When secret plans hit the wrong inbox.

Tara Wisniewski: Cybersecurity is a global issue. Cybersecurity affects everyone. And we have a responsibility to keep not only our nation safe, but also our citizens safe.

Dave Bittner: Hello, everyone, and welcome to "Caveat", N2K CyberWire's privacy, surveillance, law, and policy podcast. I'm Dave Bittner, and joining me is my co-host, Ben Yelin, from the University of Maryland Center for Health and Homeland Security. Hey there, Ben.

Ben Yelin: Hello, Dave.

Dave Bittner: On today's show, we tackle the questionable and potentially illegal use of Signal by high-level Trump officials. And later in the show, my conversation with Tara Wisniewski. She's EVP for Advocacy, Global Markets, and Member Engagement at ISC2. We're discussing Navigating Global Transitions: Cybersecurity's Role Amid Political Change. While this show covers legal topics, and Ben is a lawyer, the views expressed do not constitute legal advice. For official legal advice on any of the topics we cover, please contact your attorney. [ Music ] All right, we are back. Ben, there has been one story that is dominating the news this week. It has to do with the app Signal.

Ben Yelin: It does, yep.

Dave Bittner: The secure communications app Signal.

Ben Yelin: You can put that in air quotes right there.

Dave Bittner: Yeah. The highly considered and much respected private communications app Signal. But the story, it comes from The Atlantic. It is titled, The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans. You want to unpack this for us, Ben?

Ben Yelin: Sure. So this was written by Jeffrey Goldberg, and he's kind of one of the main characters in this story. So he is a foreign policy journalist, kind of a centrist, and has had communications with members of both Democratic and Republican administration. So he's a very serious foreign policy analyst. Somebody that you could foresee National Security Advisor Michael Waltz having in his phone contacts. So Michael Waltz, the National Security Advisor, set up a group chat over Signal to discuss plans for an attack against the Houthis, which is a State Department designated terrorist group associated with the country of Yemen. They were going to attack them for blocking access to some of our shipping routes in the Middle East.

Dave Bittner: Okay.

Ben Yelin: I won't get too deep into the foreign policy here. So they set up this group chat on Signal. Members of the group chat include Michael Waltz, Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense, Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, J.D. Vance, the Vice President of the United States, and Stephen Miller, a very close advisor to the President. So these are really the key decision makers in the country when it comes to foreign policy.

Dave Bittner: Right.

Ben Yelin: This is a high-level conversation. Obviously, this is concerning extremely sensitive, clearly classified information. Allegation from Jeffrey Goldberg is that they were discussing war plans. So that's what makes it particularly serious. It's not just they were having a general conversation about how an attack on the Houthis would play politically in the United States. They were talking about when the attack was going to happen, who they were targeting, et cetera.

Dave Bittner: Right.

Ben Yelin: So at some point, Michael Waltz included in this conversation Jeffrey Goldberg. Goldberg thought that this was some type of OPSEC rat bleeping operation from a foreign adversary. I mean, he was very suspicious that this was some type of hoax.

Dave Bittner: Right.

Ben Yelin: So he kind of stayed in the conversation, understanding that somebody was probably trying to play him.

Dave Bittner: Yeah.

Ben Yelin: So there were people representing themselves, at least, as these high-level figures, talking about the pluses and minuses of staging this attack. I mean, it actually is a really interesting conversation. The one dissenting voice is J.D. Vance. And it's particularly notable that he seemed to be at odds with the president and the rest of the president's team about whether it would be a good idea to attack the Houthis in this region.

Dave Bittner: Let me add just real quick.

Ben Yelin: Sure.

Dave Bittner: Tulsi Gabbard was allegedly in on this as well, director of national intelligence.

Ben Yelin: Yes, that's right. So I forgot to add her. So yeah, we have really the full national security apparatus. At one point, they start discussing the war plans themselves. Now, to Goldberg's credit, he did not release this portion of the conversation. He released excerpts of an earlier portion of the conversation where they were talking generally about whether it would be a good idea. So we don't have the actual text messages here because this obviously concerns highly classified, highly sensitive information.

Dave Bittner: Right. There was a concern of, I believe, outing a CIA officer, right?

Ben Yelin: Yes.

Dave Bittner: Yeah.

Ben Yelin: I mean, and that's just for starters. Letting our adversaries know who we are attacking, our modes and methods of attack is about as sensitive as information as you can possibly conjure up. So Waltz and the other participants in this conversation indicate that in two hours, there's going to be an attack on the Houthis. So this is at 11 a.m. on some day. And Goldberg decides to test whether the conversation he's accidentally been included on is legitimate. So he waits in his car and two hours later, he checks Twitter to see that Yemen is under attack and that this attack is actually taking place. So Goldberg now at least has very good reason to believe that this conversation is genuine. He dots all his I's, crosses his T's, talks to the legal department at his publication, The Atlantic, and publishes this bombshell story. So this has pretty significant implications. For one, we know that Signal, even though it is end-to-end encrypted, is not a secure application. They put out warnings, actually, in both January and February saying that there were significant vulnerabilities. And for classified information, you should not be communicating on those types of channels.

Dave Bittner: Right.

Ben Yelin: Secondly, why did Michael Waltz include Jeffrey Goldberg? Obviously, it wasn't on purpose.

Dave Bittner: Yeah.

Ben Yelin: Everybody involved in the story thinks it would be very bizarre if Waltz just wanted to clue Goldberg in on this conversation. They had communicated in the past, but there's just absolutely no reason that would have been purposeful. So there's a question as to whether it was a mistake, whether there's a JG in Waltz's list of contacts in his Signal account. And there's some speculation that it could have been a trade representative who happens to have those initials, who would be involved in foreign policy decisions.

Dave Bittner: Okay.

Ben Yelin: But we don't know. We don't know how this happened, why this happened. Democratic lawmakers are calling for an investigation. If this had happened to underlings at the Pentagon or at the CIA or the NSA, if they were communicating over unsecured channels and they accidentally included a prominent national journalist, they would be fired, for starters.

Dave Bittner: Yeah, you know, I was listening to "Marketplace" yesterday, you know, Kai Risdahl hosts that and he was saying that under any normal administration, several of the people in this conversation would either resign or be fired. But this just probably, you know, not probably -- it's not going to happen.

Ben Yelin: It's not going to happen in this administration. So President -- their instinct is always to fight back. They interviewed Defense Secretary Hegseth as he got off a plane yesterday and he started attacking the credibility of the journalist, which, you know, that's fine. He has the right to attack the credibility of the journalist. The administration does not deny that the communication is authentic.

Dave Bittner: Right.

Ben Yelin: It says, yes, this appears to be authentic. But they were just having a really well-informed discussion about foreign policy. Well, you should probably have your well-informed discussion about foreign policy in a SCIF, a secure facility.

Dave Bittner: Right.

Ben Yelin: Or through already approved, confidential, classified communications channels, which I'm sure many of our listeners are aware, those exist for exactly these types of scenarios where the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, the head of national intelligence, the national security advisor are not in the same physical location, but they need to communicate with one another.

Dave Bittner: Right.

Ben Yelin: So that's that was Hegseth's reaction. President Trump's reaction was basically they made a mistake. You know, Waltz is a is a good guy. The implication there is that he's not going anywhere. He's not going to be fired, even though he's the one who seemingly included Goldberg on this conversation. So I don't see significant repercussions for the people involved, except that they probably should at least all promise to never do this again, because at some point they might not accidentally share it with a responsible journalist. They might accidentally share it with a foreign adversary. And that could get U.S. troops or undercover agents or really a lot of different people could be killed as a result of those insecure communications. So that's the basics of this rather insane, crazy story.

Dave Bittner: It really is a crazy story. Right? I mean, it it's jaw-droppingly crazy. So let's try to unpack some of the details, some of the nitty gritty here. I mean, so what I'm seeing is in terms of potential legal peril, which I think we agree the odds of anything being followed through on are extraordinarily low.

Ben Yelin: Yes.

Dave Bittner: But the Espionage Act.

Ben Yelin: Yes.

Dave Bittner: This is a violation of that. Do you understand why?

Ben Yelin: I think this could be a facial violation of the Espionage Act. Being either deliberately cavalier with classified information on military matters or reckless is a crime under the Espionage Act. Now, there have been past cases, the most notable being Hillary Clinton, where somebody was admittedly careless with communications. She was communicating on a supposedly unsecure private home server.

Dave Bittner: Right.

Ben Yelin: About her emails, as they say.

Dave Bittner: Right, right.

Ben Yelin: And at the time, FBI Director James Comey said, we don't prosecute these cases because usually there has to be some type of sign of malintention. So when you look for things like malintention, you can go back to a different case. And that was the case of David Petraeus. He was a well-regarded general. He was in charge of the surge in Iraq and then I believe was also put in charge of the war in Afghanistan under the Obama administration. After his duty had been completed, he had a relationship with a journalist. It was his mistress. And he shared classified information with her so that she could write a more compelling book. I might be getting one or two of the details here wrong, but that's the essence of the story.

Dave Bittner: Right.

Ben Yelin: And he was prosecuted. I mean, I think they came to some type of settlement. But there you had clear intention on the part of Petraeus to share this classified information.

Dave Bittner: Right.

Ben Yelin: I think in a hypothetical world where there was a legal case here, the argument would be we were just being careless the way Hillary Clinton was being careless.

Dave Bittner: Right.

Ben Yelin: And there is a precedent now that that type of carelessness should not be prosecuted, even if it is under the letter of the law, technically a violation.

Dave Bittner: Yeah.

Ben Yelin: But as you said, they're not they're not going to be prosecuted.

Dave Bittner: What about the -- what is it? Is it the Federal Records Act that requires these sorts of communications to be recorded? They eventually go into the National Archives?

Ben Yelin: National Archives. Yes. That's another element of it. That's another one that's really hard to prosecute because you have to have proof again that this wasn't some type of accidental deletion of records that was also relevant in the Hillary Clinton case. But you were actively trying to shield these records from retention under the Presidential Records Act. But yes, I believe Signal deletes communications after how many days?

Dave Bittner: Well, that's another thing. Yeah, it's an option. And the folks who are communicating here, at least one of them had set the communications to auto delete. I think they said some of them in like four weeks and some of them in a week. It's not automatic, but you can set the messages to automatically disappear.

Ben Yelin: So yeah, whomever that person was definitely could face potential legal jeopardy. One thing we might see prior to January 2029 is the participants in this conversation subjected to a preemptive presidential pardon.

Dave Bittner: Ah.

Ben Yelin: I would not be surprised if that took place to protect them against some future Democratic president who appoints a special counsel to try and prosecute this.

Dave Bittner: Right.

Ben Yelin: But in the meantime, we have almost four years and it's just not the nature of this president or this Justice Department to pursue charges against what they consider to be their people.

Dave Bittner: So another fundamental issue here is that they were using Signal at all. They're not supposed to be discussing these sorts of things on this sort of platform. It is not considered to be secure enough for these sorts of conversations. Another issue is presumably this means they're using Signal on their personal mobile devices.

Ben Yelin: Which is also not cool.

Dave Bittner: Which is not considered secure.

Ben Yelin: They could leave their mobile device somewhere.

Dave Bittner: Well, their mobile devices being consumer grade devices could plausibly be compromised. We don't know if they are. There's no evidence here that they are. But standard operating procedure is that there are government issued devices for these sorts of communications that are secure, that are military grade secure. And I hate to use that phrase because it's so overused. But, you know, like it's important. Right? And every person who I've talked to about this story who has a security clearance has their jaws on the floor.

Ben Yelin: Oh, yeah. They're like, I would have been instantly fired if I were not burned at the stake.

Dave Bittner: Right. Right. So just how cavalier they are about this. And of course, it also calls into question how routine is this. Presumably this is not the first time that they're using Signal for communications. And again, where does that put them relative to the Presidential Records Act?

Ben Yelin: So this isn't even in their defense, but I'll just say there's been some rumblings that previous administrations, including the Biden administration, national security officials use Signal to discuss non-classified matter. So just kind of like the where and when of certain meetings or information that didn't implicate war plans, obviously. So they're going to say, well, the Biden administration used Signal. It wasn't a good idea for the Biden administration to use Signal either, if that's indeed what happened.

Dave Bittner: Yeah.

Ben Yelin: But the big difference is the topic of the conversation, just given the seriousness and the severity of it. I kind of want to bring up one thing that's very, very uncomfortable here. And I'm going to make a godfather analogy, but I think it's particularly apt. So J.D. Vance in this conversation seems to disagree with the idea of carrying on with this attack. Now, his justification is kind of interesting. Basically, he thinks we'd be doing this for our European allies and F them, like we've been doing too much for them. It's not our responsibility. These are their shipping lanes, like they're the ones who are going to suffer. Why should we go through with it?

Dave Bittner: Right.

Ben Yelin: There's a scene in The Godfather where Vito is meeting with Virgil Sollozzo, who's offering him this proposition where in exchange for the support of Vito's political friends and judges, he would get a piece of the action on narcotics. So they were going to go into the narcotics business.

Dave Bittner: Right.

Ben Yelin: And Vito is reluctant. He says he doesn't want to get into the narcotics business. His son, Sonny Corleone, shows that he's hot for this deal. He gets up and says something like, you mean to tell me that our security is going to be protected? Indicating that he's favorable to this deal. Anybody who's seen the movie knows what happens next. If you know that the successor is more amenable to your views than the principal, that creates an extremely perverse incentive structure. If you catch my drift.

Dave Bittner: Yeah. So keep going.

Ben Yelin: So I mean, if you were one of our foreign adversaries, you now realize that the vice president is potentially less hawkish about attacking Yemen or the Houthis than the vice president, that would give somebody incentive to do harm to the president, just to put it bluntly.

Dave Bittner: Oh, I see. Right.

Ben Yelin: And I think that's extremely dangerous. Any public daylight between the president and the vice president, I think invites, when it comes to foreign policy, at least I think could potentially invite that type of attack. And I know it's a very difficult kind of uncomfortable conversation to have, but I think it's a very important element to the story. Even if they weren't discussing specific war plans, the fact that they're having this conversation where everybody's being encouraged to share their candid views, which is good, but the fact that that can get into the hands of our adversaries creates a very disturbing incentive structure.

Dave Bittner: And that the vice president is not in complete alignment with the president in this case.

Ben Yelin: Right. And that if the vice president was instead the president, if you're a Houthi, maybe you make out like a bandit and you're not subject to an attack. And that could lead either the Houthis or somebody allied with them to do something to President Trump which is just a very disturbing prospect.

Dave Bittner: Yeah. Okay. Well just real quick, swinging back to something we mentioned before, it was actually Waltz who set the messages to disappear, some after one week and some after four weeks. The article in The Atlantic points out that this raises questions about whether the officials may have violated federal records laws. Text messages about official acts are considered records that should be preserved.

Ben Yelin: So there you have it.

Dave Bittner: Yeah, yeah. But again, the odds of there being any follow-up will be next to zero. If you're on the Democratic side, as we're recording this, I believe some of the folks involved in this are going to coincidentally be in hearings today.

Ben Yelin: Yeah, there's going to be a hearing with representatives of our foreign policy apparatus on emerging global threats. It was scheduled before any of this came out.

Dave Bittner: Yeah.

Ben Yelin: I think it's the only opportunity for the Democrats to have an audience. They don't have any agenda-setting power. They can't schedule hearings in the House and the Senate because they're in the minority. So they have to use a hearing like this to really try and bring this to the forefront, to demand resignations, et cetera, et cetera. That's really the extent of their power is to raise a stink about it.

Dave Bittner: Okay.

Ben Yelin: And that might end up working depending on how persistent they are. Trump has a gift, and his people have a gift for presenting us a new shiny object every day or every week that might distract us from the previous shiny object.

Dave Bittner: Right.

Ben Yelin: But really all Democrats can do at this point is try to publicize what happened and try and force their Republican colleagues to hold hearings or investigations into what happened here and to ensure that it doesn't happen again.

Dave Bittner: All right. Well, I think it's going to be really interesting to see what kind of legs this one has.

Ben Yelin: I agree. I'm very curious. Are we still going to be talking about this in a week or a month?

Dave Bittner: Yeah.

Ben Yelin: In any other administration, I just feel like the answer would obviously be yes, but I don't know.

Dave Bittner: Well, I mean, let's just compare it to the amount of play that the Republicans got out of Hillary Clinton's email server, right?

Ben Yelin: Yeah.

Dave Bittner: Like how long that was a story, their ability to make that a story. And I don't think the Democrats have the ability to do that, the ability, the desire, the constitution, however you want to describe it.

Ben Yelin: Right. And frankly, the media savvy.

Dave Bittner: Right.

Ben Yelin: I mean, they don't have -- Democrats don't have a channel like Fox News where they can coordinate a message, and it's the highest rated cable news network, so that's going to infiltrate the public conversation.

Dave Bittner: Yeah.

Ben Yelin: Not to mention, as we've talked about, most online platforms that people use these days are kind of more conservative-leaning.

Dave Bittner: Right.

Ben Yelin: We have X/Twitter, owned by a member of the administration. We have Meta/Facebook, owned by kind of a fanboy of the administration.

Dave Bittner: Yeah.

Ben Yelin: So I think that's another element of it. But I agree with you. I'm not confident that the Democrats are going to be able to make hay out of this. In a political sense, or more importantly, just in a sense that we need to pressure Republicans into conducting a full-scale investigation to prevent this from happening again. That's ultimately the most important aspect of it. We're very lucky that Goldberg was responsible and didn't release the contents of this conversation before the attack on the Houthis, and didn't release the war plans even after the attack. But if they're being this cavalier and careless, they might include somebody who's not a responsible journalist. And that's what we really have to worry about going forward.

Dave Bittner: Yeah. All right. Well, we will have a link to that story in the show notes. More to come, right?

Ben Yelin: Indeed.

Dave Bittner: All right. [ Music ] Ben, I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Tara Wisniewski. She is Executive Vice President for Advocacy, Global Markets, and Member Engagement at ISC2. And we are discussing a recent publication that they shared. It's called Navigating Global Transitions: Cybersecurity's Role Amid Political Change. Here's my conversation with Tara Wisniewski. [ Music ]

Tara Wisniewski: You know, I think that this is actually an incredibly exciting time for cyber. And I think cybersecurity's role remains more important than ever. If anything, we are in political transition in a number of key jurisdictions. So if you think about from everything from the EU, which had an election last June, right? And so the dust is settling there. Then you had in Great Britain, there was another really important election. Of course, we are just kind of getting -- we're at the very beginning of the second Trump administration. And really, when you look globally, the last really 18 months have been a significant time of political change. And so within that, I think cybersecurity's role remains absolutely important. And one of the things that we're thinking about is how do we actually keep this topic critical, relevant, top of mind when there is so much transition happening? And so that's certainly something that the team and I are focusing on every day.

Dave Bittner: And how do you suppose we should go about doing that? It strikes me that it is hard to have a topic not be politicized by some people who are, you know, who want to do so. And I think overall, up to this point, cybersecurity has been relatively bipartisan. But there's certainly evidence that there are folks out there who don't want that to be the case anymore or are trying to use things to their advantage. How do you function given that reality?

Tara Wisniewski: So for us, we definitely have always enjoyed benefiting that both sides of the aisle wants to speak to us about that. And that's just not only relevant here in the U.S., but again, we do work globally and we see that. It's been a benefit for us to be able to keep this issue out of kind of political fray. But as you say, there are certainly some people that want to do that. And we actually really stick to some of the really basic messages that we think are really, really critical. Cybersecurity is a global issue. Cybersecurity affects everyone. And we have a responsibility to keep not only our nation safe, but also our citizens safe. And for us as an organization like ISCQ, we really do see ourselves as a global advocate for the profession. And what we think is important is for policymakers and newly elected officials to really appreciate not only the dire need for more cybersecurity professionals, but also the critical need for jurisdictions to be thinking about things like harmonization of regulations, to be thinking about what is going to be the role of emerging technologies on keeping our nation state safe, our critical infrastructure safe and also important areas that affect people every day, like financial services. So we think that there's a lot of work to be done around education. And while we occasionally find ourselves swept up into some political fray, we really as an organization think, believe that if we continue to just educate and advocate for important issues that are critical to cybersecurity, and so that includes, again, workforce development, professionalization of the sector and key emerging topics, that our goal is to really position ourselves as a resource for policymakers.

Dave Bittner: Well, you mentioned harmonization of regulations. I would love to dig into that a bit. Obviously, you know, we have GDPR, which the European Union has enjoyed for several years now. And here in the U.S., we find ourselves still without any federal privacy legislation or anything like that. Things are happening at the state level. Do you see any traction when it comes to the U.S. heading towards any sort of federal regulation?

Tara Wisniewski: So great question. Last year, we actually did see some progress. So the first time, a bill that actually kind of died in the lame duck session, but it did make it as far as we've seen anything on the federal privacy side. And you are absolutely correct that we've seen, you know, there's some very strong legislation on the state level coming out of California and New York and a couple other jurisdictions. I think that the reality is, is that we're already going to see -- there's already some legislative packages in play at the global level that will affect the U.S. And so interesting that you bring up GDPR because the Cyber Resilience Act, which was passed in the EU and will come into impact later this year, has been explained to me as the GDPR of cyber. And so I think that we're going to continue to see more legislation globally that's going to have an impact. And even if it doesn't cover your jurisdiction, it will impact the way that people do business. And so therefore, by, you know, from a de facto standpoint, it will impact what we do and say in the U.S. We do think that there is potential interest in not only a federal privacy bill this year. We also believe that there is potential interest for just even workforce development that really does focus on upskilling and reskilling of cyber professionals. And we already see that happening within the DOD. So, you know, we think that there's already -- the global trend is already in play. And what's really important is to, again, educate policymakers about that, but then also make sure that anything that we do do, particularly around topics like incident reporting, that it actually minimizes the burden on cybersecurity professionals so they can be focused 100% of the time on their jobs, protecting all of us and let the compliance folks do what they need to do from the compliance side.

Dave Bittner: Well, let's talk about the demand for folks coming into the industry. I mean, how do we align the people who are training the hopefuls with the needs of the industry?

Tara Wisniewski: Yeah, there's actually quite a bit of work to be done there. There is, of course, significant interest around the globe in cyber. It is definitely, you know, we see it trending as a top profession. We also know that there is a significant gap of well-qualified, well-skilled individuals coming in. Where we see some challenges are actually people getting into the profession and staying in the profession. And so this is where I think that there is an opportunity for public-private partnerships to really kind of drive the conversation and unlock what are some of the challenges of getting people into the pipeline. We know that there's a lot of pressure on cyber training budgets. We also know that there's a lot of pressure around making sure that firms and that industry is actually investing in emerging technologies like AI, right? They're kind of juggling a lot. But the reality is, is that there are not enough highly skilled people in the workforce. And so we need to really start advocating for, you know, really having people invest in not only being qualified from organizations like us, of course, right? But then it's also how can we help people in their first few years into the field so that they are getting the training that they need to actually, you know, stay in the long term. For us, you know, one of the things that like our CISSP is well known in the industry, but it is definitely a credential that is really only applicable to people that have at least five years' experience. And so one of the things that we're trying to do as an organization is how do we help kind of get people in, get them to that level, but also work with industry to kind of advocate for training investment as well?

Dave Bittner: Yeah. As you look ahead towards this year, what would be your advice for the folks who are tasked with defending their organizations? And I'm thinking specifically, you know, what sort of things should they have their eye on from a policy point of view that could affect their day-to-day?

Tara Wisniewski: Definitely, we advocate for strong policy from and really coming out of the board level around strong policy around data security, cybersecurity, strong governance and strong auditing principles as well. So all of the things that you would certainly expect that a well-run business is thinking about and taking care of absolutely still applies. I think the biggest challenge that we all face is that just really technology moving, continuing to move quicker and quicker. And there's still so much work to do to not only sustain what is a solid cyber, what does a cyber resilience look like today, but then also anticipating what it needs to look like tomorrow. And so I think that there's a lot of work that continues to be done around really spreading the responsibility of cyber around the entire business and not just putting it, leaving a CISO holding the bag or certainly not just expecting that a cyber team can do it all. It really needs to be a full court press.

Dave Bittner: Yeah, I'm curious if there are any aspects of this that you feel aren't getting the attention they deserve. Are there things where you kind of scratch your head and say, why aren't people paying more attention to this?

Tara Wisniewski: Yeah, I mean, for us, I think that one of the things that I talk about a lot is harmonization. And I do think there is a tendency, regardless of the jurisdiction that you're in, there is a tendency to kind of do the navel gazing. Right? And I think it's really, really important for people to really be paying attention to what is happening at that global level, because cyber really, it's a borderless issue, it's a borderless activity as well. And so really thinking at that kind of beyond just your own kind of little bubble, right, you need to kind of think outside the bubble. That becomes really important. Another thing that we think people -- it really is around preparedness. And again, what we think is really important is that cyber cannot sit in one pocket. It has got to be something that the board takes seriously and that has responsibility for. And that, you know, really seeing well-qualified cyber expertise at all levels in a business is something that's going to become really mission critical.

Dave Bittner: All right, Ben, what do you think?

Ben Yelin: Very relevant, as we've seen significant political change across a lot of Western democracies, obviously here in the United States.

Dave Bittner: Yeah.

Ben Yelin: In the UK last year, we might see it in Canada later this year. So certainly a relevant topic. And it was a very interesting interview.

Dave Bittner: Yeah. Our thanks to Tara Wisniewski for joining us. We do appreciate her taking the time. [ Music ] That is our show. We want to thank all of you for listening. Our executive producer is Jennifer Eiben. The show is edited by Trey Hester. Our executive editor is Peter Kilpe. I'm Dave Bittner.

Ben Yelin: And I'm Ben Yelin.

Dave Bittner: Thanks for listening.