The Trump administration’s policy shift.

[ Music ]

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 cohost, 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, Ben and I are once again joined by our N2K CyberWire colleague, and editor of the "Caveat" newsletter, Ethan Cook. Ethan, welcome back.

 

Ethan Cook: Thank you for having me back.

 

Dave Bittner: Today we are digging into U.S. cyber policy. 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 ] Alright, we are back, and Ethan, it is always great to have you join us here with these deep dives into various topics. For folks who may not be familiar, Ethan heads up our "Caveat" newsletter, which if you are not yet a subscribe to, I highly recommend you check that out. You can find it on our website. So Ethan, what are we digging into here today?

 

Ethan Cook: Yeah, so today we're going to be jumping into the deep end with U.S. cybersecurity policy, and talking about it from both an international level and a domestic level.

 

Dave Bittner: Well, let's start at the top here. Can we look at a little history? I mean, how would you describe the traditional role that the U.S. federal government has played in cyber policy over the past, I don't know, few decades?

 

Ethan Cook: Yeah, I would say, you know, especially, you know, post-World War 2, in any capacity, the U.S. has kind of paved the way, and cyber is no different. And in both an international level, and you know, federally, from a domestic level, you know, there has been a constant, maybe force is the right word, of pushing and motivating both international actors to, you know, co-op and be part of intelligence sharing efforts, to be a part of, you know, major cooperation efforts, bilateral agreements. As well as from a domestic effort, you have major agencies that have emerged not just in the past 40 years, but I mean, in the past 10 years with CISA being formed under the first Trump administration, and that has been since its formation, a driving force of cybersecurity within the U.S. The NSA has played a huge part. You know, Homeland Security, since its formation, has been a huge motivator as well. So I would say, you know, from a high-level view, you know, just kind of looking out, the federal government has been a major driver at all levels and through a variety of programs, some of which have been through private-public partnerships, and some of them have been through bilateral agreements.

 

Dave Bittner: Ben, does this all make sense to you? I mean, it strikes me that, you know, the U.S. really has been the global leader when it comes to cyber in general. You know, we started the computer revolution and the internet, and all those kinds of things. It seems to me fitting that we would have a leadership role when it comes to these sorts of things.

 

Ben Yelin: Yeah, I mean, go America.

 

Dave Bittner: [Laughter].

 

Ethan Cook: [Laughter].

 

Ben Yelin: We're number one in - or at least for a while we were number one in cyber. Yeah, I mean we carry on offensive and defensive cyberoperations at multiple levels of government. Obviously that's something, as you mentioned, that the NSA does. Even state and local governments are starting to get more involved in cybersecurity as cyberattacks have impacted state and local governments, agencies, municipalities, et cetera. But the federal government has always played kind of the general role that they play in a bunch of different other realms. So I know we'll talk a little bit about emergency management, but just since that's my world, I kind of see parallels there with what FEMA does with what CISA does, which is kind of evaluating the threat landscape, giving people tools to protect their networks against intrusion, setting kind of broad-based policies. So they're not as in the trenches as state and local governments. You're not going to see federal mandates that a state or local government purchase CrowdStrike or anything. It's high-level guidelines, but those are absolutely critical, because really, only the federal government has the capacity to have that kind of broad expertise. It just - as much as one can do in the private sector, you kind of have to be the federal government to understand the full threat landscape. When you have the NSA at your disposal, and all of our other intelligence agencies, and Department of Defense, et cetera.

 

Dave Bittner: Well, I think it's fair to say that this is a bit of tumultuous time when it comes to policy government-wide, [laughter], right? I mean, there - the Trump administration has come in with a lot of plans, and a lot of strategies, and are making changes that are big and fast, and that leads to cyber as well. The Trump administration has certainly pivoted to a more state-led cybersecurity model. Ethan, what is this National Resilience Strategy trying to achieve?

 

Ethan Cook: Yeah, so you know, when we look at the Trump administration's cyber policy, there's obviously a lot of different levers being pulled, a lot of different momentums and different, you know, adjustments, and all of it, like you said Dave, is happening incredibly fast. We're not talking a, you know, two-year plan with a lot of phasing in and out. These are plans that have - we want to be executing on today, and executing and having tangible results in a couple months. So I think the driving force, as you alluded to, is this National Resilience Strategy, which was an executive order that was signed just last month, mid-month in March. And it basically is looking to domestically make the U.S. reevaluate its entire federal preparedness and response policies. How are we responding and how can we remove the federal government's footprint in that, and give that to states instead? In fact, when he signed it, Trump was very explicit that the goal was to empower state, local, and individual preparers, and to make sure that they can respond quickly and fastly to threats that are relevant to them, rather than being bogged down by federal bureaucracy. And they're doing a lot of different assessments through this process, ranging from - some of the assessments are going back and reviewing policies that were signed back in the 80s and 90s, all the way to things that were signed, including just by the Trump administration earlier this - in his administration just right now. So it is a wide range of things that are being reviewed for effectiveness, and the goal is to reduce the federal footprint.

 

Dave Bittner: Ben, what do you make of this? I mean, I think a, you know, using your comparison with FEMA, and there are, in my mind, when we talk about the states, you know, we talk about the haves and the have-nots. You know, Mississippi may be in a different position to properly defend themselves than California or New York. Does that line of thinking track with what you're seeing?

 

Ben Yelin: Yeah, it does. I mean, I'll note that this executive order applies broadly across the threat landscape, not just to cybersecurity. So just in my work, I've had to kind of go through it with a fine-toothed comb. It's really hard to know exactly what this is and what it means. It's not just me saying that, but like, the International Association of Emergency Managers have looked at this thing, and they're like, this could either mean emergency management and threat assessment as a discipline is over in America, or this could be like a minor reshuffling of federal responsibilities. It's so unclear because there are just mixed messages. I mean, at one of the previous cabinet meetings, the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, said we're going to end FEMA, and then a couple of days later, this executive order came out. And this executive order is more like, let's review our policies and see what will best help state and localities, which is a long way from, we're ending FEMA. I think she's been extremely critical of CISA as well, and I don't know if she's explicitly said she wants CISA to cease to exist as it currently does, or if she's kind of implied it. [Sigh], how should I put this? I think this is sort of a placeholder while senior leadership in the administration tries to determine whether to come at this, this whole apparatus, with an axe or with a scalpel. Are we going to really devolve these functions to state and local governments, or are we going to do what we've done in other areas of policy, where say, block grants are sent to states? So the funding remains constant, but states have more flexibility in how they encounter threats. I'm sure some states would still make that worse under that type of arrangement, if the states just don't have that same level of institutional expertise, but I think most states would be fine if that were the case. The other option, which just given what we've seen with DOGE and everything else, is they just gut the whole enterprise, and the federal government ceases to provide these types of risk resilience assessments. They just don't perform emergency management preparedness functions. They stop the spigot of grant money to state and local governments, academic institutions, et cetera. So I don't know where this is going to end, but I think it's just a completely - it's a story that we're going to have to follow closely, because this could reorient not just cybersecurity, but security in general across the United States.

 

Dave Bittner: Well --

 

Ethan Cook: Yeah, and I think there, oh, sorry, [laughter].

 

Dave Bittner: Go ahead, Ethan. Go ahead, please.

 

Ethan Cook: I think there is a - to the point about the scalpel and the axe that you made, Ben, you know, I think it may not be one or the other, but both simultaneously, where you have some aspects of the administration saying, you know, with this strategy, let's review, let's take a step back, and you have other aspects that are actively, like DOGE, cutting major workforce already. I mean, we just saw this week that CISA is already being prepared to gut itself, essentially.

 

Dave Bittner: Right, 1300 people.

 

Ethan Cook: Exactly, and that's a substantial force, and that's just - not even just the people working there, but also contractors being cut as well. And I think that, you know, to me is more of that axe approach, where we're just going to remove a third of the agency or a fourth of the agency overnight. And there's not a lot of preparedness that you can do to account for that, effectively.

 

Ben Yelin: I mean, that's the thing -

 

Dave Bittner: Well, also, oh - no, no, go, go, go.

 

Ben Yelin: I mean, that's the thing that has happened in other agencies. It's like, there is a way to do this. You have Congress get involved, you transfer responsibilities from one agency to another, you do it with a lot of lead time so that state and local governments have time to adjust. I mean, they've already gone through their budgeting cycles for the most part, and states are going to want to - if the federal government isn't going to provide any help in the form of grants to protect cybersecurity and all other forms of security, states are going to want to invest some of their own money, but they just haven't budget for it. So it just creates this kind of chaos, but that's what we've seen throughout the federal government, where somebody working for DOGE goes in and presses buttons, there's a large reduction-in-force, and really no plan - no continuity plan for the functions that those agencies have undertaken.

 

Dave Bittner: Well, let's shift to the global situation here. I mean, we're seeing the Trump administration refocus priorities, [sigh], detethering ourselves from our allies, is that a fair way to say it, Ethan?

 

Ethan Cook: Yeah, I would say so. You know, I would say it's a detethering and retethering simultaneously. And I think part of that is the administration's clear pivot to focus on Asia. And that is resulting in the U.S., you know, doubling down with its ties with Japan, South Korea, Taiwan notably, who has always been a hot-button issue for China, and really focusing its efforts to not only build those partnership up from a, you know, conventional military strategy, but also Taiwan announced that a part of its QDR, that it wants to and plans to hold a lot of tabletop simulations, cybersecurity live fire demonstrations, things like that, to really improve intelligence-sharing efforts and kind of reinforce those alliances, and I guess the best way to describe it is replicate what we have seen in Europe for the past 20 years. And in the process of doing that, the Trump administration is removing those same ties that it's had with Europe. And whether that be through questioning the Five Eyes, which has been a longstanding traditional western intelligence-sharing alliance, or outright downplaying Russia's cyberaggression at major conferences.

 

Ben Yelin: And let's just be clear about what's going on in Europe. I think this anecdote says it all. They're telling European diplomats that when they go in the United States, they should be using burner phones. Previously they did that for diplomats that went to Russia and China, but I think because this relationship, and largely it's because of what's happened with trade, has just kind of gone off the rails between the United States and the European Union, I think that's starting to manifest itself in the cyberworld as well. But you know, as you've said, with the Five Eyes, it's been such a valuable multilateral relationship where we're sharing threats, we're sharing intelligence. These countries are our closest allies. And now all of the sudden, you know, we're talking smack about Canada, [laughter].

 

Dave Bittner: Right, right.

 

Ben Yelin: 24-7, and we're going to invade Canada and annex Greenland, and I just think it's kind of all part of a piece.

 

Dave Bittner: It seems odd to me that, you know, there have been rumblings about removing Canada from the Five Eyes alliance, and I can't help thinking to myself, is Canada really the problem child here? Like -

 

Ethan Cook: Yeah, [laughter].

 

Ben Yelin: [Laughter].

 

Dave Bittner: Right?

 

Ethan Cook: Yeah. I -- it's a weird to me. I don't understand, you know, and maybe - I don't - not part of the goals, but you know, that is such a longstanding relationship, and it is mutually beneficial for everyone, and it's not just removing Canada that is the, like, you know, you go through that route, it's also, how do the other players of that alliance view that alliance now? If we're willing to remove people from it, you know, how does that change what we share? What, how we view each other? What do we trust with each other? What - do we trust the intelligence we're getting from another person? And I, you know, it kind of erodes the foundation of the alliance as a whole.

 

Dave Bittner: Right. Yeah, I mean, if you're one of our allies, and I'll put that in air quotes right now, because it seems like everything is fluid, what type of intelligence-sharing - or how are you dialing in your intelligence-sharing, knowing that our administration is friendlier with places like Russia than we used to be? I think those are serious questions.

 

Ben Yelin: Totally, and are we going to be able to put that cat back in the bag? There is going to come a point, maybe, when Donald Trump will no longer be president, presumably in January of 2029. I think there are certain things that can be reversed easily in a change of administration, but a lack of trust is not one of them. And I don't know what the impact is going to be to the United States on threatening these long-term international relationships. And it's not a partisan thing, it's just - I think we have to reckon with the fact that the relationship has fundamentally changed. Canada's new prime minister has said that we don't have the same alliance with the United States. And the European Union, the head of the - I believe it was the head of the European Commission went on record saying, like, the trans-Atlantic alliance as we knew it is over. So these are not things that you just bring in a new administration and it's like, sorry about that, that whole thing for four years. Like, let's try and get the band back together. I don't think it's going to be that easy.

 

Dave Bittner: Well, and I think a big part of that is because we've demonstrated to the world what's possible, right? In other words, yes, at the end of this Trump administration, let's say the Democrats win and swing back the other way, well, now we know that, four years after that, we could swing back to this sort of thing. And so, as you say, what was outside of the range of possibility is happening.

 

Ethan Cook: Right, and we had partisan switches post-World War 2 plenty of times, but there was a general understanding among presidents of both parties, like, certain things were beyond question. NATO, trans-Atlantic alliances, us being friendly with Canada, [laughter].

 

Dave Bittner: Right.

 

Ethan Cook: It's one of those things where I wouldn't have expected this to fundamentally change so quickly, and it's an uncomfortable truth, but I do think it's the truth.

 

Dave Bittner: We'll be right back. [ Music ] Ethan, what do you think the biggest risks are that you see emerging from this realignment in cyber policy, both domestically and internationally?

 

Ethan Cook: Yeah, I think, to tackle the domestic side, I think it is how fast this is occurring, and states - you know, Ben alluded to it, not being financially prepared to handle this burden. You know, with how drastic and how fast these reductions are happening at a federal scale, and the specific programs that are being cut, right? We're not just seeing, oh, we're cutting people, we're also cutting funding to engaging in state and local governments. We're cutting funding for election review security boards, right? We're cutting funding to - there was a program that CISA ran that involved - it wasn't even about election security per se, it was more so, hey, states can share. It's an intelligence-sharing operation across states, and to help states bridge that gap. That's been cut, and I think this drastic reduction is going to leave a lot of responsibility in states to figure out and form ties amongst themselves far quicker than they will be able to handle, and certainly financially handle. And that's just going to invite risk. It's going to invite hostile actors to come in and target weak, especially states that are underfunded or cannot pivot as quickly, and will create vulnerabilities that I think will have tangible impacts, sadly, on the average person. And then from an international perspective, I think the dynamic of reducing Europe's faith in the U.S. and, you know, traditional western allies' faith in the U.S. will be something, to your point, that is almost irreconcilable even with a new administration coming in. That's not something that's just going to magically fix itself. I mean, you know, we had the first Trump administration where there was a lot of signaling that he did not have faith in NATO, and there were some reductions in NATO support, you know, some efforts that would definitely reduce some faith, but with the Biden reelection, I think that quelled some of the fears, and the fact that we went back, and it's not even been a year, and the efforts that are being taken seem to already have outpaced the first administration, as messaging for Trump, is definitely creating some significant lack of faith both from a security perspective, from a trade perspective, from a reliability perspective, and I think that those things are going to take decades to repair to the full extent, especially if we continue at the pace that we're at.

 

Ben Yelin: Yeah, and just to add on to that point, Ethan, I think everything you said there is exactly right. When some trade policy is announced that is crazy, to put it colloquially, the stock market reacts, and you know, you can kind of see the impact in real-time. So sometimes the president's been forced to pull back on his trade policies, or institute new policies.

 

Ethan Cook: There is kind of an automatic feedback mechanism.

 

Ben Yelin: For the problems that we're talking about, there isn't. Like let's be honest, most people are not going to notice that CISA has been eliminated and that grants to state and local governments for cybersecurity preparedness have been gutted. That impacts some of us, [laughter], it impacts greatly, but for your average median American, it's not something they'd notice. The average median American might not notice that funding for critical health research on cancer medication, they're not going to notice that that funding has been gutted through the NIH. It's still going to have these long-term impacts that might not become evident to us until there is a crisis. And I think it's important for us to anticipate that when that crisis happens, this, right now is, we were sowing the seeds of that crisis by standing down our preparedness mechanisms.

 

Dave Bittner: Well, let's turn it around. I mean, do - I could imagine, Ben, that some of our listeners.

 

Ben Yelin: Oh, they're so angry with me right now.

 

Ethan Cook: [Laughter].

 

Dave Bittner: [Laughter], they'll say, there goes old Ben, you know, with his fearmongering and assuming the worst. There's no guarantee that any of that is going to play out. Let me turn it around and say, are there any signs that this new approach could succeed, and -- where past efforts have fallen short?

 

Ben Yelin: Yes. I think it absolutely could succeed in the sense that, like, certain events are still overall unlikely to happen. You know, if you were investing a lot of money in disease surveillance and preparedness, there's still a good chance that, like, we're not going to run into the next pandemic, because pandemics only happen, you know, on average, what? Once every 100 years. So you might get lucky. It's possible that this is something like what Elon Musk did with Twitter, where he came in and kind of gutted everything and then rebuilt it piece by piece, which to give Elon Musk credit, which I, you know, it's not a normal thing for me to do.

 

Dave Bittner: [Laughter].

 

Ethan Cook: You struggle with that one.

 

Ben Yelin: Yeah. Twitter seems to be working fine after they went through that major reorganization. There are still issues with it, obviously, but I think to him that's kind of the model here, is like, let's do away with old assumptions. Just kind of assume, at first glance, that there's a lot of waste and fraud everywhere. So we'll gut these agencies, and then whatever we need to bring back, we'll bring back. I just think when we're talking about the federal government and confronting some of the threats that are out there, threats that we've all experienced, I think that's charting a dangerous course. It could work out, in the sense that, maybe we actually didn't need those resources. And I'm not going to profess to say with 100% certainty that this is going to cause some type of disaster. It just makes me worried about the future, is all.

 

Ethan Cook: Yeah, I think there's an interesting, you know, conversation to be had about, you know, CISA was a - CISA's a weird organization in the sense that it was - it's a baby organization, right? It's only been around for less than a decade, and so by the time it gets spun up and really gets going, it's kind of already being gut in the process.

 

Dave Bittner: And they have no regulatory authority.

 

Ethan Cook: Exactly. And so, you know, there's this - they kind of, you know, get established by Trump, grown by Biden, and then reduced by Trump. So it's not like they've been around and they've been a long-time staple. I think this shift, at least on the domestic front, to you know, empower state and local governments, in theory, you know, the theory behind it is, let's cut to Ben's point. Let's cut the federal bureaucracy, the red tape that is slowing down actual security efforts, and allow people at the federal - or at the state and local level to really be able to create systems that protect their state in the best way possible, rather than having to go through some bureaucratic regulatory checklist to make sure that they've hit the marks. And I think that that, in theory, has some soundness to it, you know? There's - every infrastructure, every state is different. The private companies that operate a lot of critical infrastructure are different, and blanket-applying one state's rules to another state's rules is not a good system. Now, whether that was happening is a different conversation, but I do think that there is some value to saying, we need to empower people who are on the ground to actually make the security decisions call. I think where the concerns, and I know, I've alluded to it before, is not necessarily the theory behind it, it's the speed behind it.

 

Dave Bittner: Right.

 

Dave Yelin: Right, and people can come back in a year, if the administration has said we're going to slowly phase some of these programs into being block grants to the states, where they get to decide how to address the unique threats that they face. And we'll still stand up CISA in the meantime until all of this block grant funding is allocated, and states go through their budget cycles. I will eat my words, and I'll put on my red hat, and I will give the Trump administration credit. I just don't think that's what's going to happen. We'll see. We'll see. But it's not the way it's happened with what they've cut in other agencies. It's not like they've taken money out of the CDC and sent a giant check to all the states to say here, you take on this role in disease surveillance, that now we've cut $10 billion from CDC. Here's $10 billion. Do what you think works in disease surveillance. And that's not happening, they're just cutting the $10 billion. So, I will believe it when I see it, I promise.

 

Dave Bittner: I wonder, too, for - we talked about how will individual citizens notice these changes? And I wonder if this leads to things like delays in services, you know? Waiting longer at your local DMV. We're - there are, I think, legitimate fears of disruptions to social security payments. You know, things like that, that affect people day-to-day, maybe not catastrophic, but raise the noise floor, you know, for the frequency and the cadence of the nuisances of day-to-day life. The things that we all kind of roll our eyes about when we're like, oh, I have to go interact with the government, you know? This is going to take forever. Will those things just get a little worse all around?

 

Dave Yelin: It's possible. It's also possible, though, that's let's say, we just had this experience where there were really long call wait times on social security hotlines. And people got really upset about that, and members of Congress wrote letters to the administration, and they did walk back some of those cuts. I think that's a unique example, because that's very public-facing. A lot of people need to make calls to the Social Security Administration for one reason or another. It's just less obvious to me that that's going to manifest itself in cybersecurity preparedness or emergency preparedness, for that matter. People who are - who do the day-to-day work are certainly going to notice. Trust me, we already have. But people who aren't involved in it, it just might completely fly off the radar, where there won't be some type of public uprising, and it won't really make it into the halls of Congress.

 

Dave Bittner: Yeah.

 

Ethan Cook: Now, one wrinkle that I, you know, I don't think we've talked about, but I do have, you know, a question, maybe, for two people have been in this longer than me, is, you know, a key role the federal government has been supporting private businesses with cyber efforts. Through intelligence-sharing, especially for businesses that handle sensitive information, you know, DoD information, you know, they get a lot of support from agencies like the NSA, CISA, et cetera. And with these reductions happening, is that something that is impacting private businesses now? And is that something - how can a private business really adjust and account for that, especially if they manage, let's say, critical infrastructure?

 

Dave Bittner: Mm hmm. Well, I mean, it's an interesting question, isn't it? And I think part of it that I think about is the kind of hybrid approach that we have taken to businesses defending themselves, where, if we think about national defense, right? Who's in charge of defending our borders? The military, right? The - we have systems in place to make sure that other people don't come and take our stuff, very simply put. But in cyber, it's more of a hybrid thing. You know? The government does provide support, and does provide help, but they're not building the moat to protect the companies. There's a certain amount of protection the companies have to provide for themselves. So does that mean that, as the government dials back the amount of support that they give, it's just - now it's up to the companies to turn the dial the other direction, and they have to invest more individually.

 

Ben Yelin: Yeah, I think that makes sense, and I think something like information-sharing is easier to replicate in private industry, and at least from people I've talked to, like I haven't heard that being as much of a concern as some of these devolving the roles of CISA, FEMA, et cetera to state and local governments. That doesn't mean it's not a concern. I just haven't heard quite as much about it. I don't know about you, Ethan.

 

Ethan Cook: Yeah, it was an interesting thing that I saw, you know, with part of the scale-back has been, you know, these public-private partnerships. And the - I think the biggest thing that I saw, and it raised my eyebrows, and it was the threat - reduction of threat hunting, and being able to actively identify issues, and be able to inform people, not just government officials, but also private businesses that there - hey, there is a new exploit out. There is a new X out, or whatever it is, that is looking to target, you know, let's say fuel industry. So for fuel people, you know, Solar Winds, et cetera, something along those lines, preventing that next Solar Winds. Or for, you know, we just had, you know, it was Salt Typhoon last year, and avoiding something like that. Obviously Salt Typhoon happened with the current system, but the question - I think the question I have is, is this reduction going to result in more Salt Typhoons? More Solar Winds? Because we have less federal threat hunting efforts that have really helped support businesses in avoiding some of these incidents?

 

Ben Yelin: Yeah, I mean, what's hard is that it's very hard to have any traceability. If something - if we did have another Salt Typhoon tomorrow, I think the natural reaction of people would be, like, well we had one in 2024, and we had one in 2025, and the policy changed, so it's clearly not the policy, it's just, these are things that are going to happen, and do we have to invest billions of dollars in this? Is it a worthwhile investment? And that's - honestly that is a fair perspective and I understand it, I just think it does increase the risk in the long-term, in my view, of us suffering those types of attacks.

 

Dave Bittner: Well, let's wrap things up here, and let me do this with a question for each of you. If you were advising policymakers right now, as they reshape cyber policy, what sort of things would you advocate for? Let me start with you, Ethan.

 

Ethan Cook: Yeah. You know, I'll take the domestic side and say, ensuring that states - if we're not going to support them from a leadership perspective, ensuring that they have the ability to have funding, especially with this year of kind of funding wrapped up, to be able to adjust to threats that they can't foresee coming, sort of like an emergency preparedness with FEMA, but from a cyber perspective, being able to - and not just from a monetary perspective, but from an expertise perspective, as they approach and account for different issues across the nation.

 

Dave Bittner: Ben?

 

Ben Yelin: Well, Ethan took mine, so I'm going to go, I'm going to -

 

Dave Bittner: [Laughter].

 

Ethan Cook: [Laughter].

 

Ben Yelin: I'm going to pivot and go in a different direction, that I think it is totally fair to have skepticism against the European Union on things like trade. It's totally fair to criticize them for not spending enough on defense as they need to be, for being part of NATO. I just think it's really important to maintain those alliances. We've built them up over the past 80 years. It's been of great service to us and, I think, the European Union, and to the extent that despite these other political differences, we can still maintain intelligence-sharing, and threat assessments, and the Five Eyes, I really hope we're able to do that.

 

Dave Bittner: Yeah. Alright, well gentlemen, thank you so much for joining us, as always. Ethan Cook is the author of the "Caveat" newsletter, which you should definitely check out. You can find that on our website. Ethan, thanks so much for joining us this week.

 

Ethan Cook: Thank you for having me. Always a pleasure. [ Music ]

 

Dave Bittner: And that is "Caveat," brought to you by N2K's CyberWire. We'd love to know what you think of this podcast. Your feedback ensures we deliver the insights that keep you a step ahead in the rapidly-changing world of cybersecurity. If you like our show, please share a rating and review in your favorite podcast app. Please also fill out the survey in the show notes or send an email to caveat@n2k.com. This episode is produced by Liz Stokes. Our executive producer is Jennifer Eiben. The show is mixed by Tre Hester. Peter Kilpe is our publisher. I'm Dave Bittner.

 

Ben Yelin: And I'm Ben Yelin. Thanks for listening. [ Music ]