Asaf Lubin on Regulating Commercial Spyware
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 9 August 2023
⏱️ 48 minutes
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Summary
The increasingly pervasive use and abuse of spyware by governments around the world has led to calls for regulation and even outright bans. How should these technologies be controlled? Asaf Lubin, an Associate Professor of Law at Indiana University's Maurer School of Law, thinks that the best path forward is an international agreement that would regulate, but not outlaw, these important national security and crime-fighting tools. He's just published a paper for Laware's ongoing Digital Social Contract research paper series making his case for what he calls the Commercial Spyware Accreditation System.
Alan Rozenshtein, Associate Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota and Senior Editor at Lawfare spoke with Asaf about why current efforts to control spyware are insufficient and why only a global regime can do the job.
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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, that's patreon.com slash |
| 0:16.9 | LawFair. Also check out LawFair's other podcast offerings, rational security, chatter, LawFair |
| 0:25.6 | no bull, and the aftermath. |
| 0:30.0 | Finance doesn't need to be disrupted. It needs people who see the potential for progress, |
| 0:38.2 | like faster payments, more transparency, and new ways to meet compliance, so that finance |
| 0:43.8 | can move at the speed of business. This is what our blockchain solutions deliver for financial |
| 0:50.0 | institutions, enterprises, and central banks around the world. Progress is a choice, and |
| 0:56.0 | it's one you can make right now. Ripple, crypto means business. |
| 1:08.7 | It is clear that what we need is a framework that will at least capture the primary buyers |
| 1:14.7 | of these technologies. These are rule of law binding rich countries who want to buy these |
| 1:20.6 | tools for legitimate criminal investigations. They could then leverage their procurement |
| 1:25.7 | power against these companies to increase a large number of companies to comply with the |
| 1:30.6 | standards they possess. So we need to create a framework that captures enough companies |
| 1:36.1 | and enough governments within it, making it a multi-stakeholder solution. That solution |
| 1:41.9 | will need to be binding on all the parties, not voluntarily undertaken, and would need |
| 1:47.1 | to put a emphasis on accountability. Now we need to still preserve the secrecy inherent |
| 1:52.7 | to the industry, yet if we are ever to create a legitimate marketplace, we need to have |
| 1:58.2 | some accountability, so some framework around grievance mechanisms. All of these are the |
| 2:03.8 | elements that I would propose to you should be part of an international framework. |
| 2:08.7 | I'm Alan Rosenstein, Associate Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota and |
| 2:12.4 | Senior Editor at Lawfare, and this is the Lawfare Podcast for August 9th, 2023. |
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