Author Archive | Stewart Baker

In a speech to RSA 2012 in Europe, Art Coviello challenged privacy laws as a threat to, well, privacy: “Intelligence-based security also requires information sharing at scale,” said Coviello. But these changes are held back by a number of things, including current privacy laws. Coviello recounted a discussion he had with a CIO at a […]

The House Intelligence Committee has issued a detailed report on its investigation of Huawei and ZTE, the Chinese telecom equipment giants. It’s a professional and bipartisan piece of work, some 50 densely footnoted pages long. In 2011, Huawei asked for an investigation so it could answer suspicions that it might enable Chinese interception of US […]

No, we’re not suddenly turning into the Huffington Post.  But trust me, this photo is directly relevant to the topic at hand:  How the US should respond to massive state-sponsored cyberespionage. Right now, policymakers are intent on improving network security, perhaps by pressing the private sector to improve its security, or by waiving outmoded privacy […]

The Chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee has demanded an “immediate explanation” of the cybersecurity failings of a popular small drone.  In an “urgent” letter to Henri Seydoux, the CEO of Parrot Group, Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) pointed with alarm to the outcome of the Lawfare Drone Smackdown.  “Using a variety of cyberattacks, Ben Wittes […]

In upcoming testimony before the House Homeland Security Committee, I’ll be assessing the Department of Homeland Security, with particular focus on cybersecurity.  Probably the most important point I’ll be making is a simple one:  We will never defend our way out of the current cybersecurity crisis.  That’s because putting all the burden of preventing crime on the […]

Federal News Radio’s Jason Miller reports that he’s seen a draft of the executive order on cybersecurity.  What he describes is quite plausible: The order creates a council chaired by DHS to coordinate the mission. This provision would be a defeat for the business lobbyists who fought to keep DHS from getting a central cybersecurity […]

Privacy groups put much of their effort into attacking new technologies for a reason.  They’re afraid that, once we see a technology in action, we won’t be scared by its hypothetical risks, while its benefits will be easier to assess. Once that happens, imposing new privacy laws gets a lot harder. To see just how […]

And do you have to be a Republican to use it? PHOTOS: From Salon

Adam Mueller, a police-the-police campaigner, has been convicted and sentenced to three months in jail for recording and posting telephone conversations with a police captain, a high school principal and a school secretary in Manchester, NH. Mueller was calling for comment on a student’s cell phone video allegedly showing a Manchester officer using excessive force. […]

Greg McNeal’s article for Forbes argues that the UAV industry is now squarely in the privacy lobby’s sights.  That means that the industry must be demonized and creepified relentlessly until new legal constraints are imposed on public and private use of the technology.  All the signs are there.  The left-leaning privacy groups have already recruited Drudge […]

Eugene recently posted about whether it can ever be libelous to say, accurately, that someone has been arrested after the arrest has been expunged.  The New Jersey Supreme Court rightly described the idea as Orwellian and rejected it. In Europe, though, something like this rule is being advanced in the name of privacy.  Unlike the […]

I’ve long suspected that President Obama would respond to the failure of cybersecurity legislation with an executive order.  Many of the legislative proposals that failed in the Senate can be implemented by the President acting alone.  An executive order would also advance a story line that has the President robustly protecting national security while a […]

The cybersecurity bill is dead for this Congress, with cloture failing by a vote of 52-46. The Senate’s failure to reach any kind of compromise is particularly striking, given that roughly two-thirds of the basic ideas in the bill had been endorsed by all of the following: the Obama administration, Senator McCain and the great majority of […]

Here’s the head of Huawei’s enterprise business last year, telling the Financial Times that the whole security thing is overblown: Mr Xu said Huawei represented no threat to national security anywhere. “There has never been a single network security breach case that has ever happened with Huawei.” Whoops.  Here’s a recent ComputerWorld report on the […]