Steptoe Cyberlaw Podcast

Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) is to moral panics over privacy what Andreessen Horowitz is to cryptocurrency startups. He’s constantly trying to blow life into them, hoping to justify new restrictions on government or private uses of data. His latest crusade is against the intelligence community’s purchase of behavioral data, which is generally available to everyone from Amazon to the GRU. He has launched his campaign several times, introducing legislation, holding up Avril Haines’s confirmation over the issue, and extracting a Director of National Intelligence report on the topic that has now been declassified. It was a sober and reasonable explanation of why commercial data is valuable for intelligence purposes, so naturally WIRED magazine’s headline summary was, “The U.S. Is Openly Stockpiling Dirt on All Its Citizens.” Matthew Heiman takes us through the story, sparking a debate that pulls in Michael Karanicolas and Cristin Flynn Goodwin. Next, Michael explains IBM’s announcement that it has made a big step