Skating on Stilts

342. Will European Privacy Law Protect American Child Molesters?

Our interview is with Alex Stamos, who lays out a complex debate over child sexual abuse that's now roiling Brussels. The application of European privacy standards (and European AI hostility) to internet communications providers has called into question the one tool that has reduced online child sex predation. Scanning for sex abuse images works well, and even scanning for signs of "grooming" is surprisingly effective.  But both depend on automated monitoring of communications content, something that has apparently come as a surprise to European lawmakers hoping to impose more regulation on American tech platforms.  Left unchanged, the new European rules could make it easier to abuse kids all around the world.  Alex explains the rushed effort to head off that disaster – and tells us what Ashton Kutcher has to do with it (a lot, it turns out).

Meanwhile, in the news roundup, Michael Weiner breaks down the FTC's (and 46 states') long-awaited antitrust lawsuit against Facebook. Maybe the government will come up with something as the case moves forward, but its monopolization claims don't strike me as overwhelming.  And, as Mark MacCarthy points out, the likelihood that the lawsuit will do something good on the privacy front is vanishingly small.

Russia's SVR, heir to the KGB, is making headlines with a remarkably sophisticated and well-hidden cyberespionage attack on a lot of institutions that we hoped were better at defense than they turned out to be. Nick Weaver lays out the depressing story, and Alex offers a former CISO's perspective, arguing for a federal breach notification law that goes well beyond personal data and includes after-action reports that aren't locked up in post-litigation gag orders. Jamil Jaffer tells us that won't happen in Congress any time soon.

Jamil also comments on the prospects for the National Defense Authorization Act, which is chock full of cyber provisions but struggling forward under a veto threat. If you're not watching the European Parliament tie itself in knots trying to avoid helping child predators, tune in to watch American legislators tie themselves into knots trying to pass an important defense bill without drawing the ire of the President.

The FCC, in an Ajit Pai farewell, has been hammering Chinese telecom infrastructure companies. In one week, Jamil reports, the FCC launched proceedings to kick China Telecom out of the US phone network, reaffirmed its exclusion of Huawei from the same infrastructure, and adopted a "rip and replace" mandate for US providers who still have Chinese gear  in their networks.

Nick and I clash over the latest move by Apple and Google to show their contempt for US counterterrorism efforts – the banning of a location data company whose real crime was selling the data to (gasp!) the Pentagon.

Mark explains proposals for elaborate new regulation elaborate new regulation of digital intermediaries now working their way through -- where else? – Brussels. I express some cautious interest in regulation of "gatekeeper" platforms, if only to prevent Brussels and the gatekeepers from combining to slam the Overton window on conservatives' fingers.

Mark also reports on the Trump administration's principles for U.S. government use of artificial intelligence, squelching as premature my celebration at the absence of "fairness" and "bias" cant.

Those who listen to the roundup for the porn news won't be disappointed, as Mark and I dig into the details of Pornhub's brush with cancellation at the hands of Visa and Mastercard – and how the site might overcome the attack.

In short hits, Nick and I disagree about Timnit Gebru, the "ethicist" who was let go at Google after threatening to quit and who now is crying racism. I report on the enactment of a modest but useful IoT Cybersecurity law and on the doxxing of the Chinese Communist Party membership rolls as well as the adoption of the most law-enforcement-hostile technology  yet to come out of Big Tech – Amazon's Sidewalk.       

Download the 342nd 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 [email protected]. 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.

341. It’s time to pay attention when attention stops paying

Did you ever wonder where all those trillion dollar tech valuations come from?  Turns out, a lot of the money comes from online programmatic advertising, an industry that gets little attention even from the companies it's making wealthy, such as Google. That lack of attention is pretty ironic, because lack of attention is what’s going to kill the industry, according to Tim Hwang, former Google policy maven and current research fellow at the Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET).  In our interview, Tim Hwang explains the remarkably complex industry and the dynamics that are leaching the value out of its value proposition. Tim thinks we’re in an attention bubble, and the pop will be messy.  I’m persuaded the bubble is real but not that its end will be disastrous outside of Silicon Valley.

But first, in the news roundup Sultan Meghji and I celebrate was seems like excellent news about a practical AI achievement in predicting protein folding. It’s a big deal, and an ideal problem for AI, with one exception.  The parts of the problem that AI hasn’t solved would be a lot easier for humans to work on if AI could tell us how it solved the parts it did figure out.  Explainability, it turns out, is the key to collaborative AI-human work. 

Opening the 'Black Box' of Artificial Intelligence | RealClearScience 

We welcome first time participant and long-time listener Jordan Schneider to the panel. Jordan is the host of the unmissable ChinaTalk podcast. Given his expertise, we naturally ask him about … Australia. 

Actually, it’s a natural, because Australia is now the testing ground for many of China’s efforts to bend independent countries to its will using cyber power along with trade leverage. Among the highlights: Chinese tweets about Australian war crimes, boosted by a hamhanded bot campaign. And in a move that ought to be front an center in future justifications of the Trump administration’s ban on WeChat, the platform refused to carry the Australian prime minister’s criticism of the war-crimes tweet. Tom Cotton and Marco Rubio, call your office!

And this will have to be the Senators' fight, because it looks more and more as though the Trump administration has thrown in the towel. Its claim to be negotiating a TikTok sale after ordering divestment is getting thinner; now the divestment deadline has completely disappeared, as the government simply says that negotiations will continue.   Nick Weaver is on track to win his bet with me that CFIUS won’t make good on its Tiktok order before the mess is shoveled onto Joe Biden’s plate.

Whoever was in charge of beating up WeChat and TikTok may have checked out of the Trump administration early, but the team that’s sticking pins in other Chinese companies is still hard at work. Jordan and Brian talk about the addition of SMIC to the amorphous Defense blacklist. And Congress has passed a law (awaiting Presidential signature) that will make life hard for Chinese firms listed on U.S. exchanges.

China, meanwhile, isn’t taking this lying down, Jordan reports. It is mirror-imaging all the Western laws that it sees as targeting China, including bans on exports of Chinese products and technology. It is racing (on what Jordan thinks is a twenty-year pace) to create its own chip design capabilities.

And with some success. Sultan, the podcast’s resident DeHyper, takes some of the hype out of China’s claims to quantum supremacy.  But even dehyped, China’s achievement should be making those who rely on RSA-style crypto just a bit nervous (and that’s all of us, of course).

Michael Weiner previews the still veiled state antitrust lawsuit against Facebook and promises to come back with details as soon as it’s filed. In quick hits, I explain why we haven’t covered the Iranian claim that their scientist was rubbed out by an Israeli killer robot machine gun: I don’t actually believe them.

Brian explains that another law aimed at China and its use of Xinjian forced labor is attracting lobbyists but likely to pass. Apple, Nike, and Coca-Cola have all taken hits for lobbying on the bill; none of them say they oppose the bill, but it turns out there’s a reason for that. Lobbyists have largely picked the bones clean.

President Trump is leaving office in typical fashion – gesturing in the right direction but uninteresting in actually getting there. In a “Too Much Too Late” negotiating move, the President has threatened to veto the defense authorization act if it doesn’t include a repeal of section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. If he’s yearning to wield the veto, Dems and GOP alike seem willing to give him the chance.  They may even override, or wait until January 20 to pass it again.

Finally I commend to interested listeners the oral argument in the Supreme Court’s Van Buren case, about the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. The Solicitor General’s footwork in making up quasitextual limitations on the more sweeping readings of the Act is admirable, and it may well be enough to keep van Buren in jail, where he probably belongs for some crime, if not this one. 

Download the 341st 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 [email protected]. 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.