Cheapfakes and the end of blackmail

Episode 265 of the Cyberlaw Podcast

Paul Rosenzweig leads off with This Week in China Tech Fear – an enduring and fecund feature in Washington these days. We cover the Trump Administration's plan to blacklist up to five Chinese surveillance companies, including Hikvision, for contributing to Uighur human rights violations in the West of China, DHS's rather bland warning that commercial Chinese drones pose a data risk for US users, and the difficulty US chipmakers are facing in getting "deemed export" licenses for Chinese nationals.

We delve deeper into a remarkably shallow and agenda-driven New York Times article by Nicole Perlroth and Scott Shane that blames NSA for Baltimore's ransomware problem without ever asking why the city failed for two years to patch its systems. David Kris uses the story to take us into the Vulnerabilities Equities Process – and its flaws.

There may be a lot – or nothing – to the Navy email "spyware" story, but David points out just how many of today's cyber issues it touches. With the added fillip of a "Go Air Force, Beat Navy" theme not usually sounded in cybersecurity stories.

Paul expands on what I have called Cheapfakes (as opposed to Deep Fakes) – the Pelosi video manipulated to make her sound impaired. And he manages to find something approaching good news in the advance of faked video – it may mean the end of (video) blackmail.

But not the end of "revenge porn" and revenge porn laws. I ask Gus Hurwitz whether those laws are actually protected by the Constitution, and the answer turns out to be highly qualified. But, surprisingly, media lawyers aren't objecting that revenge porn laws criminalizing the dissemination of true facts are on a slippery slope to criminalizing news media. Only a bit more persuasively, though, that is the argument they're making about the expanded charges of espionage against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. David offers his view of the pros and cons of the indictment.

And Gus closes us out with some almost unalloyed good news. Despite my suspicion of any bipartisan bill in the current climate, he insists that the Senate-passed anti-robocalling bill is a straight victory for the Forces of Good. But, he warns, the House could still screw things up by adding a private right of action along the lines of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, which has provided the plaintiffs bar with an endless supply of class actions without actually benefiting consumers.

Download the 265th Episode (mp3).

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