The Cyberlaw Podcast

Episode 343 of the Cyberlaw Podcast is a long meditation on the ways in which technology is encouraging other nations to exercise soft power inside the United States.

Did you ever wonder where all that tech money came from all of a sudden? Turns out, a lot of it comes from online programmatic ads, an industry that gets little attention even from the companies, such as Google, that it made wealthy.

This is my favorite story of the episode. David Kris covers a report from the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board on the enormous value that European governments get in fighting terrorism from the same American surveillance programs that European institutions have been fighting for twenty years to shut down. It’s a delightful takedown of European virtue-signaling, and I hope the Biden Administration gives the PCLOB a new name and mission in honor of the report.

This episode’s interview with Dr. Peter Pry of the EMP Commission raises an awkward question: Is it possible that North Korea has already developed nuclear weapons that could cause the deaths of hundreds of millions of Americans by permanently frying the entire electrical infrastructure with a single high-altitude blast? And if he doesn’t, could the sun accomplish pretty much the same thing? The common factor in both scenarios is EMP—electro-magnetic pulse. And we explore the problem in detail, from the capabilities of adversaries to the controversy that has pitted Dr.