Josh Goldfoot on Cybersecurity as a Legal Problem
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 30 August 2023
⏱️ 44 minutes
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Summary
What do we mean when we talk about "cybersecurity"? There's clearly a technical component: can someone prevent, through clever hardware and software, someone else from accessing some device or data? But that just raises the question of who should have access. And that's not a technical question. It's a legal, social, and moral one.
This, at least, is the argument made by Josh Goldfoot, Principal Deputy Chief at the Department of Justice's Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section, the nerve center of the federal government's attempt to prosecute cyber criminals. A litigator and policy lawyer with decades of experience thinking about cybersecurity and digital surveillance, Josh just published a paper for Lawfare's ongoing Digital Social Contract research paper series making his case for why cybersecurity isn't just a technical problem. Alan Rozenshtein, Associate Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota and Senior Editor at Lawfare, spoke to Josh about his paper and what viewing cybersecurity as a social, not just engineering, problem means for our ongoing efforts to secure our digital lives.
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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 |
| 0:16.8 | LawFair. Also check out LawFair's other podcast offerings, rational security, chatter, LawFair |
| 0:25.6 | no bull, and the aftermath. What collectivism says is that yes, although there is some sphere |
| 0:38.5 | of, you know, personal control over a computer, when you connect your computer to the internet |
| 0:45.2 | or some other network, you become part of this larger collective. And the internet is |
| 0:51.9 | useful because everyone agrees to be part of that. And by agreeing to be part of that collective |
| 0:59.1 | network, you have agreed to take on obligations to others and you've agreed to allow others to |
| 1:05.6 | use your computer in certain ways. And so collectivism tends to be much more technology focused. |
| 1:12.8 | They tend to look at the decisions made by engineers as defining what the outer bounds of privacy are. |
| 1:22.5 | I'm Alan Rosenstein, associate professor of law at the University of Minnesota and senior editor at LawFair, |
| 1:27.8 | and this is the LawFair podcast for August 30th, 2023. What do we mean when we talk about cyber security? |
| 1:35.9 | There's clearly a technical component. Can someone prevent through clever hardware and software, |
| 1:41.2 | someone else from accessing some device or data? But that just raises the question of who should have access. |
| 1:47.0 | And that's not a technical question. It's a legal, social, and moral one. This at least is the argument made by Josh |
| 1:53.7 | Goldfoot, principal deputy chief at the Department of Justice's computer crime and inflectual property section, |
| 1:58.6 | the nerve center of the federal government's attempt to prosecute cyber criminals. |
| 2:03.3 | A litigator and policy lawyer with decades of experience thinking about cyber security and digital surveillance, |
| 2:08.6 | Josh just published a paper for LawFair's ongoing digital social contract research paper series, |
| 2:13.7 | making his case for why cyber security isn't just a technical problem. |
| 2:18.0 | I spoke to Josh about his paper and with viewing cyber security as a social, not just engineering issue, |
| 2:23.3 | means for our ongoing efforts to secure our digital lives. It's the LawFair podcast, August 30th, |
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