Author Archive | Stewart Baker

As the threat of major terror attacks rises, the European Commission has chosen to take action.  Of a sort.  It’s about to violate its existing antiterror agreement with the United States – and in a way that will make the current threat worse. Al-Qaeda is apparently planning Mumbai-style commando attacks on European, and the US has reportedly launched drone strikes […]

Two months ago, I posted about the malware that has become known as Stuxnet, noting that it was designed to compromise SCADA systems; I thought that was proof that nations are planning a new form of cyberwar that will target electric power grids among other things. Two months later, though, security experts parsing Stuxnet have […]

Clever and nimble aren’t the first words you think of in connection with Microsoft, but the company’s decision to grant blanket IP licenses to targeted Russian human rights groups strikes me as both.  It took less than 24 hours, and it doesn’t mumble about reducing its cooperation with the authorities — it takes the Microsoft weapon out of authorities’ hands: […]

Russian government allegedly teams with Microsoft to suppress dissenters using dubious claims of software piracy. Staggeringly excessive piracy penalties were pioneered by the United States, but it was only a matter of time before authoritarian governments discovered their charm.

It looks as though hundreds of centenarians carried on the health ministry’s books, and helping to raise Japan’s average life expectancy through the roof, are missing: The story unfolded in late July when police discovered that Sogen Kato, who would have been 111 and was thought to be Tokyo’s oldest man, had actually been dead […]

Short answer:  Not too much. Long answer:  Congress stood on its head to pass a supplemental $600 million border security bill yesterday, with two Senators returning to adopt the provision with unanimous consent.  Election-year politics has a lot to do with the legislative consensus.  But what exactly did the bill do? It funds about 1000 […]

Julian Sanchez and I just recorded a dialogue on bloggingheadsTV about the wikileaks affair and “Top Secret America.”

I’ve been wondering why the Washington Post spent two years putting together the story that it rolled out this week — “Top Secret America.”  The report essentially covers the world of classified contracting, and it was delivered with the fanfare that the Post usually reserves for a Woodward exclusive or a big, deep scandal. But […]

One of my cybersecurity nightmares is that foreign nations will use a network attack to bring down our power grid in a time of crisis.  I’m not alone.  Richard Clarke and Rob Knake spend a lot of time on the risk in their book on Cyberwar.  So naturally the privacy lobby, determined to downplay the […]

The New York Times recently insisted that Google should be regulated because its supersecret algorithm and market dominance required government intervention.  Even more recently, though, Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land reminded the NYT that turnabout is fair play: The New York Times is the number one newspaper web site. Analysts reckon it ranks first in reach among US […]

Quick quiz: A legislature proposes strict new limits on wiretapping, including penalties for leaking the results of a criminal wiretap in advance of trial, essentially making such leaks a felony for most people and a misdemeanor for journalists.  Is this (a) good for human rights because it protects privacy and cuts down on prosecutorial abuses […]

The US and the EU have negotiated over travel reservation data three times in the last six years.  A US law enacted after 9/11 requires that airlines transporting travelers to the US provide information from the airline reservation about those travelers.  Europeans have been antsy about that requirement since 2003, and they’ve initiated three rounds […]

This post is the last in a series about privacy. They are all drawn from my book. The full discussion is available, free for distribution, here. I’ve devoted several posts to failed solutions to the problem of privacy in a data-filled world. In the end, I think these approaches all fail because they’re all reactionary […]