It's been a jam-packed week of cyberlaw news, but the big debate of the episode is triggered by the White House blueprint for an AI 'bill of rights'. I've just released a long post about the campaign to end "AI bias" in general, and the blueprint in particular. In my view, the bill of rights will end up imposing racial and gender (not to mention intersex!) quotas on a vast swath of American life. Nick Weaver argues that AI is in fact a source of secondhand racism and sexism, something that will not be fixed until we do a better job of forcing the algorithm to explain how it arrives at the outcomes it produces. We do not agree on much, but we do agree that lack of explainability is a big problem for the new technology.
President Biden has issued an executive order meant to resolve the U.S.-EU spat over transatlantic data flows—at least for a few years, until the anti-American EU Court of Justice finds it wanting again. Nick and I explore some of the mechanics created by the executive order. I argue that masking the identities of foreign intelligence targets will be bad for the comprehensibility of U.S. intelligence reports and for the privacy of U.S. persons. On the other hand, the quasijudicial system the order creates is cleverly designed to discourage litigant grandstanding.
Matthew Heiman covers the biggest CISO news of the week, the month, and the year – the criminal conviction of Uber's CSO, Joe Sullivan, for failure to disclose a data breach to the Federal Trade Commission. Matthew is less surprised by the verdict than others, but we agree that it will change the way CISOs do their job and relate to their fellow corporate officers.
