Skating on Stilts

423. President DeSantis’s First Supreme Court Nominee

This episode features a much deeper, and more diverse, examination of the Fifth Circuit decision upholding Texas's social media law than we did last week. We devote the last half of this episode to a structured dialogue  between Adam Candeub and Alan Rozenshtein about the decision. Both have written about it, Alan critically and Adam supportively. I lead off, arguing that, contrary to legal Twitter's dismissive reaction, the opinion is a brilliant and effective piece of Supreme Court advocacy. Alan thinks that's exactly the problem; he objects to the opinion's grating self-certainty and refusal to acknowledge the less convenient parts of past case law. Adam is closer to my view. We all seem to agree that the opinion succeeds as an audition for Judge Oldham to become Justice Oldham in the DeSantis Administration.

We walk through the opinion and what its critics don't like, touching on the competing free expression interests of social media users and of the platforms themselves, whether there's any basis for an injunction today, given the relative weakness of the overbreadth argument, and whether "exercising editorial discretion" is a fundamental right under the first amendment or just an artifact of older technologies. Most intriguingly, we find unexpected consensus that Judge Oldham's (and Justice Thomas's) common carrier argument may turn out to be the most powerful argument in the case when it reaches the Court.

In the news roundup, we focus on the sprint to pass additional legislation before the end of the Congress. Michael Ellis explains the debate between the Cyberspace Solarium Commission alumni and business lobbyists over enacting a statutory set of obligations for systemically critical infrastructure companies.

Adam outlines a strange-bedfellows bill that has united Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Ted Cruz (R-Texas) in an effort to give small media companies and broadcasters an antitrust immunity to bargain with the big social media platforms over the use of their content. Adam is a skeptic, Alan less so.

The Pentagon, reliably braver when facing bullets than a bad Washington Post story, is performing to type in the flap over fake social media accounts. Michael tells us that the accounts pushed pro-U.S. stories but had met with little success before Meta and Twitter caught on and kicked them off their platforms. Now the Department of Defense is conducting a broad review of military information operations. I predict fewer such efforts and don't mourn their loss.

Adam and I touch on a decision of Meta's Oversight Board criticizing Facebook's automated image takedowns. I offer a new touchstone for understanding content regulation at the Big Platforms: They just don't care, so they've turned the whole effort over to second-rate AI and second-rate employees. There's a lot of explanatory power there.

Michael walks us through the Department of the Treasury's new flexibility on sending communications software and services to Iran.

And, in quick hits, I note that:

• The Justice Department's China Initiative continues to suffer pushback,
• We should all expect bad things from the emergence of  violence as a service, and
• Russian botmasters have suddenly discovered that extradition to the U.S. may be better than going home and facing mobilization.

Download the 423rd 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. Especially the pets.

422. Judge Oldham Bails Out Texas

The big news of the week was a Fifth Circuit decision upholding Texas's law regulating social media speech suppression. The decision was poorly received by the usual supporters of social media censorship but I found it both remarkably well written and surprisingly persuasive. That does not mean it will survive the almost inevitable Supreme Court review but Judge Oldham wrote an opinion that could be a model for a Supreme Court decision upholding the Texas law.

The big hacking story of the week was a brutal takedown of Uber, probably by the dreaded Advanced Persistent Teenager. Dave Aitel explains what happened and why no other large corporation should feel smug or certain that the same cannot happen to them. Nick Weaver piles on.

Maury Shenk explains a recent European court decision upholding sanctions on Google for its restriction of Android phone implementations.

Dave points to some of the less well publicized aspects of the Twitter whistleblower's testimony before Congress. We agree on the bottom line – that Twitter is utterly incapable of protecting either U.S. national security or even the security of its users' messages. If there were any doubt about that, it would be laid to rest by Twitter's dependence on Chinese government advertising revenue.

Maury and Nick tutor me on The Merge, which moves Ethereum from "proof of work' to "proof of stake," massively reducing the climate footprint of the cryptocurrency. They are both surprisingly upbeat about it.

Maury also lays out a new European proposal for regulating the internet of things – and, I point out, for massively increasing the cost of all those things.

China is getting into the attribution game. It has issued a report blaming the National Security Agency for intruding on Chinese educational institution networks. Dave is not impressed.

The Department of Homeland security, in breaking news from 2003, has been storing the contents of phones it seizes on the border. Dave predicts that DHS will have to further pull back on its current practices. I'm less sure.

Now that China is regulating vulnerability disclosures, are Chinese companies reluctant to disclose vulnerabilities outside China? The Atlantic Council has a report on the subject, but Dave thinks the results are ambiguous at best.

In quick hits:

• The Senate has confirmed Nate Fick as the first U.S. cyber ambassador
• I reiterate wit evidence my cynical view that Apple's app rules are not so much concerned about protecting your privacy as about taking share from Google and Facebook in the advertising market
• Nick lays out the latest Treasury Department guidance on sanctions and tornado cash
• Maury explains how the Indian government persuaded 50 million Indians to geotag their homes
• And I tell listeners how the FBI and Silicon Valley could be working together to identify conservatives for potential criminal investigation.

Download the 422nd 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.

421. Congressional Session of the Living Dead

 

Gus Hurwitz brings us up to speed on major tech bills in Congress. They are all dead. But some of them don't know it yet.

The big privacy bill, American Data Privacy and Protection Act, was killed by the left, but I argue that it's the right that should be celebrating, since the bill would have imposed race and gender preferences all across the economy, and the GOP members who supported the measure in the House were likely sold a bill of goods by industry lobbyists.

The big antitrust bill, American Innovation and Choice Online Act, is also a zombie, Gus argues, lurching undead toward the Senate floor but unlikely to muster the GOP votes needed to pass, mainly because content moderation has become a simple partisan issue: the GOP wants less (or fairer) moderation, Dems want more of what Silicon Valley has been dishing out for the past few years. If the bill doesn't produce viewpoint competition in the tech sector, it offers nothing for the GOP, and industry lobbyists are happily driving wedges into that divide.

The same divide also caused a stutter in the bill allowing newspapers to bargain collectively with the big platforms. It may make it to the floor, but it's already losing body parts.

Meanwhile, the White House is having a weirdly inconclusive "listening session" that might better have been called a "talking but not really proposing anything session."

When Iran launched a wiper attack on Albania because of its harboring of Mujahedin-e-Kalq, Albania broke relations with Iran and the U.S. promised consequences. In fact, all the U.S. seems to have done is impose meaningless sanctions on the already-sanctioned Iranian spy ministry. What was Iran's response? A second cyberattack on Albania. Nate Jones runs down the story. Jamil Jaffer and I question whether governmental sanctions on foreign intelligence agencies, which never promised much, are now delivering an appearance of haplessness and not of strength.

Jamil and I dwell on the criminal trial of Joe Sullivan for how he handled some hackers who got access to personal data stored by Uber. He was the chief security officer, and he decided to pay the hackers a bug bounty in exchange for their promising to destroy the data. That allowed Uber to avoid treating (and reporting) the incident as a breach. Creative lawyering or too creative by half? I could go either way, but calling it obstruction of justice and wire fraud seems like a reach. Nonetheless, that's what the Justice is charging in a case that opened last week. It is heavily politicized, and all the politics – corporate and governmental – line up against Sullivan. Whether the jury will do the same is another question. Meanwhile, everyone from other CISOs to former New York Times reporter Nicole Perlroth are questioning the prosecution's merits and warning of its likely consequences. However the case comes out, I predict that the biggest loser will be the FBI, which will never again get the kind of welcome from CISOs that it has in more innocent days.

Jamil critiques Apple's decision to support China's chip industry with new orders – and its claim that the chips it puts in its phones for the China market will stay in China.

The sanctions on Tornado Cash come back to the podcast for the second week in a row, Nate tells us, this time as litigation. Coinbase is funding an APA and constitutional challenge to Treasury's anctioning of a pile of code rather than a person or entity. My money is on the Treasury winning in the end.

In quicker hits,

• Nate and I talk about the many cryptocurrency policy papers coming out of the administration these days. Treasury plans to warn the White House that cryptocurrency needs regulation. And the White House science office thinks proof-of-work crypto mining is warming the planet unnecessarily.
• Gus and I wonder out loud whether Lina Khan's Federal Trade Commission has a fatal case of "eyes bigger than stomach."
• Nate covers the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency's (CISA) request for public feedback on its mandatory incident reporting rule.
• Gus and I note new criticism of the EU's AI Act.
• Gus also lays out the opening round in what could turn out to be an important Justice Department case trying to end Google's large payments to be the default search engine on popular platforms like the iPhone.

Download the 421st 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.

420. All the Cyberlaw you missed in August

This is our return-from-hiatus episode. Jordan Schneider kicks things off by covering the passage of a major U.S. semiconductor-building subsidy bill, while new contributor Brian Fleming talks with Nick Weaver about new foreign investment restrictions on chip (and maybe other) technology companies, as well as new export controls on (artificial Intelligence (AI) chips going to China. Jordan also covers a big corruption scandal arising from China’s big chip-building subsidy program, leading me to wonder when we’ll have our version.

Brian and Nick cover the month’s biggest cryptocurrency policy story, the imposition of OFAC sanctions on Tornado Cash. They agree that, while the outer limits of sanctions aren’t entirely clear, they are likely to show that sometimes the U.S. Code actually does trump digital code. Nick points listeners to his bracing essay, OFAC Around and Find Out.

Paul Rosenzweig reprises his role as the voice of reason in the debate over location tracking and Dobbs. (Literally. Paul and I did an hour-long panel on the topic last week. It’s available here.) I reprise my role as Chief Privacy Skeptic, calling the Dobbs/location fuss an overrated tempest in a teapot.

Brian takes on one aspect of the Mudge whistleblower complaint criticizing Twitter's security: Twitter’s poor record at keeping foreign spies from infiltrating its workforce and getting wide access to its customer records. Perhaps coincidentally, he notes, a former Twitter employee was just convicted of “spying lite”, proving the company is just as good at national security protection as it is at content moderation.

Meanwhile, returning to onshore aspects of U.S.-China economic relations, Jordan tells us about the survival of high-level government concerns about TikTok. I note that, in the years since these concerns first surfaced in the Trump era, TikTok’s lobbying efforts have only grown more sophisticated. Speaking of which, Klon Kitchen has done a good job of highlighting DJI’s increasingly sophisticated lobbying in Washington D.C.

The Cloudflare decision to deplatform Kiwi Farms kicks off a donnybrook, with Paul and Nick on one side and me on the other. It’s a classic Cyberlaw Podcast debate.

In quick hits and updates:

• Nick and I cover the sad story of the Dad who photographed his baby’s private parts at a doctor’s request and, thanks to Google’s lack of human appellate review, lost his email, his phone number, and all of the accounts that used the phone for 2FA.
• Paul brings us up to speed on the U.S.-EU data fight: and teases today's Federalist Society webinar on the topic.
• Nick explains the big changes likely to come to the porn world because of a lawsuit against Visa. And why Twitter narrowly averted its own child sex scandal.
• I update listeners on the flap over Google’s bias against GOP fundraising emails. It has led to an unlikely result: less spam filtering for all such emails.
• And, after waiting much too long, Brian Krebs has retracted his post about a Ubiquity “breach” that led the company to sue him.

Download the 420th 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.