October 7 2022

This Week in Washington 

• POLITICO: The Supreme Court on Monday agreed to hear a case that threatens tech companies’ broad immunity to lawsuits over content hosted on their platforms.
• CyberScoop: The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency announced a Binding Operational Directive on Monday ordering federal civilian agencies to enhance efforts to detect vulnerabilities in their networks, a move that CISA Director Jen Easterly hopes the private sector will emulate.
• Nextgov: Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina M. Khan appointed two new senior leaders for the agency on Monday. Stephanie Nguyen will be the FTC’s new chief technology officer and Douglas Farrar will be the new public affairs director.
• Fierce Telecom: The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) wants to let broadband grant winners from two key programs sidestep “Buy American” requirements currently tied to the money.
• CNET: The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency is warning people to be on the lookout for Hurricane-related scams that could come in the form of unsolicited emails, or even a knock at their door.
• Axios: The U.S.’s once sleepy cyber diplomacy efforts are getting a jumpstart as a new State Department office gets its leadership. The country’s first cyber ambassador, Nathaniel Fick, started on the job last week.
• NPR: Officials at the White House are figuring out how to spend more than $52 billion on semiconductor projects. The Biden administration’s point person lays out the goals and the pitfalls.
• The Hill: Efforts to regulate how tech companies collect and use children’s data gained momentum in the U.S. in the past year — a push supporters credit to a former Facebook product manager who took Washington and Silicon Valley by storm a year ago when she released hundreds of internal documents that offered a peek inside how the social media behemoth operates.

Article Summary

• Motherboard: So far in 2022, there have been 27 districts and 1,735 schools hit with ransomware, according to Emsisoft, a cybersecurity company that tracks these incidents.
• New York Times: In the absence of a federal privacy law, most ad-tech companies and data brokers are unregulated and opaque in their operation, which makes it nearly impossible for phone owners to track where their data goes or how it gets used, let alone prevent that data from being shared in the first place

Featured Podcast

Marketplace Tech Podcast

• Podcast on Data Privacy
  The Federal Trade Commission is suing data analytics firm Kochava, alleging the company sold sensitive geolocation data from hundreds of millions of mobile devices. The FTC argues that the data could reveal users’ visits to sensitive places, like abortion providers or addiction recovery centers. It’s the latest step in FTC Chair Lina Khan’s mission to increase government oversight of companies that traffic in consumer data. Marketplace’s Kimberly Adams recently spoke with Megan Gray, founder and CEO of GrayMatters Law & Policy to discuss the significance of this case. (The FTC Gets Serious about Data Privacy with New Lawsuit – September 6, 2022)