Our interview is with Kim Zetter, author of the best analysis to date of the weird messaging from NSA and Cyber Command about the domestic “blind spot” or “gap” in their cybersecurity surveillance. I ask Kim whether this is a prelude to new NSA domestic surveillance authorities (definitely not, at least under this administration), why the gap can’t be filled with the broad emergency authorities for FISA and criminal intercepts (they don’t fit, quite),…

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. It’s insightful on the structural issues that have enhanced the power of platforms to suppress and shape public debate. It understands the temptation to address those issues through an antitrust lens – as well…

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 agencies, not to purchase Teslas or allow them on the premises, for fear that Elon Musk’s famously intrusive record-keeping systems will give US agencies insight into Chinese facilities and personnel. Pete Jeydel says the Biden administration is prepping to make the same determination…

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 the FSB team that tried to kill Navalny and getting him to confess. Eliot talks about the techniques that…

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 Promiscuous Mode. Anyone who hasn’t already installed the Microsoft patch is at risk of being compromised today for exploitation tomorrow.…

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 This leads us to Russia’s targeting of the US grid and to uneasy speculation on how well our regulatory regime is adapted to preventing successful grid attacks. The Biden administration is starting to get its legs under it on cybersecurity. In its…

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 “pre-history” – the years from 1917 through 1940 when the need for cryptanalysis was only dimly perceived by…