Alex Stamos on the Hard Tradeoffs of the Internet
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 13 February 2020
⏱️ 59 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this episode of Lawfare's Arbiters of Truth series on disinformation, Evelyn Douek and Kate Klonick spoke with Alex Stamos, the director of the Stanford Internet Observatory. Prior to joining Stanford, Alex served as the chief security officer at Facebook, and before that, as the chief information security officer at Yahoo. They talked about Alex's experience at Facebook handling 2016 election interference, as well as his work on cybersecurity, disinformation, and end-to-end encryption.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The following podcast contains advertising to access an ad-free version of the LawFair |
| 0:07.2 | podcast become a material supporter of LawFair at patreon.com slash LawFair. |
| 0:14.7 | That's patreon.com slash LawFair. |
| 0:18.2 | Also, check out LawFair's other podcast offerings, rational security, chatter, LawFair |
| 0:25.6 | no bull and the aftermath. |
| 0:34.1 | After the election, we spun up a team both to investigate more of what we had reported |
| 0:39.1 | the FBI and what we could figure out related to that as well as what was the source of |
| 0:43.2 | kind of the fake news crisis on Facebook during the election. |
| 0:46.9 | And so that report in April was supposed to be kind of our best understanding of what |
| 0:52.4 | was going on at that time because it became clear that especially now that the Trump |
| 0:57.4 | administration was in power telling the FBI, telling the Department of Justice was not |
| 1:01.3 | going to be like an acceptable thing for us to do. |
| 1:03.8 | But then there is this real fight inside the company because people in the company, |
| 1:08.2 | especially in the DC office, it's their job to keep the company on the good graces of |
| 1:12.7 | the incredibly powerful executive branch of the United States. |
| 1:15.8 | And so they did not want to be seen as getting involved. |
| 1:18.9 | And so the report that came out is the outcome of the fight of how detailed can we be, |
| 1:23.5 | how much attribution can we provide without being seen to insert ourselves into what at |
| 1:28.5 | the time was a very partisan, it's still a very partisan, but a poorly understood area |
| 1:33.5 | of what the Russians had done in 2016. |
| 1:36.4 | I'm Quintet Jurassic and this is the LawFair podcast, February 13, 2020. |
| 1:43.4 | It's another episode of our Arboratives of Truth series on disinformation. |
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