In the 1980s, they used to say that a conservative was a liberal who’d been mugged. Today’s version is that a conservative who embraces regulation of business is a conservative who’s been muzzled by Silicon Valley. David Kris kicks off this topic by reprising Justice Thomas’s opinion in a case about Trump’s authority to block […]
Our interview this week is with Francis Fukuyama, a fellow and teacher at Stanford and a renowned scholar and public intellectual for at least three decades. He is the coauthor of the Report of the Working Group on Platform Scale, an insightful paper on the power of platforms to suppress and shape public debate. Fukuyama […]
Our news roundup for this episode is heavy on China and tech policy. And most of the news is bad for tech companies. Jordan Schneider tells us that China is telling certain of its agencies not to purchase Teslas or allow them on the premises, for fear that Elon Musk’s famously intrusive record-keeping systems will […]
This week we interview Eliot Higgins, founder and executive director of the online investigative collective Bellingcat and author of We Are Bellingcat. Bellingcat has produced remarkable investigative scoops on everything from Saddam’s use of chemical weapons to exposing the Russian FSB operatives who killed Sergei Skripal with Novichok, and, most impressive, calling a member of […]
We’re mostly back to our cybersecurity roots in this episode, for good reasons and bad. The worst of the bad reasons is a new set of zero-day vulnerabilities in Microsoft’s Exchange servers. They’ve been patched, Bruce Schneier tells us, but that seems to have inspired the Chinese government hackers to switch their campaign from Stealth to […]
In the news roundup, David Kris digs into rumors that Chinese malware attacks may have caused a blackout in India at a time when military conflict was flaring on the two nation’s Himalayan border. This leads us to Russia’s targeting of the U.S. grid and to uneasy speculation on how well our regulatory regime is […]
This episode features an interview with Jason Fagone, journalist and author of The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America’s Enemies. I wax enthusiastic about Jason’s book, which features remarkable research, a plot like a historical novel, and deep insights into what I call NSA’s […]
Our interview this week is with Nicole Perlroth, the New York Times reporter and author of This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race. It’s a wide-ranging, occasionally confrontational, interview and a great tour of the issues raised in the book about 0-day exploits, US responsibility for the global cyber […]
This episode features a deep dive into the National Security Agency’s self-regulatory approach to overseas signals intelligence, or SIGINT. Frequent contributor David Kris takes us into the details of the SIGINT Annex that governs NSA’s collection outside the US. It turns out to be a surprising amount of fun as we stop to examine the […]
My latest op-ed, on Lawfare, argues that the Biden administration’s first big counterterrorism blunder was getting rid of the Trump travel ban: How, you might ask, could undoing such an unpopular and racist order possibly be a mistake? The answer is that, by the time of its revocation, the Trump travel ban had become something […]
