The Cyberlaw Podcast

30 May 2025

The Cyberlaw Podcast is back from hiatus – briefly!  I've used the hiatus well, skiing the Canadian Ski Marathon, trekking through Patagonia, and having a heart valve repaired (all good now!). So

22 Apr 2024

Okay, yes, I promised to take a hiatus after episode 500. Yet here it is a week later, and I'm releasing episode 501. Here's my excuse. I read and liked Dmitri Alperovitch's book, "World on the

11 Apr 2024

There's a whiff of Auld Lang Syne about episode 500 of the Cyberlaw Podcast, since after this it will be going on hiatus for some time and maybe forever. (Okay, there will be an interview with Dmitri

2 Apr 2024

This episode is notable not just for cyberlaw commentary, but for its imminent disappearance from these pages and from podcast playlists everywhere.  Having promised to take stock of the podcast

26 Mar 2024

The Biden administration has been aggressively pursuing antitrust cases against Silicon Valley giants like Amazon, Google, and Facebook. This week it was Apple's turn. The Justice Department (joined

19 Mar 2024

The Supreme Court is getting a heavy serving of first amendment social media cases. Gus Hurwitz covers two that made the news last week. In the first, Justice Barrett spoke for a unanimous court in

14 Mar 2024

This bonus episode of the Cyberlaw Podcast focuses on the national security implications of sensitive personal information. Sales of personal data have been largely unregulated as the growth of

13 Mar 2024

Kemba Walden and Stewart revisit the National Cybersecurity Strategy a year later. Sultan Meghji examines the ransomware attack on Change Healthcare and its consequences. Brandon Pugh reminds us that

7 Mar 2024

The United States is in the process of rolling out a sweeping regulation for personal data transfers. But the rulemaking is getting limited attention because it targets transfers to our rivals in

20 Feb 2024

We begin this episode with Paul Rosenzweig describing major progress in teaching AI models to do text-to-speech conversions. Amazon flagged its new model as having "emergent" capabilities in

16 Feb 2024

On the latest episode of The Cyberlaw Podcast, guest host Brian Fleming, along with panelists Jane Bambauer, Gus Hurwitz, (https://www.law.upenn.edu/faculty/ghurwitz) and Nate Jones,

6 Feb 2024

It was a week of serious cybersecurity incidents paired with unimpressive responses. As Melanie Teplinsky reminds us, the U.S. government has been agitated for months about China's apparent

30 Jan 2024

It was a big week for deep fakes generated by artificial intelligence. Sultan Meghji, who's got a new AI startup, walked us through three stories that illustrate the ways AI will lead to more

23 Jan 2024

The Supreme Court heard argument last week in two cases seeking to overturn the Chevron doctrine that defers to administrative agencies in interpreting the statutes that they administer. The cases

9 Jan 2024

Returning from winter break, this episode of the Cyberlaw Podcast covers a lot of ground. The story I think we'll hear the most about in 2024 is the remarkable exploit used to compromise several

12 Dec 2023

It's the last and probably longest Cyberlaw Podcast episode of 2023. To lead off, Megan Stifel takes us through a batch of stories about ways that AI, and especially AI trust and safety, manage to

5 Dec 2023

In this episode, Paul Stephan lays out the reasoning behind U.S. District Judge Donald W. Molloy's decision enjoining Montana's ban on TikTok. There are some plausible reasons for such an

28 Nov 2023

The OpenAI corporate drama came to a sudden end last week. So sudden, in fact, that the pundits never quite figured out What It All Means. Jim Dempsey and Michael Nelson take us through some of the

21 Nov 2023

Paul Rosenzweig (http://redbranchconsulting.com/) brings us up to date on the debate over renewing section 702, highlighting the introduction of the first credible "renew and reform" measure by the

14 Nov 2023

That, at least, is what I hear from my VC friends in Silicon Valley. And they wouldn't get an argument this week from EU negotiators facing what looks like a third rewrite of the much-too -early AI

7 Nov 2023

In a law-packed Cyberlaw Podcast episode, Chris Conte walks us through the long, detailed, and justifiably controversial SEC enforcement action against SolarWinds and its top infosec officer, Tim

31 Oct 2023

I take advantage of Scott Shapiro's participation in this episode of the Cyberlaw Podcast to interview him about his book, Fancy Bear Goes Phishing – The Dark History of the Information Age, in

24 Oct 2023

This episode of the Cyberlaw Podcast begins with the administration's aggressive new rules on chip exports (about:blank) to China. Practically every aspect of the rules announced just eight months

17 Oct 2023

This episode of the Cyberlaw Podcast delves into a False Claims Act lawsuit against Penn State University by a former CIO to one of its research units. The lawsuit alleges that Penn State faked

16 Oct 2023

The debate over section 702 of FISA is heating up as the end-of-year deadline for reauthorization draws near. The debate can now draw upon a report from the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight

10 Oct 2023

Today's episode of the Cyberlaw Podcast begins as it must with Saturday's appalling Hamas attack on Israeli civilians. I ask Adam Hickey and Paul Rosenzweig (http://redbranchconsulting.com/) to

3 Oct 2023

The Supreme Court has granted certiorari to review two big state laws trying to impose limits on social media censorship (or "curation," if you prefer) of platform content. Paul Stephan and I spar

26 Sep 2023

Our headline story for this episode of the Cyberlaw Podcast is the U.K.'s sweeping new Online Safety Act, which regulates social media in a host of ways. Mark MacCarthy spells some of them out, but

19 Sep 2023

That's the question I have after the latest episode of the Cyberlaw Podcast. Jeffery Atik lays out the government's best case: that it artificially bolstered its dominance in search by paying to be

12 Sep 2023

All the handwringing over AI replacing white collar jobs came to an end this week for cybersecurity experts. As Scott Shapiro (https://law.yale.edu/scott-j-shapiro) explains, we've known almost from

6 Sep 2023

The Cyberlaw Podcast is back from August hiatus, and the theme of the episode seems to be the way other countries are using the global success of U.S. technology to impose their priorities on the

26 Jul 2023

In our last episode before the August break, the Cyberlaw Podcast drills down on the AI industry leaders' trip to Washington, where they dutifully signed up to what Gus Hurwitz calls "a bag of

18 Jul 2023

This episode of the Cyberlaw Podcast kicks off with a stinging defeat for the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which could not persuade the courts (about:blank) to suspend the Microsoft-Activision

11 Jul 2023

It's surely fitting that a decision released on July 4 would set off fireworks on the Cyberlaw Podcast. The source of the drama was U.S. District Court Judge Terry Doughty's injunction prohibiting

5 Jul 2023

Geopolitics has always played a role in prosecuting hackers. But it's getting a lot more complicated, as Kurt Sanger reports. Responding to a U.S. request, a Russian cybersecurity executive has been

3 Jul 2023

Max Schrems is the lawyer and activist behind two (and, probably soon, a third) legal challenge to the adequacy of U.S. law to protect European personal data. Thanks to the Federalist Society's

28 Jun 2023

Sen. Schumer (D-N.Y.) has announced an ambitious plan to produce a bipartisan AI regulation program in a matter of months. Jordan Schneider (https://rhg.com/) admires the project; I'm more

21 Jun 2023

Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) is to moral panics over privacy what Andreessen Horowitz is to cryptocurrency startups. He's constantly trying to blow life into them, hoping to justify new restrictions on

13 Jun 2023

It was a disastrous week for cryptocurrency in the United States, as the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) filed suit against the two biggest exchanges, Binance and Coinbase, on a theory that

6 Jun 2023

This episode of the Cyberlaw Podcast kicks off with a spirited debate over AI regulation. Mark MacCarthy dismisses AI researchers' recent call for attention to the existential risks posed by AI; he

1 Jun 2023

In this bonus episode of the Cyberlaw Podcast, I interview Jimmy Wales (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Wales), the cofounder of Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a rare survivor from the Internet Hippie

31 May 2023

This episode of the Cyberlaw Podcast features the second half of my interview with Paul Stephan, author of The World Crisis and International Law. But it begins the way many recent episodes have

23 May 2023

This episode features part 1 of our two-part interview with Paul Stephan, author of The World Crisis and International Law—a deeper and more entertaining read than the title suggests. Paul lays

16 May 2023

Maury Shenk opens this episode with an exploration of three efforts to overcome notable gaps in the performance of large language AI models. OpenAI has developed a tool meant to address the models'

9 May 2023

The "godfather of AI" has left Google, offering warnings about the existential risks for humanity of the technology. Mark MacCarthy calls those risks a fantasy, and a debate breaks out between

2 May 2023

We open this episode of the Cyberlaw Podcast with some actual news about the debate over renewing section 702 of FISA. That's the law that allows the government to target foreigners for a national

25 Apr 2023

The latest episode of The Cyberlaw Podcast was not created by chatbots (we swear!). Guest host Brian Fleming, along with guests Jay Healey, Maury Shenk, and Nick Weaver

19 Apr 2023

Every government on the planet announced last week an ambition to regulate artificial intelligence. Nate Jones and Jamil Jaffer take us through the announcements. What's particularly discouraging is

11 Apr 2023

We do a long take on some of the AI safety reports that have been issued in recent weeks. Jeffery Atik first takes us through the basics of attention based AI, and then into reports from OpenAI and

4 Apr 2023

Dmitri Alperovitch (https://silverado.org/) joins the Cyberlaw Podcast to discuss the state of semiconductor decoupling between China and the West. It's a broad movement, fed by both sides. China