DEA v. NSA—the podcast

In this week's episode, our guest is Rebecca Richards, NSA's director of privacy and civil liberties. We ask the tough questions: Is her title an elaborate hoax or is she the busiest woman on the planet? How long will it be before privacy groups blame the Seattle Seahawks' loss on NSA's policy of intercepting everything? How do you tell an extroverted NSA engineer from an introvert? And, more seriously, now that acting within the law isn't apparently enough, how can an intelligence agency assure Americans that it shares their values without exposing all its capabilities?

In the week's news, Jason Weinstein, Michael Vatis and I explore the DEA's license plate collection program and what it means, among other things, for future Supreme Court jurisprudence on location and the fourth amendment. We take on the WikiLeaks-Google flap and conclude that there's less there than meets the eye.

Jason celebrates a festival of FTC news. The staff report on the Internet of Things provokes a commissioner to dissent from feel-good privacy bromides. The FTC data security scalp count grows to 53, with more on the way. We discover that the FTC has aspirations to become the Federal Telecommunications Commission, regulating telecommunications throttling as well as cramming—and apparently forcing the FCC into the business of regulating hotels. To be fair, we find ourselves rooting for the Commission as it brings the hammer down on a revenge porn site.

And Michael finds the key to understanding China's policies on cybersecurity and encryption.

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Download the fifty-second episode (mp3).

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