Author Archive | Stewart Baker

The ABA’s Standing Committee on Law and National Security has just released a sequel to its first book on national security legal topics. The first book, Patriot Debates, focused heavily on the USA Patriot Act. The second book, Patriots Debate, is a wider-ranging look at law and national security. Both volumes are distinguished by several […]

Conservatives have grown more skeptical of copyright maximalism since SOPA forced newly elected Republicans to choose sides in the copyright wars. And copyright owners aren’t doing much to win them back, judging by Bertelsmann’s latest ham-fisted foray into US politics.  The large German publisher, which owns BMG Rights Management, recently forced YouTube to take down […]

Maybe so, but the stories and podcasts repeating this claim by former Pentagon analyst F. Michael Maloof don’t provide much new supporting evidence. Maloof’s own report is interesting and extensive, and it does indeed make the claim I’ve headlined: The Chinese government has “pervasive access” to some 80 percent of the world’s communications, giving it the […]

A kind of perfect storm has struck ZTE, the huge Chinese telecom equipment manufacturer.  A storm largely of ZTE’s own making. For starters, ZTE and its larger Chinese rival, Huawei, have been the subjects of great national security concern for years.  The US intelligence community fears that, if allowed to install equipment here, the two […]

The sound you hear is legal ground shifting under the banks’ feet. Keylogging software now infects many small businesses.  Hackers use it to steal banking credentials and make wire transfers.  Keeping the hackers out is very difficult, at least for small businesses. The most promising way to defeat such fraud is for banks to deploy back-end […]

For the past three years, a couple of think tanks, one in China and one in the US, have been conducting what could be called “proxy” negotiations on cyberwar and cyberespionage. The China Institute of Contemporary International Relations and the US Center for Strategic and International Studies are both establishment institutions, with just enough independence […]

The Department of Homeland Security is a settled part of the federal landscape now, and Osama bin Laden is dead. So DHS is finding budget increases harder to come by. And as funds grow tighter, it’s inevitable that the Department will begin to look for less expensive ways to achieve its security goals.  Up to now, DHS […]

As Randy has noted, recent news reports purport to tell the story of the Chief Justice switching his vote while drafting what began as an opinion striking down Obamacare.  CBS News says it has inside details from two sources: There were countless news articles in May warning of damage to the Court – and to […]

One of the things I like about computer security is how uncredentialed the whole field is.  Very few senior computer security people started their careers in the field.  One of the best I knew started her career as a nurse; others as cops; a few as lawyers.  Some even started in computer science.  But this […]

What explains Muslim anti-Americanism?  Those on the right say it’s our freedoms.  Those on the left say it’s our resort to military force.  The debate just looks like an artifact of American political debates. So it shouldn’t be a surprise to discover that Muslim antiAmericanism is really just … an artifact of local political debates. […]

A new look at the Vioxx debacle suggests that HIPAA’s privacy regime may have contributed to 90 thousand unnecessary heart attacks and 25 thousand premature deaths. Vioxx, the non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug once prescribed for arthritis, was on the market for over five years before it was withdrawn from the market in 2004. Though a group […]

Why would a Nigerian scammer admit that he’s from Nigeria?  After all, Nigeria is notorious for fraudulent emails.  Shouldn’t the fraudsters claim instead to be from Turkey or South Africa or, really, anywhere but Nigeria?  That’s a question asked by Microsoft researcher, Cormac Herley, and seconded by security guru Bruce Schneier.  Herley’s insightful answer looks […]

Big data reached a new plateau in public consciousness recently.  Cheap data storage and analytics mean that our behavior can now be tracked and correlated in remarkably fine-grained ways.  That’s already being done for security reasons on computer networks, and in the hunt for terrorists, but it’s been controversial.  Privacy groups are using the creepiness factor to […]

USA Today has a good article on efforts to redesign airport security so that it is faster and less obtrusive. Not surprisingly, the whole effort relies on data-driven screening in place of the one-size-fits-all approach: The key to speeding up checkpoints and making security less intrusive will be to identify and assess travelers according to […]