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Stewart Baker

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Stewart A. Baker is a partner in the Washington office of Steptoe & Johnson LLP. He returned to the firm following 3½ years at the Department of Homeland Security as its first Assistant Secretary for Policy. He earlier served as general counsel of the National Security Agency.

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Podcasts

The Cyberlaw Podcast: Debating FISA 215 after Pensacola

Stewart Baker   Tue, Dec 10, 2019, 11:51 AM

The apparent terror attack at Naval Air Station Pensacola spurs a debate among our panelists about whether the FISA Section 215 metadata program deserves to be killed, as Congress has increasingly signaled it intends to do. If the Pensacola attack involved multiple parties acting across US borders, still a live possibility as we talked, then it would be just about the first such attacks since 9/11 – and exactly the kind of attack the metadata program was designed to identify in advance.

Podcasts

The Cyberlaw Podcast: Ethical Algorithms with Michael Kearns and Aaron Roth

Stewart Baker   Fri, Dec 6, 2019, 11:15 AM

Algorithms are at the heart of the Big Data/machine learning/AI changes that are propelling computerized decision-making. In their book, The Ethical Algorithm, Michael Kearns and Aaron Roth, two Computer Science professors at Penn, flag some of the social and ethical choices these changes are forcing upon us.

The Cyberlaw Podcast

The Cyberlaw Podcast: Plumbing the Depths of Artificial Stupidity

Stewart Baker   Fri, Nov 15, 2019, 6:14 PM

The Foreign Agent Registration Act is having a moment – in fact its best year since 1939, as the Justice Department charges three people with spying on Twitter users for Saudi Arabia. Since they were clearly acting like spies but not stealing government secrets or company intellectual property, FARA seems to be the only law that they could be charged with violating.