The Half-life of Secrets, A Golden Age of Surveillance, and the US Military's Starship Enterprise

The Cybersecurity Podcast

Leading privacy and cyberlaw scholar Peter Swire joins New America’s Peter Singer and Passcode’s Sara Sorcher to talk about the difficulty of keeping secrets in the Digital Age, the differences between the East and West Coast's views on the Edward Snowden leaks, and what's still needed to reform US surveillance practices. Swire, a professor at Georgia Institute of Technology who also served on President Obama’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technology, says we're living in a Golden Age of Surveillance – and that law enforcement is not actually "going dark" in its pursuit of criminals and terrorists but actually has more available data than ever before. Rick Howard, chief security officer for Palo Alto Networks and Army veteran, weighs in on the line between spying for economic advantage and state secrets; whether companies should be able to strike back when they're under cyberattack; and if proposed threat information sharing plans will be effective. He also shares stories about how the military, in the early days of cybersecurity, took a stab at recreating science fiction.