confirmation of my secret plan to collectivize American agriculture and liquidate the kulaks. Other theories are welcome.

Thanks to Jacob Nelson for the find.

 

 

First thoughts on the section 230 executive order

For all the passion it has unleashed, President Trump's executive order on section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is pretty modest in impact. It doesn't do anything to undermine the part of section 230 that protects social media from liability for the things that its users say. That's paragraph (1) of section 230(b), and the order practically ignores it.

Instead, the order is all about paragraph (2), which protects platforms from liability when they remove or restrict certain content: "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of  … any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable."

This makes some sense in terms of the President's grievance.  He isn't objecting to Twitter's willingness to give a platform to people he disagrees with.  He objects to Twitter's decision to cordon off his speech with a fact-check warning, as well as all the other occasions on which Twitter and other social media platforms have taken action against conservative speech. So it makes sense for him to focus on the provision that seems to immunize biased and pretextual decisions to downgrade viewpoints unpopular in the Valley.

(I note here that the existence of a liberal bias in the application of social media content mediation is heavily contested, especially by commentators on the left. They point out, correctly, that the evidence of a left-leaning bias is anecdotal and subjective. Of course the same could be said of left-leaning bias in media outlets like the Washington Post or the New York Times. I'm friends with many reporters who deny such a bias exists. Yet most readers of these and other traditional media recognize that there is bias at work there -- rarely reporting the facts, but often in deciding which stories are newsworthy, or how the facts are presented, or past events are summarized. If you are sure there's no bias at work in the mainstream press, then I can't persuade you that the same dynamic is at work on social media's content moderation teams.  But if you have seen even a glimmer of liberal bias in the New York Times, you might ask yourself why there would be less in the decisions of Silicon Valley's content police, whose decisions are often made in secret by unaccountable young people who have not been inculcated in a journalistic ethic of objectivity.)

What's interesting and useful in the order's focus on content derogation is that it addresses precisely the claim that anticonservative bias isn't real. For it is aimed at bringing speech suppression decisions into the light, where we can all evaluate them.

In fact, that's pretty much all it's aimed at.  The order really only has two and a half substantive provisions, and they're all designed to increase the transparency of takedown decisions.

The first provision tells NTIA (the executive branch's liaison to the FCC) to suggest a rulemaking to the FCC. The purpose of the rule is to spell out what it means for the tech giants to carry out their takedown policies "in good faith." The order makes clear the President's view that takedowns are not "taken in good faith if they are "deceptive, pretextual, or inconsistent with a provider's terms of service" or if they are "the result of inadequate notice, the product of unreasoned explanation, or [undertaken] without a meaningful opportunity to be heard." This is not a Fairness Doctrine for the internet; it doesn't mandate that social media show balance in their moderation policies. It is closer to a Due Process Clause for the platforms.  They may not announce a neutral rule and then apply it pretextually. And the platforms can't ignore the speech interests of their users by refusing to give users even notice and an opportunity to be heard when their speech is suppressed. 

The second substantive provision is similar. It asks the FTC, which has a century of practice disciplining the deceptive and unfair practices of private companies, to examine social media takedown decisions through that lens.  The FTC is encouraged (as an independent agency it can't be told) to determine whether entities relying on section 230 "restrict speech in ways that do not align with those entities' public representations about those practices."

(The remaining provision is an exercise of the President's sweeping power to impose conditions on federal contracting. It tells federal agencies to take into account the "viewpoint-based speech restrictions imposed by each online platform" in deciding whether the platform is an "appropriate" place for the government to post its own speech. It's hard to argue with that provision in the abstract. Federal agencies have no business advertising on, say, Pornhub. In application, of course, there are plenty of improper or unconstitutional ways the policy could play out. But as a vehicle for government censorship it lacks teeth; one doubts that the business side of these companies cares how many federal agencies maintain their own Facebook pages or Twitter accounts. And in any event, we'll have time to evaluate this sidecar provision when it is actually applied.)

That's it.  The order calls on social media platforms to explain their speech suppression policies and then to apply them honestly. It asks them to provide notice, a fair hearing, and an explanation to users who think they've been treated unfairly or worse by particular moderators.  

I've had many conversations with participants in the debate over the risks arising from social media's sudden control of what ordinary Americans (or Brazilians or Germans) can say to their friends and neighbors about the issues of the day. That is a remarkable and troubling development for those of us who hoped the internet would bring a flowering of  views free from the intermediation of traditional sources. But you don't have to be a conservative to worry about how this unprecedented power could be abused.

In another context, I have offered a rule of thumb for evaluating new technology: You don't really know how evil a technology can be until the engineers who depend on it for employment begin to fear for their jobs.  Today, social media's power is treated by the companies themselves as a modest side benefit of their astounding rise to riches; they can stamp out views they hate as a side gig while tending to the real business of extending their reach and revenue. But every one of us should wonder, "How they will use that power when the ride ends and their jobs are at risk?" And, more to the point, "How will we discover what they've done?"

Such questions explain why even those who don't lean to the right think that the companies' control of our discourse needs more scrutiny. There are no easy ways to discipline the power of Big Tech in a country that has a first amendment, but the answer most observers offer is more transparency.

We need, in short, to know more about when and how and why the big platforms decide to suppress our speech.

This executive order is a good first step toward finding out.

317. Has Apple opened a new legal front against the FBI -- without telling it?

Our interview is with Mara Hvistendahl, investigative journalist at The Intercept and author of a new book, The Scientist and the Spy: A True Story of China, the FBI, and Industrial Espionage, as well as a deep WIRED article on the least known Chinese AI champion, iFlytek. Mara’s book raises questions about the expense and motivations of the FBI’s pursuit of commercial spying from China.

In the News Roundup, Gus Hurwitz, Nick Weaver, and I wrestle with whether Apple’s lawsuit against Corellium is really aimed at the FBI. The answer looks to be affirmative, since an Apple victory would make it harder for contractors to find hackable flaws in the iPhone.

Germany’s top court ruled that German intelligence can no longer freely spy on foreigners – or share intelligence with other western countries. The court seems to be trying to leave the door open to something that looks like intelligence collection, but the hurdles are many. Which reminds me that I somehow missed the 100th anniversary of the Weimar Republic.

There’s Trouble Right Here in Takedown City. Gus lays out all the screwy and maybe even dangerous takedown decisions that came to light last week. YouTube censored epidemiologist Knut Wittkowski for opposing lockdown. It suspended and then reinstated a popular Android podcast app for the crime of cataloging COVID-19 content. Thanks to Google, anyone can engage in a self-help right to be forgotten with a bit of backdating and a plagiarism claim. And classical musicians are taking it on the chin in their battle with aggressive copyright enforcement bots and a sluggish Silicon Valley response.

In that climate, who can blame the Supreme Court for ducking cases asking for a ruling on the scope of Section 230? They’ve dodged one from the 2d Circuit already, and we predict the same outcome in the next one, from the 9th.

Finally, Gus unpacks the recent report on the DMCA from the Copyright Lobby Off, er, the Copyright Office.

With relief, we turn to Matthew Heiman for more cyber and less law. It sure looks like Israel launched a disruptive cyberattack on Iranian port facility. It was probably a response to Iranian cybermeddling with Israeli water systems.

Nick covers Bizarro-world cybersecurity: It turns out malware authors now can hire their own black-market security pentesters.

I ask about open-source security and am met with derisive laughter, which certainly seems fair after flaws were found in dozens of applications.

I also cover a Turing Test for the 21st Century: Can you sext successfully with an AI and not know it’s an AI? And the news from AI speech imitation is that Presidents Trump and Obama have fake-endorsed Lyrebird.

Gus reminds us that most of privacy law is about unintended consequences, like telling Grandma she’s violating GDPR by posting her grandchildren's photos without their parents' consent.

BEERINT at last makes its appearance, as it turns out that military and intelligence personnel can be tracked with a beer enthusiast app.

Finally, in the wake of Joe Rogan’s deal with Spotify, I offer assurances that the Cyberlaw Podcast is not going to sell out for $100 million.

Download the 317th Episode (mp3).

You can subscribe to The Cyberlaw Podcast using iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, Pocket Casts, or our RSS feed. As always, The Cyberlaw Podcast is open to feedback. Be sure to engage with @stewartbaker on Twitter. Send your questions, comments, and suggestions for topics or interviewees to CyberlawPodcast@steptoe.com. Remember: If your suggested guest appears on the show, we will send you a highly coveted Cyberlaw Podcast mug!

The views expressed in this podcast are those of the speakers and do not reflect the opinions of their institutions, clients, friends, families, or pets.

316. Our AI Future – Sexbots, Toilet Drones, and Robocops?

Our interview guest, Peter Singer, continues to write (with August Cole) what he calls "useful fiction"– thrillers that explore the real-world implications of emerging technologies. His latest is Burn-In: A Novel of the Real Robotic Revolution, to be released May 26, 2020.  The thoroughly researched (and footnoted!) book is a painless way to understand the social and economic changes new AI and robotic technologies will make possible and their impact on actual human beings. The interview ranges widely over these policy implications, plus a few plot spoilers.

In the News Roundup, David Kris covers the latest Congressional FISA Follies, leading me into a rant on the utter irresponsibility of subjecting national security authorities to regular expiration – and equally regular ransom demands from the least responsible elements of Congress. Speaking of FISA, it turns out that the December Pensacola shootings were hatched by al-Qaeda's Yemen franchise. Why are we only learning this in May? Because the evidence comes from an iPhone whose security Apple refused to find a way around. The FBI's self-help solution worked in the end, but not until the trail had gone cold.

US-China decoupling is in overdrive this week. Nick Weaver talks about the move by the Trump Administration to achieve semiconductor self-sufficiency – and probably-not-coincidental announcements that TSMC will build a chip factory in Arizona and that the Commerce Department has drafted a new export rule aimed at making it much harder for TSMC to build chips for Huawei. In response, China is preparing a list of unreliable US suppliers of technology. I wonder whether putting companies on the list for diversifying their supply chain out of China will have the long-term effect of making companies more reluctant to open new supply relationships with Chinese companies.

David and I note that recent US accusations of Chinese and Iranian cyber intrusions on COVID-19 research may be more than just the usual imprecations.

And Nick explains why so many US professors are going to jail for undisclosed China ties. The key word is "undisclosed."

Mark MacCarthy previews France's (and Germany's and the EU's and the UK's) increasingly tough sanctions for US social media firms that fail to remove "hate speech" and other bad content within 24 hours (or sometimes one hour). More and more, it seems, Section 230 immunity is just a local US ordinance.

Mark and Nick review the latest trial balloon from Europe's technocrats: How about a Chinese firewall for Europe, ask apparently respectable policy thinkers working for the European Parliament.

David and Nick find themselves agreeing with the latest release from DHS's CISA pouring cold water on online voting.

In quick hits, David notes the Trump administration's now routine extension of the "telecom national security" Executive Order, Nick brings us This Week in NSO Bashing, I touch on a ransomware and doxing threat that has tripped up a celebrity law firm, and Nick and I muse on why cell phone contact tracing seems about to jump the shark.

We close with a surprising catfishing story that leads us into a discussion of the relative hotness of recent NSA directors and whether it's true that being dual-hatted makes you irresistible to women.

Download the 316th Episode (mp3).

You can subscribe to The Cyberlaw Podcast using iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, Pocket Casts, or our RSS feed. As always, The Cyberlaw Podcast is open to feedback. Be sure to engage with @stewartbaker on Twitter. Send your questions, comments, and suggestions for topics or interviewees to CyberlawPodcast@steptoe.com. Remember: If your suggested guest appears on the show, we will send you a highly coveted Cyberlaw Podcast mug!

The views expressed in this podcast are those of the speakers and do not reflect the opinions of their institutions, clients, friends, families, or pets.

315. Gapple to Government: “Send Your Man to See My Man. And We'll Stiff Him.”

J.P. Morgan once responded to Teddy Roosevelt’s charge that his railway trust violated federal law by telling the President, “If we have done anything wrong, send your man to see my man, and we’ll fix it up.” That used to be the gold standard for monopolist arrogance in dealing with government, but Google and Apple have put J.P. Morgan in the shade with their latest instruction to the governments of the world: You can’t use our app to trace COVID-19 infections unless you promise not to use it for quarantine or law enforcement purposes.

The two companies are able to dictate this policy because between them they have about 99% of the phone OS market. That’s more control than Morgan had of US railways, and their dominance apparently gives them the clout to send a message that improves on Morgan's: “If you think we’ve done something wrong, don’t bother to send your man; ours is too busy to meet.”

Nate Jones and I discuss Silicon Valley overreach in this episode. (In that vein, I apologize unreservedly to John D. Rockefeller, to whom I mistakenly attributed the Morgan quote.) The sad result is that what began as a promising technological adjunct to covid-19 contact tracing has been delayed and muddled by ideological engineers in the Valley to the point where it isn’t likely to be deployed and used in a timely way.

Another lesson we draw in today’s episode is for authoritarian governments: Worry less about Cyber Command and more about NGOs. Citizen Lab has released a great paper making the case that WeChat monitors its users outside China, not to suppress their speech but to flag documents and images for later suppression inside China. Ironically, Matthew Heiman notes, Western users of WeChat who circulate human rights material are giving China’s censors the ability to hash and block that material as soon as it crosses the Great Firewall -- where it's really needed.

Meanwhile, Nate points out, Bellingcat has done for Russia’s GRU what Citizen Lab did for China. Perhaps inspired by Germany’s indictment of Dmitry Badin for hacking the Bundestag, Bellingcat doxes him to a fare-thee-well, finding his phone number, car registration, wife's home page, GRU office address, and preposterously bad password.

David Kris, meanwhile, explains the intersection of export control law and the Law of Unintended Consequences, as the US Commerce Department finds that its efforts to isolate Huawei may be excluding US firms from some standards bodies.

Anthony Anscombe joins us from Steptoe’s class action practice to unpack the recent Seventh Circuit decision on Article III standing and the second dumbest privacy law in the country – Illinois’s Biometric Information Privacy Act.

I note that Israel’s passive-aggressive Supreme Court, meanwhile, has found a second way to say, “Meh,” to the Israeli government’s use of intelligence capabilities to do contact tracing.

Matthew lays out what’s at stake as the Senate rewards the House’s “corona-cation” by trying again to pass its FISA bill. That may happen as early as today.

In short hits, every government's hackers are adding COVID-19 to their targets, going after everyone from the WHO to coronavirus researchers. And I make an effort to explain why Apple has brought a DMCA copyright lawsuit against Corellium. It’s all about the “chilling effect” on security research. And maybe one particular Five Eyes researcher, Azimuth. I make the case for Justice Department intervention on Corellium’s behalf – or at least Azimuth’s. Following up on last week's story, Banjo’s CEO finds himself canceled for his (bad) acts as a 17-year-old. And, finally, where is Jean-Paul Sartre when you need him? He’s the only one who can resolve the odd dispute over “authenticity” between Twitter and the US State Department.

Download the 315th Episode (mp3).

You can subscribe to The Cyberlaw Podcast using iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, Pocket Casts, or our RSS feed. As always, The Cyberlaw Podcast is open to feedback. Be sure to engage with @stewartbaker on Twitter. Send your questions, comments, and suggestions for topics or interviewees to CyberlawPodcast@steptoe.com. Remember: If your suggested guest appears on the show, we will send you a highly coveted Cyberlaw Podcast mug!

The views expressed in this podcast are those of the speakers and do not reflect the opinions of their institutions, clients, friends, families, or pets.

314. Mirror-Image Decoupling

We begin the news with a US measure to secure its supply chain for a critical infrastructure – the bulk power grid. David Kris unpacks a new Executive Order restricting purchases of foreign equipment for the grid. As with all these measures, China is the unspoken target.

Nick Weaver, meanwhile, explains the remarkable extent of surveillance built into Xiaomi phones and questions the company's claim that it was merely acquiring pseudonymous ad-related data like others in the industry.

It wouldn't be the Cyberlaw Podcast if we didn't wrangle over using mobile phones to combat the coronavirus. Mark MacCarthy says that several countries – Australia, the UK, and perhaps France – are deviating from the Gapple model for  contact tracing. Several others, though, have bought in. India, meanwhile, is planning a much more government-driven approach to using phone apps to deal with the pandemic.

Mark ventures into even more contested territory in response to an article in The Atlantic by Jack Goldsmith and Andrew Woods, who argue that China has won the debate with John Perry Barlow over whether the Internet will be a force for free speech. Mark and I more or less agree, which sends me off on a rant about the growing self-confidence and ham-handedness of Big Tech as they get comfortable in their role as Guardians of What You Can't Say on the Internet. Things you can't say include plausible arguments about the still highly unsettled question of how best to deal with COVID-19 and descriptions of treatment options that have been entertained by President Trump without establishment approval, not to mention "unverified" statements (not, notably, false ones) that could cause "social unrest." Just reading such things, it turns out, will lead at least Facebook to track you down and tell you that it knows what you did and wants to correct your flirtation with thoughtcrime – a practice that earned it praise from Rep. Adam Schiff.

Nick and I note the difficulty Facebook is having getting out of FOSTA cases in Texas, and I ask why FOSTA hasn't already spelled doom for end-to-end encryption since it basically does what the EARN IT Act does, and all right-thinking Americans have been told that that act Spells Doom For End-to-End Encryption.

David explains why Amazon is facing tough new scrutiny from both parties: A Wall Street Journal article that questioned the accuracy of Amazon testimony before Congress has generated claims of perjury, a demand that Jeff Bezos testify, and suggestions that the administration open a criminal antitrust probe.

"You can't decouple from me! I'm decoupling from you!" That's the sentiment from Chinese officials, anyway, as they push forward with their own remarkably familiar supply chain security regulations. David explains that while the rules are similar to those in the United States, they're tougher and more likely to be implemented in a slow, inexorable way. And, of course, the United States is the unspoken target of them all.

Download the 314th Episode (mp3).

You can subscribe to The Cyberlaw Podcast using iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, Pocket Casts, or our RSS feed. As always, The Cyberlaw Podcast is open to feedback. Be sure to engage with @stewartbaker on Twitter. Send your questions, comments, and suggestions for topics or interviewees to CyberlawPodcast@steptoe.com. Remember: If your suggested guest appears on the show, we will send you a highly coveted Cyberlaw Podcast mug!

The views expressed in this podcast are those of the speakers and do not reflect the opinions of their institutions, clients, friends, families, or pets.

313. Is the international law of cyberwar a thing?

In today’s interview, I spar with Harriet Moynihan over the application of international law to cyberattacks, a topic on which she has written with clarity and in detail. We disagree politely but profoundly. I make the case that international law is distinct from what works in cyberspace and is inconsistent with either clarity or effectiveness in deterring cyberattacks. Harriet argues that international law has been a central principle of the post-1945 international system and one that has helped to keep a kind of peace among nations. It’s a good exchange.

In the News Roundup, David Kris and I discuss the state of Team Telecom, which is taking unwonted (but probably not unwelcome) fire for not being tough enough on state-owned Chinese telecom firms. Predictably, Team Telecom is going with the flow, and reportedly seeking to knock four such firms out of the US market.

Maury Shenk reports that Vietnam is suspected of hacking Chinese health authorities. In response to the accusations, the Vietnamese released what looks to me like a word-for-word clone of Chinese cyberespionage boilerplate denials. Sauce for the goose is sauce for the panda.

Gapple’s design for a COVID-19 tracing app isn’t the best way to track infections, I argue, but it’s all that Google and Apple are willing to let governments do, apparently because of Silicon Valley's exquisitely refined and self-evidently superior sense of privacy. Nick Weaver disagrees, arguing that the Gapple system preserves privacy and allows health authorities all the information that they really need. Governments are mostly falling in line with Gapple's demands, either because they buy Nick’s argument or because they have decided that Silicon Valley resistance has the ability to wreck any more centralized system. France is still fighting for its vision of contact tracing. Australia seems to be adopting a lightly tweaked version of the Gapple model. And Germany seems to be surrendering.

Several senators want Cyber Command and CISA to do more to deter coronavirus hackers, David reports. More importantly, he points out that asking a military organization to attack a civilian criminal gang raises a host of legal issues that should be sorted out before rather than after the attack begins.

Failure to protect your client from Chinese government hackers might be malpractice, a DC court rules. But as Maury points out, there’s a long road from winning a motion to dismiss to winning at trial, so the lesson to be drawn from this case won’t be certain for some time.

Three years later, the Shadow Brokers leak is making news, and still providing challenges for private security researchers. Nick reports on how a three-year-old leak led to the latest revelation of an unknown APT group.

Nick and I touch on confused reporting about the latest filing in the mud fight between Facebook and NSO Group over NSO’s hacks of WhatsApp customers. NSO, Facebook says, has used a lot of US servers in those attacks. That matters for the technical question of whether NSO can be sued in the United States, but the volume (several hundred instances) also suggests to Nick that NSO did more than throw exploits over the wall to its customers – it was arguably offering espionage as a service.

David dings IBM for its handling of a researcher’s disclosure of four zero-days – and that leads to a dive into what a good bug bounty program can and can’t do.

Maury notes that Amazon is getting new scrutiny for its handling of third-party sales data, including suspicions on Congress’s part that it may have been lied to. This isn’t the last we’ll hear of this story.

In quick hits, I am nonplussed by Vimeo’s willingness to outsource its definition of “hate group” to, well, a left-wing hate group, the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Nick celebrates the end to what he calls the “Asshat meets BlackHat” affair: Crown Sterling’s “defamation” lawsuit against BlackHat has been settled.

And Nick and I mark the surprising ouster of Marc Rotenberg, EPIC’s long-time director, over what might be called excessive attention to his own COVID-19 privacy.

Download the 313th Episode (mp3).

You can subscribe to The Cyberlaw Podcast using iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, Pocket Casts, or our RSS feed. As always, The Cyberlaw Podcast is open to feedback. Be sure to engage with @stewartbaker on Twitter. Send your questions, comments, and suggestions for topics or interviewees to CyberlawPodcast@steptoe.com. Remember: If your suggested guest appears on the show, we will send you a highly coveted Cyberlaw Podcast mug!

The views expressed in this podcast are those of the speakers and do not reflect the opinions of their institutions, clients, friends, families, or pets.

312. Russia’s online disinformation has a 100-year history

In this episode, I interview Thomas Rid about his illuminating study of Russian disinformation, Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare. It lays out a century of Soviet, East European, and Russian disinformation, beginning with an elaborate and successful operation against the White Russian expatriate resistance to Bolshevik rule in the 1920s. Rid has dug into recently declassified material using digital tools that enable him to tell previously untold tales – the Soviets' remarkable success in turning opposition to US nuclear missiles in Europe into a mass movement (and the potential shadow it casts on the legendary Adm. Hyman Rickover, father of the US nuclear navy), the unimpressive record of US disinformation campaigns compared to the ruthless Soviet versions, and the fake American lobbyist (and real East German agent) who persuaded a West German conservative legislator to save Willy Brandt's leftist government. We close with two very different predictions about the kind of disinformation we'll see in the 2020 campaign.

In the news, David Kris, Nick Weaver, and I trade perspectives on the Supreme Court's grant of certiorari on the question when it's a crime to access a computer r “in excess of authority.” I predict that the Justice Department's reading of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act will lose, but it's far from clear what will replace the Justice Department's interpretation.

Remember when the House left town without acting on FISA renewal? That's looking like a worse and worse decision, as Congress goes weeks without returning and Justice is left unable to use utterly uncontroversial capabilities in more and more cases. Matthew Heiman explains.

In Justice Department briefs, all the most damaging admissions are down in the footnotes, and it looks like that's true for the inspector general's report on the Carter Page FISA. Recently declassified footnotes from the report make the FBI's pursuit of the FISA order look even worse, in my view. But at the end of the day, the footnotes don't add much to suspicions of a partisan motivation in the imbroglio.

Speaking of IG reports, the DOD inspector general manages first to raise the possibility that Amazon was the victim of political skullduggery in the big DOD cloud computing award and then to find a way to stick it to Amazon anyway. Meanwhile, the judge overseeing the bid protest gives the Pentagon a chance for a do-over.

Matthew covers intel warnings about China-linked ‘Electric Panda’ hackers and the Syrian government spreading malware via a coronavirus apps. And David notes that a Zoom zero-day is being offered for $500,000.

Nick and I mix it up, first over the Gapple infection tracing plan and their fight with the UK National Health Service and then over Facebook’s decision to suppress posts about anti-lockdown demonstrations that violate the lockdown. I think that's highly questionable and not something Facebook would be doing if the first demonstrations had been Black Lives Matter activists in Detroit – or regime protestors during the Arab Spring for that matter. Nick thinks it's the best way to treat a "zombie death cult serving haterade." So, all in all, exactly the restrained and civil exchange of views you've come to expect from the Cyberlaw Podcast.

Download the 312th Episode (mp3).

You can subscribe to The Cyberlaw Podcast using iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, Pocket Casts, or our RSS feed. As always, The Cyberlaw Podcast is open to feedback. Be sure to engage with @stewartbaker on Twitter. Send your questions, comments, and suggestions for topics or interviewees to CyberlawPodcast@steptoe.com. Remember: If your suggested guest appears on the show, we will send you a highly coveted Cyberlaw Podcast mug!

The views expressed in this podcast are those of the speakers and do not reflect the opinions of their institutions, clients, friends, families, or pets.

What's wrong with the Google-Apple infection tracking proposal

Google and Apple have released specifications for how to use a mobile phone to track coronavirus infections. That’s good news. As the country moves toward at least partial resumption of normal life, we’re likely to need good tracking capabilities to avoid a second peak in infections, and that can’t be done without the cooperation of Google and Apple.

But the more I study the design that these companies are promoting, the less attractive it looks. To be blunt, I think the companies were so eager to avoid criticism from privacy groups and Silicon Valley libertarians that they produced a design that raises far too many barriers to effectively tracing infections. The good news, though, is that Google and Apple won’t have the last word. The two companies are creating an absolutely essential set of tools, or APIs, that will allow other tracking apps to interact with phone operating systems. They’ve also sketched what might be described as the default tracking system that they intend to implement “while maintaining strong protections around user privacy.”  This default system is less essential, and a good thing too. The Google/Apple default tracking system is seriously flawed, mainly because it elevates privacy over effectiveness. Luckily, national health systems will be free to write better, more workable tracking apps that can still plug into Google and Apple operating systems without buying into the questionable choices those companies seem to favor.

Public health agencies have tracked infections as a way of stopping the spread of disease for more than a century, and not just for pandemics. It’s a routine part of the public health response to syphilis and other sexually transmitted diseases. The process is straightforward. If someone tests positive for an infectious disease, health authorities ask for a list of all his contacts while he had the disease. They track those people down, treat or quarantine them, and then get a list of their contacts. Eventually, everyone in the chain of infection is accounted for, and the chain is broken. COVID-19 is a challenge to this model because asymptomatic infection is so easy, which makes it hard to recreate all of a COVID-positive person’s contacts. Which is what makes mobile phone tracking so attractive. An app that knows where you’ve been for the last two weeks allows a reconstruction of your contacts that your memory can’t match. That’s why there’s been such an emphasis in many countries on using location data for infection tracking. But as the initial enthusiasm encountered reality, public health officials realized that location data on phones was not well-suited to the task. It wasn’t detailed enough, gathering everyone’s locations over the length of the emergency felt unnecessarily intrusive. Singapore came up with a better approach: using not location data but an exchange of Bluetooth signals between the phones of people who were actually close to each other for a period of time. Then if one of them tested positive, the health authorities could collect the contact data and send alerts to everyone who had exchanged signals with the infected party.

But Singapore’s system did not work well with the Android and iOS operating systems.  It only worked if Bluetooth was actively seeking connections all the time, which often required that the phone be continually unlocked. The app still hasn’t achieved more than about twenty percent market share.

Google and Apple soon realized that for such a system to work, they would have to adapt the operating system to the needs of a disease tracking app. That’s why they are developing new APIs. At the same time, their engineers seem to have decided that they could make an app that worked like Singapore’s but had more privacy protections. That idea is the source of the default tracking app they are promoting.

It’s also the source of most of the problems with the default app. Probably the biggest mistake the default app makes is trying to build a tracing system will be completely independent of any central health authority.  That’s not realistic or wise. Real-world disease tracing systems like Singapore’s (and like those of the United States for a century) all rely on the public health authorities to identify infected people, collect their contacts, and notify those at risk. But Silicon Valley is in love with a “trust no one” approach to security that is grounded in an assumption that centralized systems can be abused if authoritarian governments get access to the data. That’s always possible, but the risk is pretty modest in this case since the only data at issue is two weeks’ worth of contacts. And any authoritarian government worth its salt could get far more location and contact data simply by subpoenaing Google’s adtech files. Nonetheless, Google and Apple are pushing a default app that does not depend on centralized administration and therefore is guarded against that particular abuse.

But in preventing abuses from the center, such an app would invite many abuses from the edge. The design seems to envision a regime in which testing results are known to health authorities, but the place and identities of those who’ve come into contact with each other are never disclosed. That means the health authorities can tell someone who tests positive to notify his contacts, but they will have no way of knowing whether he follows their advice. Predictably, some people won’t.  Maybe they’ll forget. Maybe they’ll be worried about retaliation from those they’ve exposed. And maybe they’ll just be freeloaders who wanted to be notified if they were at risk but have no interest in notifying others. By leaving the decision to the user, and even creating additional barriers to notification with a separate “consent to notify” hurdle, the default design from Google and Apple compromises public health in the name of privacy

Other abuses are made possible by the designers’ preference for keeping information from the authorities. In the default design, those getting a notification are told only that they’ve been near an infected person, but not who and not where. Anonymity breeds irresponsibility, as many Zoom users learned in recent weeks. Surely some irresponsible app users will be delighted to cause random grief by sending out false infection alerts to everyone with whom they’ve been in contact. Google and Apple say that they can prevent that by having public health authorities verify test results. But a verification process, such as cryptographic signing of test results, is likely to add substantially to notification friction.

The same effort to keep data out of the hands of a central administrator leads the Google and Apple engineers to store and process all contact data locally on the phone.  This is bad news for anyone who loses or has to reset their phone.  It looks as though, under the default Google/Apple design, those already unfortunate people also lose their contact records and thus run the risk of missing a notice that they may have been exposed. Indeed, as far as I can see, the design doesn’t even allow people to store a backup of their contacts in the cloud.  Similarly, suppose a person using the app comes to the health system’s attention by collapsing in public, or dying before they make it to the hospital, as all too many victims have. In that case, it would be impossible to trace the person’s contacts or notify those affected. Apple’s famously law-enforcement-hostile phone design will ensure that the authorities cannot open either the phone nor the app.

That’s a lot of dysfunction to suffer just to avoid the theoretical risks of a centralized infection tracing system like the ones we’ve been using for the last hundred years.

A related problem is that Google and Apple seem to assume that infection tracing needs the same kinds of user consent as a weather or traffic app. (And, to be fair, the designers may believe that more privacy features will induce more users to download the app.) But it’s increasingly clear that to be effective, a tracing app is going to require a market share well over 50%. That can’t be achieved by throwing something into the app store and waiting for users to find it.  Even though Singapore’s app has substantial privacy protections and its populace is generally compliance-minded, its app is being used by less than a fifth of the population. In fact, as I’ve said before, it’s likely that mobile phone infection tracking will only work if Google and Apple are required to install such an app automatically on Androids and iPhones, the way Apple Maps or iTunes updates are auto-downloaded.  (Apple is, after all, famous for having automatically sent all its users a U2 album that none of them ordered; last time I checked.) Google and Apple have said that they intend to add a contact tracing platform to their phone operating systems, though it’s not clear that the feature will be on by default.

At the end of the day, the purpose of infection tracing is to notify people who may have been infected. Unfortunately, without a lot of changes, the Google/Apple system will make notification a lot less likely. First, in an effort to reduce the role of central authorities, the app design separates testing from contact tracing, so the health authorities who do the testing can’t confirm that the contacts got notice of the result. Instead, the design imagines that someone who tests positive will be given the option of sending notice. That means friction every step of the way -- a user who tests positive must remember to send the notice, open the app, navigate the “do you really consent?” screen, and wait for the notification to upload.  And all of those steps depend entirely on the user’s sense of social responsibility.  That’s just a bad idea. At a minimum, public health authorities need to be able to tell who tested positive but didn’t send notifications.  That would allow the authorities to ping those who didn’t notify others, reminding them to do so. It would also allow the health authority to impose fines or other sanctions on those who use the system to protect themselves but not others.

Finally, Google and Apple’s assumption that tracking apps should keep location data away from health authorities leads to absurd results.  It’s quite true that in most cases, there’s no need to record the exact location where each contact occurred. What matters most is just whether one person was in close proximity to another. But there are times when location matters too. Someone who gets a notice and can’t figure out how the contact occurred might want more data before quarantining himself; maybe there was a wall that Bluetooth didn’t recognize between him and the infected party, or perhaps they were standing outside with a breeze blowing between them.  I suspect that few people will thank Google and Apple if we end up with an American tracking app that assumes that it’s better for them to endure an unnecessary two-week quarantine than for them to tell health authorities the location of their potential infection.

Being able to get precise location data in at least some cases will be especially important if commerce resumes and the app is not universally adopted. Suppose that an infected person spends time at a Starbucks, where a quarter of the people in the shop have installed the Google/Apple app. When the infected person sends out a notice, only a quarter of the customers will get it. But some of them will suspect that the contact was at Starbucks. Without knowing the infected person’s location data; authorities would have no idea where the exposures occurred. What if health authorities want to find the other customers, plus the barista? It wouldn’t be that hard if they knew the place and time of the infected person's visit. The barista’s hours are already recorded by Starbucks, and customers who were there at the time could be found through payment records. But it appears that the Google/Apple app makes no provision for public health authorities being able to identify hotspots by time and location. In fact, in the world the two companies envision, potentially infected parties themselves apparently won’t know for sure where their exposure occurred.

These are a lot of problems, most of them stemming from design assumptions that start in the wrong place, privileging decentralization and anonymity over the goal of defeating the virus. Don’t get me wrong. Google and Apple deserve a lot of credit for having stepped up to the challenge of providing essential APIs. We’re going to need their help to get it onto phones all over the country. But the companies also have blind spots and a fear of getting crosswise with privacy advocates is one of them. This means mean we can’t simply trust them to set the parameters for a tracing app that does what we want in the real world.

And we don’t have to. Pandemics force us to trust elected leaders with great power over individuals and businesses. State governments have ordered people to stay home even at the cost of their jobs. Governors have been given authority to seize private supplies of ventilators and to close otherwise lawful businesses and gatherings -- even church services on Easter.   And as I’ve written before at greater length, 40 states have adopted a post 9/11 public health emergency law that gives governors broad authority to intervene in private industry to respond to crises. This authority extends even to companies that deal in “communication devices.” If they can mandate that people sacrifice jobs and access to in-person religious services, surely state governors can also order companies like Google and Apple to build an interface that works with tracking apps that actually fit society’s needs and not Silicon Valley’s conventional wisdom.

311. What the Cyberspace Solarium report means for the private sector

The Cyberspace Solarium Commission’s report was released into the teeth of the COVID-19 crisis and hasn’t attracted the press it probably deserves. But the commissioners include four sitting Congressmen who plan to push for adoption of its recommendations. And the Commission is going to be producing more material – and probably more press attention – over coming weeks. In this episode, I interview Sen. Angus King, co-chair of the Commission, and Dr. Samantha Ravich, one of the commissioners.

We focus almost exclusively on what the Commission’s recommendations mean for the private sector. The Commission has proposed a remarkably broad range of cybersecurity measures for business. The Commission recommends a new products liability regime for assemblers of final goods (including software) who don’t promptly patch vulnerabilities. It proposes two new laws requiring notice not only of personal data breaches but also of other significant cyber incidents. It calls for a federal privacy and security law – without preemption. It updates Sarbanes-Oxley to include cybersecurity principles. And lest you think the Commission is in love with liability, it also proposed tort immunities for critical infrastructure owners operating under government supervision during a crisis. The interviews cover all these proposals, plus the Commission’s recommendation of a new role for the Intelligence Community in providing support to critical US companies.

In the news, Nick Weaver and I dig deep into the Google and Apple proposals for tracking COVID-19 infections. I’ve got a separate post in the works on the topic, but the short version is that I think Google and Apple have dramatically overvalued privacy interests and downgraded the job of actually tracking infections. Nick disagrees, believing that the privacy interests aren't actually conflicting with the tracking goals, but we agree that the app should operate on an opt-out basis, not opt-in.

The Great Decoupling, part 278: It looks as though China Telecom will be getting the boot from US telecom markets, at least if Team Telecom has anything to say about it. And speaking of Team Telecom, Brian Egan tells us that it has a new charter and a new, catchy acronym: CAFPUSTTSS!

Nick and I dig into a Ninth Circuit decision that may be heading for the Supreme Court. It holds that Facebook can be held liable for wiretapping when it gets information from its widely deployed “like” buttons on third-party sites.

Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, and the EU gotta regulate tech, coronavirus or no coronavirus. Maury Shenk reports, bemusedly. Matching him bemusement for bemusement, Nick tries to explain a French ruling that Google must pay news outlets to link to their content (and can’t stop linking to the outlets).

Maury explains the 5G-coronavirus conspiracy that has Brits burning cellular masts. And Nick explains how to make a “smart” lock spill its secrets, and how to fall foul of the FTC.

And in quick takes, the COVID-19 cyber threat has the US and UK authorities joining hands against cyberattacks, the Australian government is hacking criminals who are exploiting coronavirus, and we get a look at a future in which IoT devices defect to foreign intelligence agencies.

Download the 311th Episode (mp3).

You can subscribe to The Cyberlaw Podcast using iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, Pocket Casts, or our RSS feed. As always, The Cyberlaw Podcast is open to feedback. Be sure to engage with @stewartbaker on Twitter. Send your questions, comments, and suggestions for topics or interviewees to CyberlawPodcast@steptoe.com. Remember: If your suggested guest appears on the show, we will send you a highly coveted Cyberlaw Podcast mug!

The views expressed in this podcast are those of the speakers and do not reflect the opinions of their institutions, clients, friends, families, or pets.

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309. How Israel is fighting the coronavirus

In this bonus episode, we explore Israel’s technology- and surveillance-heavy approach to the COVID-19 pandemic. In it, Matthew Waxman and I talk to Yuval Shany, a noted Israeli human rights expert and professor at Hebrew University. We cover the particularly fraught political crisis that the virus exacerbated, the use of Israel’s counterterrorism tools to trace contacts of infected individuals, and the significance of locational privacy in the face of a deadly contagion.

Our thanks to both Nachum Braverman of Academic Exchange and Ben Wittes of Lawfare for making the interview possible.

Download the 309th Episode (mp3).

You can subscribe to The Cyberlaw Podcast using iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, Pocket Casts, or our RSS feed. As always, The Cyberlaw Podcast is open to feedback. Be sure to engage with @stewartbaker on Twitter. Send your questions, comments, and suggestions for topics or interviewees to CyberlawPodcast@steptoe.com. Remember: If your suggested guest appears on the show, we will send you a highly coveted Cyberlaw Podcast mug!

The views expressed in this podcast are those of the speakers and do not reflect the opinions of their institutions, clients, friends, families, or pets.

308: Location, location, location. And the virus.

David Kris, Paul Rosenzweig, and I dive deep on the big tech issue of the COVID-19 contagion: Whether (but mostly how) to use mobile phone location services to fight the virus. We cover the Israeli approach, as well as a host of solutions adopted in Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, and elsewhere. I’m a big fan of Singapore, which produced in a week an app that Nick Weaver thought would take a year.

In our interview, evelyn douek, currently at the Berkman Klein Center and an SJD candidate at Harvard, takes us deep into content moderation. Displaying a talent for complexifying an issue we all want to simplify, she explains why we can’t live with social platform censorship and why we can’t live without it. She walks us through the growth of content moderation, from spam, through child porn, and on to terrorism and “coordinated inauthentic behavior” – the identification of which, evelyn assures me, does not require an existentialist dance instructor. Instead, it’s the latest and least easily defined category of speech to be suppressed by Big Tech. It’s a mare’s nest, but I, for one, intend to aggravate our new Tech Overlords for as long as possible.

Returning to the News Roundup, Nate Jones and evelyn mull the head-spinning change the virus has made in the public reputation of Big Tech, but Nate wonders if Silicon Valley's PR glow will last.

Meanwhile, China is celebrating its self-proclaimed victory over COVID-19 by borrowing Russian tactics to spread coronavirus disinformation. I argue that any country adopting Russia’s patented “Who knows what’s true?” tactics probably has something to hide. Because the Russians usually do.

We take advantage of evelyn’s Aussie ties to get a translation (and an apology) for Australia’s latest venture into the business of blocking graphic violent content.

David and Paul review the White House’s National Strategy for 5G Security. They talk for two minutes, but they say more than the strategy does.

The House of Representative has irresponsibly bolted for home without even a temporary reauthorization of expiring FISA authorities. Paul and David explain why that isn’t quite the disaster it sounds like. Quite.

The NYT finds more AI bogus bias, and I invent a new term for the practice of pretending AI is a man and then attributing racism to him. We’ll see if misanthropomorphism catches on once I learn to say it without stumbling.

David says the Justice Department has brought the first fraud case stemming from the coronavirus crisis, and I suggest that case itself has a whiff of false advertising about it.

Amazon is complaining that the Pentagon is trying to fix some of the contract award problems in the big DOD cloud procurement. Paul is more sympathetic than I am.

And Paul questions the wisdom of failing to delay CCPA enforcement while the coronavirus rages across California.

Download the 308th Episode (mp3).

Take our listener poll at steptoe.com/podcastpoll. You can subscribe to The Cyberlaw Podcast using iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, Pocket Casts, or our RSS feed. As always, The Cyberlaw Podcast is open to feedback. Be sure to engage with @stewartbaker on Twitter. Send your questions, comments, and suggestions for topics or interviewees to CyberlawPodcast@steptoe.com. Remember: If your suggested guest appears on the show, we will send you a highly coveted Cyberlaw Podcast mug!

The views expressed in this podcast are those of the speakers and do not reflect the opinions of their institutions, clients, friends, families, or pets.

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The Singapore location app that could elect a President

One of the keys to slowing a pandemic is to trace infections: Find one person who’s infected. Identify, test, and quarantine all his contacts. Then trace, test, and quarantine his contacts’ contacts. Repeat until you run out of potential victims. This is pretty much the strategy followed during the current coronavirus outbreak by countries such as Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan. All three were faster off the mark than the U.S. or Europe, largely because their experience with SARS and MERS was so traumatic that they built the legal framework and the muscle memory to act quickly in the next outbreak.

The U.S. didn’t take this approach, and it was particularly hampered by botched testing at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration, from which we still haven’t completely recovered. Tests are becoming available much faster now, but widespread testing and tracing may not be feasible in places that have been hit hard, such as New York and New Jersey. In those states, more than 30 percent of the people tested have already been infected. But there are other states, such as New Mexico or Minnesota, where testing has been growing fast and infection rates are low enough that tracking infections looks like a feasible strategy. With the caveat that these numbers are undoubtedly distorted by who gets tested and how results get reported, there are still striking differences in the results among states, according to statistics compiled by the Covid Tracking Project and adjusted per capita by Buzzfeed:

State	Tests per 100,000 population	% found infected
New York	736.2	30.6
New Jersey	283.2	34.8
Washington	736.5	7.1
Minnesota	266	2.8
New Mexico	460	2.0

For places like Minnesota, New Mexico and even Washington, President Trump may have been right when he suggested that some parts of the country could use a strategy other than lockdowns to fight the virus. If so, the best alternative will be aggressive testing and contact tracing.

The countries that did contact tracing the most effectively relied in part on technology—phone location tracking, in particular. They’ve used the location services already built into mobile phones to find others who’ve been close to those who test positive. Privacy and civil liberties advocates hate the idea in principle, but they know no one values the privacy of their location history more highly than they value the lives of their loved ones. Rather than argue directly against phone tracking, privacy advocates such as Susan Landau have instead fallen back on a couple of practical objections.

First, they argue, we don’t have enough tests to imitate Asia. Really? I know the press is full of stories about U.S. testing shortages, and there are indeed supply bottlenecks in everything from protective gear to reagents. But a Trump-loathing press has every incentive to dwell on testing shortages as an emblem of administration errors at the start of the outbreak. In fact, testing capability in the U.S. is rising dramatically. Nationwide, testing has risen from a risible level—less than a thousand in early March—to 894,000 as of March 28. And new testing capabilities are coming online fast. The test-shortage argument may have been correct relatively recently, but if it still has merit, it won’t for long.

Indeed, we may soon have enough tests for some governors to mandate South Korean-style tracking and tracing. In fact, South Korea dodged disaster with a testing rate that isn’t any higher than New York’s or Washington’s today (around 730 per 100,000). Even more remarkable, Japan and Vietnam flattened their infection curves with per-capita testing rates that are even lower—well under 40 per 100,000.

To get a tracking program in place, we’ll need to use phone data; the alternatives are too slow and rely too much on fallible memories. Which brings us to the privacy advocates’ second argument: that phone location technology won’t do the job.

They have a point. Routine cell-sector data might identify a phone’s location within a few blocks—not exactly a fine tool for measuring the risk for infection. While triangulation and other tricks can improve that resolution substantially, it usually can’t say what floor of a large building the customer was on, and in many cases, such fine-grained resolution isn’t routinely collected. GPS signals are great if the user is outside, but not inside.

What public health officials need is a tool that will tell them who the phone’s owner has been close to—really close, like six feet or less. Luckily, the Singapore government has developed an app that does exactly that—and it’s open sourcing the software for the world. The app, called TraceTogether, uses Bluetooth to find nearby phones the way it finds our car audio or wireless earbuds.

The basic idea is simple: If two people who’ve downloaded the app come within six feet of each other and stay there for half an hour, their phones exchange unique identifiers and each phone logs the contact in encrypted memory. It remains encrypted unless one of them turns up positive for the virus. If that happens, public health officials ask for the phone’s contact log, translate the unique identifiers into phone numbers, and quickly call everyone who came within electronic range of the infected person. There are plenty of privacy safeguards built in: The logs never leave the user’s phone without his or her consent, and other users can’t learn anything about the people around them from the identifier.

In short, the app addresses most of the practical and privacy objections that American privacy advocates have put forward. It could be a game changer for states like Minnesota and New Mexico that already have strong testing programs and haven’t yet been swamped by the virus. They should be acting now, talking to Singapore officials and mobilizing local tech talent to adapt the tool and construct the back-end processes needed to get a state version off the ground.

For the app to work, it needs to be installed on a lot of phones. Some people will install it without much prompting. Who wouldn’t want to be called if they’ve unknowingly crossed paths with a coronavirus carrier? And many of us would be glad to have a log of our contacts if we test positive, instead of trying to reconstruct contacts from memory.

But asking people to download an app means delays and gaps in coverage, especially when some privacy advocates are dragging their feet, claiming as we’ve seen that the technology won’t work or arguing that it should wait until a regulatory regime has been enacted. To jump-start the program, governors should ask Apple and Google to auto-download the app to every phone in their states, along with a message explaining why users should activate it.

Actually, the governors probably don’t need to ask. Some 40 states have adopted one version or another of a model public health emergency law promulgated after 9/11. The law gives governors explicit authority to issue orders seizing “materials and facilities as may be reasonable and necessary to respond to the public health emergency.” Those facilities expressly include “communication devices,” and there’s no good reason to exclude the Android and Apple app stores from the authority.

In fact, if push comes to shove, the governors likely have authority to require that residents of their states activate the app. The law grants individual states the  emergency authority to conduct “any diagnostic or investigative analyses necessary to prevent the spread of disease.” And, since Apple and Android know which apps we’ve activated, they could be ordered to identify those who haven’t registered for contact tracing. The federal law prohibiting disclosure of subscriber information to governments without a subpoena contains an express exception for “an emergency involving danger of death or serious physical injury to any person.”

In short, a forward-leaning approach to high-tech contact tracing is feasible. It could save many lives and get the economy back on track much faster. It’s time for governors in less affected states to do this.

If more incentive is needed, there’s one more thing. There’s a good chance that the governor who makes this work will end up running for president on the strength of that performance in four years. And perhaps even sooner.

End the coronavirus lockdown for those who've recovered from it

President Trump is growing so worried about the economic impact of covid-19 that he’s talking about drastic action, including ending the lockdown in states that haven’t seen lots of infections. He’s right to be worried and right to be looking for dramatic solutions. He may even be well-served in this case by his skepticism about giving government public health experts the last word on fateful economic decisions, for reasons I’ll discuss. But ending the lockdown in states with low infection numbers is the wrong answer when we haven’t tested widely; many of these states almost certainly have an underground contagion that will explode as soon as the lockdown is lifted.

There are, however, responsible alternatives that might address the underlying concern.Instead of easing the lockdown state by state, we could do it person by person.  Specifically, we could end the lockdown for people who have already recovered from COVID-19. These people offer something we badly need right now:  A workforce that probably can’t get infected and probably can’t infect others. I say probably because there is plenty we don’t know. But there is reason to believe that people who recover from the coronavirus pose much less risk of infecting others and face less risk of being reinfected themselves. There’s still much uncertainty on both counts, but that’s the way to bet.

Which means that recovered coronavirus patients could be a vital resource for public health and for the economy. They can work directly with people still fighting for their lives in hospitals. They can tend to the elderly without fear of spreading the disease. Indeed, it’s possible that their blood plasma can be used to treat the sick. And, as their numbers increase over coming weeks, they can take on other jobs that call for close interactions with the uninfected – grocery and pharmacy sales, Uber drivers, and the like. They’ll suddenly be in high demand, and just in time, since many of them have been thrown out of work by the mass lockdowns. Instead of living off stimulus payments, they’ll be earning good money, performing critical jobs, and free to go out and spend it without fear.

By itself, ending the lockdown for those who’ve recovered from the virus won’t end the economic crisis. They are a tiny population in the US right now, but one that’s growing about as fast as infections did last month, which is to say it should be more or less doubling every few days. (In Italy, a couple of weeks ahead of us, there are 8300 recovered patients.) Ending their lockdown would allow both a real and a symbolic step toward economic normalcy, not to mention the public health benefits it would offer at a time when we need as many safe caregivers as we can muster.

What would it take to free up this resource?  Three things.

First, we cannot simply presume recovered patients are safe. We need the best available public health data about recovered COVID-19 patients, to get answers about when they stop being contagious and their resistance to reinfection. It is important to note, that even with more data, we are unlikely to get complete certainty on either point, and even the recovered will need to take precautions while out and about. But the decision to end their lockdown—in the face of some degree of uncertainty—should take into account economic, as well as health, risks.

This is where the President’s famous suspicion of expertise might do him some good. The government’s public health officials are indeed experts, but only in one part of the crisis we now face. They are ruled by the same incentives that govern all bureaucracies, as the recent CDC and FDA testing failures should remind us. And the bureaucratic incentive for public health officials is to maximize public health. 

As professionals, they’ll be judged by their success in suppressing the virus – not by their role in restoring the economy. To ensure that the desperate state of the economy gets proper weight, it’s entirely appropriate for the President to force a decision now, using public health officials’ best guess about infection and reinfection risks – even if the uncertainty makes them uncomfortable. The stakes are higher here than usual, but this is the kind of call we have Presidents for.

Second, we need good ways to identify the recovered. Tests for the virus identify people who have the infection; we also need to identify recoveries by testing for the antibodies that show the virus has come and gone. Those tests are on the way, but they’re caught up in FDA approval processes. The administration should be pushing the FDA to act faster. Because until we have those tests, we’re going to have to rely on doctors to write letters identifying patients who have recovered from the virus.

Third, this system requires a mechanism to enforce rules that end lockdown for some people and not others. Because we will need to rely on physician letters at the start, we should set uniform standards for representations from doctors. And the government should make clear that false claims of recovery can be criminally prosecuted as fraud. (If this proves insufficient, states and the private sector could issue 3-D barcodes to help stores, hospitals, and lockdown enforcers verify claims of recovery using a mobile phone. Similar systems are currently used across Asia.)

Most importantly, if we want this to work, we need to do all of these things now, and as impatiently as possible.

Which, of course, is where President Trump comes in. We’ve never needed his famous impatience more -- as long as he can keep it well-targeted.

307. Is privacy in pandemics like atheism in foxholes?

That’s the question I debate with David Kris and Nick Weaver in this episode, as we explore the ways in which governments are using location data to fight the covid-19 virus. Phone location data is being used both to enforce quarantines and to track contacts with infected people.  It’s useful for both, but Nick thinks the second application may not really be ready for a year – too late for this outbreak.

Our interview is with Jason Healey, who has a long history with Cyber Command and a deep recent oeuvre of academic commentary on cyberconflict. Jay explains Cyber Command’s doctrine of “persistent engagement” and “defending forward” in words that I finally understand.  It makes sense in terms of Cyber Command’s aspirations as well as the limitations it labored under in the Obama administration, but I wonder if in the end it will be different from “deterrence through having the best offense.” Nothing wrong with that, in my view – as long as you have the best offense by a long shot, something that is by no means proven.

We return to the news to discover the whole idea of sunsets for national security laws looking dumber than it did when it first saw the light of day (which is saying something). Several important FISA authorities have expired, Matthew Heiman reports.  That's thanks to Sens. Rand Paul and Mike Lee, I might add (though Nick blames President Trump, who certainly put his boot in too). Both House and Senate passed measures to keep FISA authorities alive, but the measures were completely different and out of sync.  Maybe the House will fix the problem this week, but only by extending the deadline for a couple of months.  Because of course by then we’ll be rested and ready, in the middle of a contagion and a Presidential campaign, for a  debate over Sen. Paul’s proposal to make it harder to wiretap and prosecute Americans who spy for foreign governments.

Maybe before they did all that naming and shaming of Russian government hackers, federal prosecutors should have worked on their aiming: The US Justice Department has now dropped Robert Mueller’s charges against a sponsor of Russian electoral interference, Matthew tells us. We explore two fever-dream narratives – that the whole prosecution was part of a witch hunt and that the Attorney General is just sabotaging Bob Mueller’s righteous crusade. You don’t have to believe either to conclude that the Mueller team should have thought a little more about how it would try the case and a little less about how convenient it was to be able to tell the IRA story in an indictment. CyberScoop – Wall Street Journal

There’s another major leak about government skullduggery in cyberspace, David tells us, and Wikileaks is, uh, nowhere to be seen.  That’s because the skulldugging government in question is Vladimir Putin’s, and Wikileaks is looking more and more like Putin’s lapdog.  So it falls to a group called Digital Revolution to publish internal FSB documents showing Russia’s determination to acquire a huge DDOS network, maybe enough to take whole nations offline.

Alan Cohn makes a guest appearance to discuss the role that DHS’s CISA is playing in the covid-19 crisis.  And it has nothing to do with cybersecurity.  Instead, CISA is ensuring the security of critical infrastructure around the country by identifying facilities that need to keep operating, notwithstanding state lockdown orders.  We talk about the federalism crisis that could come from the proliferation of critical infrastructure designations but neither of us expects it soon.

Here’s a surprise: Russia is deploying coronavirus disinformation, claiming that it is a US bioweapon. Uncharacteristically, I find myself praising the European Union for flagging the campaign.

Nick talks about the ambiguity of the cyberattack on Norsk Hydro, and I raise the risk that companies may stop releasing attribution information pointing to nation states because doing so may undercut their insurance claims.

Finally, we wrap up the story of ex-Uber autonomous driving executive Anthony Levandowski, who pled guilty to trade-secret theft and is likely headed to prison for a year or three.

Download the 307th Episode (mp3).

Take our listener poll at steptoe.com/podcastpoll. You can subscribe to The Cyberlaw Podcast using iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, Pocket Casts, or our RSS feed. As always, The Cyberlaw Podcast is open to feedback. Be sure to engage with @stewartbaker on Twitter. Send your questions, comments, and suggestions for topics or interviewees to CyberlawPodcast@steptoe.com. Remember: If your suggested guest appears on the show, we will send you a highly coveted Cyberlaw Podcast mug!

The views expressed in this podcast are those of the speakers and do not reflect the opinions of their institutions, clients, friends, families, or pets.

306. An (almost) COVID-19-free episode

If your podcast feed has suddenly become a steady diet of more or less the same COVID-19 stories, here’s a chance to listen to cyber experts talk about something they know – cyberlaw. Our interview is with Elsa Kania, adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security and one of the country's most prolific students of China, technology, and national security. We talk about the relative strengths and weaknesses of the artificial intelligence ecosystems in the two countries.

In the news, Maury Shenk and Mark MacCarthy describe the growing field of censorship-as-a-service and the competition between US and Chinese vendors.

Elsa and I unpack the report of the Cyberspace Solarium Commission. Bottom line: The report is ambitious but constrained by political reality. And the most striking political reality is that there hasn’t been a better time in 25 years to propose cybersecurity regulation and liability for the tech sector. Seizing the Zeitgeist, the report offers at least a dozen such proposals.

Nick Weaver explains the joys of trojanizing the trojanizers, and we debate whether that is fourth-party or fifth-party intelligence collection.

In a shameful dereliction, Congress has let important FISA authorities lapse, but perhaps only for a day or two (depending on the president’s temperature when the reauthorization bill reaches his desk). The reauthorization bill isn’t good for our security, but it tries to avoid crippling intelligence collection, mostly hanging new ornaments on the existing FISA Christmas tree.

Mark covers a Swedish ruling that deserves to be forgotten a lot more than the crimes and embarrassments protected by the “right to be forgotten.” This decision fines Google for failing to show sufficient zeal in covering up Sweden’s censorship orders.

Nick explains how Microsoft finds itself taking down an international botnet instead of leaving the job to the world’s governments.

Maury reports that the federal trial of a Russian hacker is exposing seamy ties between the FSB and criminal Russian hackers. Now we know why Russia fought so hard to head off extradition of the Russian hacker to the US.

Elsa helps me through recent claims that US chip makers face long-term damage from the US-China trade fight. That much is obvious to all; less obvious is what the US can do to avoid it.

Nick and I talk about Facebook’s suit against NSO Group. I claim that NSO won this round in court but lost in the media, which has finally found a company it hates more than Facebook. Nick thinks Facebook is quite happy to swap a default judgment for a chance at discovery.

In other quick hits, DOD is wisely seeking a quick do-over in the cloud computing litigation involving AWS and Microsoft. House and Senate committees have now okayed a bill to give CISA much-needed and suprisingly uncontroversial subpoena authority to identify at-risk Internet users. Rebooting my "Privacy Kills" series, I break the injunction against COVID-19 news to point out that dumb privacy laws likely delayed for weeks discovery of how widespread COVID-19 was in Seattle. And Joshua Schulte’s trial ends in a hung jury; I ask where the juicy post-trial jury interviews are.

Download the 306th Episode (mp3).

Take our listener poll at steptoe.com/podcastpoll!

You can subscribe to The Cyberlaw Podcast using iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, Pocket Casts, or our RSS feed!

As always, The Cyberlaw Podcast is open to feedback. Be sure to engage with @stewartbaker on Twitter. Send your questions, comments, and suggestions for topics or interviewees to CyberlawPodcast@steptoe.com. Remember: If your suggested guest appears on the show, we will send you a highly coveted Cyberlaw Podcast mug!

The views expressed in this podcast are those of the speakers and do not reflect the opinions of their institutions, clients, friends, families, or pets.

305. NSA’s call detail records program: Travis LeBlanc of the PCLOB

The NSA’s effort to use call detail records to spot cross-border terror plots has a long history. It began life in deepest secrecy, became public (and controversial) after Edward Snowden’s leaks, and was then "reformed" in the USA Freedom Act. Now it’s up for renewal, and the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, or PCLOB, has weighed in with a deep report on how the program has functioned – and why NSA has suspended it.

In this episode I interview Travis LeBlanc, a PCLOB Member, about the report and the program. Travis is a highly effective advocate, bringing me around on several issues, including whether the program should be continued and even whether the authority to revive it would be useful. It’s a superb guide to a program whose renewal is currently being debated (against a March 15 deadline!) in Congress.

And, uh, asking for a friend: Do the early stages of covid-19 infection make you more susceptible to persuasion? 

Download the 305th Episode (mp3).

Take our listener poll at steptoe.com/podcastpoll!

You can subscribe to The Cyberlaw Podcast using iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, Pocket Casts, or our RSS feed!

As always, The Cyberlaw Podcast is open to feedback. Be sure to engage with @stewartbaker on Twitter. Send your questions, comments, and suggestions for topics or interviewees to CyberlawPodcast@steptoe.com. Remember: If your suggested guest appears on the show, we will send you a highly coveted Cyberlaw Podcast mug!

The views expressed in this podcast are those of the speakers and do not reflect the opinions of their institutions, clients, families or friends.

304. Unfiltered: An interview with NSA’s former general counsel

Our interview in this episode is with Glenn Gerstell, freed at last from some of the constraints that come with government service. We cover the Snowden leaks, how private and public legal work differs (hint: it’s the turf battles), Cyber Command, Russian election interference, reauthorization of FISA, and the daunting challenges the US (and its Intelligence Community) will face as China’s economy begins to reinforce its global security ambitions.

In the news, Nate Jones and Nick Weaver talk through the new legal and technical ground broken by the United States in identifying two Chinese nationals and the $100 million in cryptocurrency they laundered for North Korean hackers.

Paul Rosenzweig lays out the challenge posed for the Supreme Court’s Carpenter decision by LocateX, which provides detailed location data commercially. This is exactly the quagmire I expected the Court to find itself in when it abandoned the third-party doctrine on a one-off basis. Nick points out that the data is only pseudonymized and tries with mixed success to teach me to say “de-pseudonymized.”

Nate and I conclude that facial recognition has achieved a kind of Kardashian status, though instead of being famous for being famous, facial recognition is toxic for being toxic. Kashmir Hill at the New York Times adds a new drop of poison in a story that could just as well have repeated “I hate Clearview AI” 50 times for all it told us about the company. And Vice, which never saw a Twitter mob it wouldn’t join, lets Anna Merlan tell us to hate Clearview because it found pictures of her that she apparently posted in public. Meanwhile, we all know the technology is evil, but we can't quite remember why. If the problem is that it doesn’t work, the stories about how Buenos Aires found a wanted man on the street using another company’s recognition tech is kind of harshing the narrative. (We're supposed to see that it's evil because the cops had mixed up two people with the same name. Not sure that’s facial recognition’s fault, guys.)

Nate and I review the Justice Department’s guidance on how threat researchers can do undercover work safely on the Dark Web. It’s a mixed bag for sure, but the biggest beneficiary of the guidance may turn out to be Dark Web criminal network administrators.

A proposed FAA drone rule is angering aviation hobbyists. Nick feels their pain but thinks it’s time for them to get over it.

Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and others have adopted international principles for enforcing laws against child abuse. But if they were hoping to stave off the EARN IT bill, they were mistaken. The bill has been introduced, with striking bipartisan sponsorship and a few changes since we last covered it. Nick and I cross swords on whether the bill would turn the companies into agents of the government for Fourth Amendment purposes.

And in short takes, I note that the Trump Administration is borrowing from Europe in one respect: CFIUS is building a wall against the export of Americans' personal data to China by overturning mergers that would give Chinese companies access to data on Americans’ hotel stays and their love lives. Paul tells us that Oz is apparently in the lead for a deal with the United States on the CLOUD Act. China’s Qihoo360 tries to beat US cyber forensics firms at the name-and-shame game but came up short. And the FISA Court offers some surprisingly tame changes in the wake of the Horowitz report detailing the botched Carter Page warrant application.

Download the 304th Episode (mp3).

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As always, The Cyberlaw Podcast is open to feedback. Be sure to engage with @stewartbaker on Twitter. Send your questions, comments, and suggestions for topics or interviewees to CyberlawPodcast@steptoe.com. Remember: If your suggested guest appears on the show, we will send you a highly coveted Cyberlaw Podcast mug!

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

303. Another merger the FTC should block

This is a bonus episode of the Cyberlaw Podcast – a freestanding interview of Noah Phillips, a Commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission. The topic of the interview is whether privacy and antitrust analysis should be merged, especially in the context of Silicon Valley and its social media platforms.

Commissioner Phillips, who has devoted considerable attention to the privacy side of the FTC’s jurisdiction, recently delivered a speech on the topic and telegraphed his doubts in the title: “Should We Block This Merger? Some Thoughts on Converging Antitrust and Privacy.” Subject to the usual Cyberlaw Podcast injunction that he speaks only for himself and not his institution or relatives, Commissioner Phillips lays out the very real connections between personal data and industry dominance as well as the complexities that come from trying to use antitrust to solve privacy problems. Among the complexities: the key to more competition among social media giants could well be more sharing between companies of the personal data that fuels their network effects, and corporate sharing of personal data is what privacy advocates have spent a decade crusading against.

It’s a wide-ranging interview, touching on, among other things, whether antitrust can be used to solve Silicon Valley’s censorship problem (he’s skeptical) and what he thinks of suggestions in Europe that perhaps the Schrems problem can be solved by declaring that post-CCPA California meets EU data privacy standards. Commissioner Phillips is bemused; I conclude that this is just Europe seeking revenge for President Trump’s Brexit support by promoting “Calexit.”

Download the 303rd Episode (mp3).

Take our listener poll at steptoe.com/podcastpoll! 

You can subscribe to The Cyberlaw Podcast using iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, Pocket Casts, or our RSS feed!

As always, The Cyberlaw Podcast is open to feedback. Be sure to engage with @stewartbaker on Twitter. Send your questions, comments, and suggestions for topics or interviewees to CyberlawPodcast@steptoe.com. Remember: If your suggested guest appears on the show, we will send you a highly coveted Cyberlaw Podcast mug!

The views expressed in this podcast are those of the speakers and do not reflect the opinions of their institutions, clients, or relatives.