Michaela dives deeper into the nexus of cyber and vulnerable populations through an interview with Eva Galperin, the Director of Cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). Listen in on our conversation about stalkerware, privacy, and activism! Listen to the end of the episode to hear what the Cyber.RAR team is up to (plus the prospect of Season 2!?). If you'd like to reach out to us, send an email to cyber.rar.podcast@gmail.com!
Michaela dives deeper into the nexus of cyber and vulnerable populations through an interview with Eva Galperin, the Director of Cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). Listen in on our conversation about stalkerware, privacy, and activism! Listen to the end of the episode to hear what the Cyber.RAR team is up to (plus the prospect of Season 2!?). If you'd like to reach out to us, send an email to cyberRAR.podcast@gmail.com!
Girls Lean Back Everywhere: The Law of Obscenity and the Assault on Genius: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girls_Lean_Back_Everywhere
Maryland SB 134: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/04/victory-maryland-police-must-now-be-trained-recognize-stalkerware
Resources for vulnerable populations:
--EFF: https://www.eff.org/pages/tools
--Access Now: https://www.accessnow.org/help/
--Department of Homeland Security: https://www.ready.gov/cybersecurity
--Consumer Reports: https://securityplanner.consumerreports.org/
INTRO
Michaela
Hi everyone. Welcome back to Cyber.RAR. My name is Michaela. In our last episode, the RAR team discussed the concept of cybersecurity and protecting people, especially vulnerable people. We talked about the current framing of the conversation as cyber war and cyber crime, and we made the case for updating our thinking about cyber threats to mirror how we think about climate change.
If you haven’t listened to it, please go back and check it out.
Today, we’re taking the discussion a little bit deeper. I have the amazing opportunity to sit down with Eva Galperin, the Director of Cybersecurity for EFF (the Electronic Frontier Foundation). Her work is primarily focused on providing privacy and security for vulnerable populations around the world, so she is the perfect person to join us for this episode. With her political science and technical background, she has done everything from organizing EFF's Tor Relay Challenge, to writing privacy and security training materials, and publishing research on malware in Syria, Vietnam, Lebanon, and Kazakhstan. Since 2018, she has worked on addressing the digital privacy and security needs of survivors of domestic abuse. She is also a co-founder of the Coalition Against Stalkerware.
Thank you so much, Eva, for joining us today!
Eva
Thanks for having me.
Michaela
So maybe to start, can you tell our audience a little bit about your background and what brought you to the work that you do today?
Eva
Well, um I really started out in sort of IT and network administration and Unix systems administration in the 90s. Largely because I had been a feral child on the internet and this was a marketable skill when I was a teenager. Um, then in the sort of late 90s, early 2000s, when the bottom fell out of the market and like the first dot-com crash happened, I went back to school.
I got a degree in political science and international relations with an emphasis in Chinese and sort of moved over into human rights. And then I went to go work for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, where I started out on the legal team, and then moved over to activism and then to international work.
And then finally was one of the founding members of our Threat Lab, which combines all of these skills into a sort of Voltron in order to protect vulnerable populations.
Michaela
That's so amazing and such an interesting path to where you are today. I think all of those elements of your background probably provide you with the skills that you need and the perspective that you need to understand the types of harms that occur to vulnerable populations.
Eva
I think that the multidisciplinary approach is frequently derided in the tech industry. Just like “go get more tech skills. It will be fine. All we care about are your tech skills.” But it turns out that if you have tech skills without context and they do not come with, you know, the soft skills of dealing with other people or the social science skills of understanding the world around you, then you end up with technology that just recreates all of the existing imbalances of power in this world and often makes them worse. And then you end up with a bunch of technologists going, “we have absolutely no idea how this happened.”
Michaela
Yeah, it's true. But on the flip side, you can bring technologists into this space to fix the problem and bring policymakers along too.
Definitely want to mention the big win that you had recently in Maryland, where the Governor, Larry Hogan, just signed a bill that would require law enforcement agencies to learn and recognize the common tactics in laws around electronic surveillance or stalkerware. Can you tell us a little bit more about the important gap that this filled and what more needs to be done?
Eva
Sure. So this was SB 134 in the great state of Maryland. I was approached by State Senator Lee asking essentially what Maryland could do about stalkerware and about physical trackers and you know, other forms of tech enabled abuse.
And what I told her was that survivors come to me all the time and they say, so I have this evidence that I'm being stalked. I have found a physical tracker or I am using antivirus software and the scan has found that I have stalkerware installed on my phone. But I bring this information to my local police and my local police don't do anything. Sometimes they gaslight the survivors and they essentially tell them this is not a real problem. Or they tell them, go to the FBI, who's not going to do anything about it. Or they say, well, this, this is a computer crime. It has to go to our computer crimes division. And then the computer crimes division has been tasked with prioritizing financial crimes above all else. And so they just never get around to helping survivors.
Whereas one of the things that that police could really benefit from is a training that helps them understand what tools abusers use in order to engage in this sort of tech enabled abuse, how to recognize them, and the ways in which they might be investigated, because these are actually not very technically sophisticated. This does not require your computer crimes division. And I would really like for the survivors who go to police to actually be able to get help instead of just being further victimized.
So I worked with Senator Lee's office. And we came up with a bill that would require police in the academy to receive a training about exactly how all of this works and how you recognize it and what you should do about it. So they will be getting this training before they even become police. So I'm very excited about that. This is the year in which all of the state academies are essentially revamping their trainings and thinking about exactly what it is that that police need to learn before they become police. So it was especially good timing.
I love to claim success. Believe me, I love a win! But this is only a partial win. What we have so far is a theory that we could improve the way that victims are treated when they come to the police through training. So now we have to write the training, train the police, and see whether or not it worked. But my hope is that if this turns out to be effective, that we can use this as a model bill in other states.
Winnona
So, as a follow up, what do some of these trainings look like in your head? I know that it's a work in progress at the moment, but as someone who comes from more of a technical engineering, reverse engineering side, I find it super cool to be able to properly and hopefully have this support network of people that can actually serve their communities in this way.
Eva
Well I have done some, you know, talks with law enforcement. And I have worked with other people who have specifically done trainings for law enforcement. So I have some vision for what the training will look like. But in the end, the contents of the training are not up to me. They are up to a commission that controls the trainings over at the academy. I merely have suggestions about what the training should include, what it should look like.
Michaela
And I can imagine that part of the training might be to illustrate to these soon-to-be-officers what the risks actually are, what the harms are, what the vulnerable populations look like and why this is not just a very niche issue that affects a very small amount of people, but is actually quite common, and maybe more common than they might anticipate. What goes into that breaking down of people’s stereotypes about the problem, their preconceived notions about what this problem looks like and how can we maybe use some of that awareness raising in other parts of society as well?
Eva
Well again, I haven't spent a lot of time training police already. So I, and I haven't spent a lot of time looking into whether or not my trainings are effective. So I hesitate to answer that question because I'm not sure that I'm qualified. I can tell you that from my trainings with other populations that one of the most important things to teach people is confidence in their own technical skills. Because frequently the people who are out there who support survivors, the moment that they see something technical, they freeze and they don't feel empowered to understand what it is or to investigate it.
And that is one of the reasons why survivors sometimes just get turned away by people saying like, I can't do anything, this requires some sort of technical wizard. And you don't need a wizard. These are actually really simple and straightforward things that you can look for. And I'm perfectly happy to make checklists and diagrams and everything that you might need in order to make this as simple as possible. I have worked with the companies to make this as simple as possible precisely so that you don't need an engineer in order to understand this. And then the big problem for engineers is that even if you understand the technical problem, often engineers are not operating from a place of understanding tech enabled abuse or understanding domestic abuse or understanding trauma. And so often what I have to teach engineers is how to take a trauma centric approach to helping survivors because a lot of the advice that engineers give to other engineers is actually not very useful for trauma survivors. And is often given in a way that's really off putting and alienating and that does not help them.
And for that, I drew a lot from my experience working with journalists and activists all over the world and especially activists in authoritarian countries. I spent a lot of time talking to very scared people involved in high stakes situations where a lot was on the line, and they did not have time for long nuanced discussions. They wanted just like a couple of punchy bits of advice that I could give them that they could implement quickly and in a hurry. And that's really what I try to do when I work directly with survivors. And also to do it all in a way that is accepting and that's not judgmental, which can also be a little bit difficult for engineers sometimes.
Michaela
That's all really exciting and I can't wait to see what comes of this legislation. And hopefully it does serve as a blueprint for other states as well. So congrats on that one!
Eva
Thank you.
Michaela
Just want to ask a question about that terminology and how to communicate across different types of communities where you've got engineers, maybe, on one side, policymakers on another, people who are working in civil society on the other hand. And often terms don't match up quite so nicely. One of the things that our RAR team talked about in our previous episode is how to determine what vulnerability looks like. In cybersecurity, vulnerability is usually thought about within the context of a weakness in a system. But from my background–I spent five years at a nonprofit on human rights issues–we talk about vulnerable populations and we talk about vulnerability in the context of systemic inequalities or how vulnerable populations, for example, racial and ethnic minorities, children, or elderly people, may have more vulnerable characteristics than others. And how do we disaggregate the impacts on those types of communities? So if we're thinking about vulnerable people within the context of digital and cyber harms, how do you define it and how do you think about it?
Eva
Well to be fair, I helped to start a sort of sub subsection of my organization that conflates these two things, or at least like that combines them because frequently vulnerable populations are being targeted with, you know, software vulnerabilities, with hardware vulnerabilities, with vulnerabilities in systems and in policies, and in terms of service. With, you know, sort of weaknesses that were not meant to be there. But I think it's also really important for engineers to understand that certain weaknesses are actually built into the system. That the nature of systemic inequality is that it's baked in. And that it's our job to sort of level those inequalities and to address them.
One of the hardest parts of my job when I'm trying to explain sort of human rights to engineers is explaining to them that the system working correctly, the system working as designed is still unjust. And that we need to make systemic changes. And that can often be a tremendous stumbling block.
Likewise, one of the, sort of the flip side of this is that working in human rights, sometimes I get people who don't have much of a technical background and so their ideas about what can and should be done from a technical point of view are simply not very informed. There's a lot of, well, you can fix Twitter by just getting rid of the Nazis with your anti-Nazi button, which is definitely how it's going to be done.
And you know, you can get rid of the terrorists by just backdooring encryption and allowing the government to see who's a terrorist. Nothing will go wrong with this plan! And then you just replace terrorist with pedophile and you get exactly the same argument about backdooring encryption, which is happening right now in the United States government, which really the, the FBI brings up every few months.
So translating between these two worlds can sometimes be challenging. But the good news is that at least both of them understand that vulnerability means something different in this different context. And I'm really happy that one of the things that I can do is I can show them that like, that is exactly the intersection of my work.
Michaela
Amazing, yeah. I'm glad that you sit right at that nexus. Because I think that's so important to be able to translate between different sectors and different types of people who work in this space. Can you share a little bit about how you've seen the world evolve over the last 20 years or so that you've been working in this area? Are we getting better at understanding the impact of cyber on people and centering them in the conversation or are things just getting more complicated and harder to manage?
Eva
Well, I have to give you the same answer that I give everybody else, which is everything is getting better and also everything is getting worse.
And both of these things are happening very quickly. Because on one hand we are all more connected to each other than we ever were before. And in some ways that is very good. The technology and information that is available to sort of ordinary people is greater than it ever has been before.
And to some extent that's pretty cool. On the other hand, the fact that we are all more connected than ever also leaves us more vulnerable than ever. And the fact that the internet has really moved away from its original promise of decentralization and towards a concentration of just a few platforms is also really problematic.
But one of the things that I'm very excited about is that there is a lot of, there's a lot of enthusiasm for decentralization right now. And that makes me happy. Often that enthusiasm gets funneled into NFTs and cryptocurrency, which is not as great. But what I really wanna do is I wanna take all of that enthusiasm and all of that feeling that we can really return to the original promise of the web as a force that pushes us away from centralized authority and that helps to correct power imbalances instead of just reinforcing the ones that already exist. Like the fact that there are people who think like this and who, you know, want it to exist in the world is something that I think is really important to harness right now.
Michaela
Yeah. And who are the people that need to be involved in harnessing that power? I guess, it sounds like a massive task, a massive undertaking. Where should we be educating, empowering or providing resources and support type people in this effort
Eva
For that particular enthusiasm, it means like going into the Web3 spaces. It means going to cryptocurrency conferences and talking to people who are, you know, very enthusiastic about things which are honestly grifts, and finding a way to take all of that sort of optimism and enthusiasm and channel it into more genuine and authentic action and really move it away from a focus on crypto coins going to the moon and the collection of apes.
Winnona
As a follow up to that, even Eva. We've talked about quite a few stakeholders on this podcast so far. I mean, going from, you know, Web3 to the FBI, to big tech companies. And all of these issues, especially when trying to best protect users, the general public, vulnerable populations. There's quite a few places where despite having fundamentally different goals as organizations, sometimes, hopefully these interests align. So are there instances in which you've been able to work with some of these stakeholders on certain issues, protecting certain populations where in other times they've actually been adversarial.
Eva
Oh, all the time. This is just the nature of activism. You have people with whom you agree on everything. You have people with whom you agree on just a few subjects. You have the people that you're always going to be opposed to. And you find your allies where you can and try not to get too bogged down in arguments about who is ideologically more pure.
And so you can see that in EFF’s relationship to, you know, everything from governments to specific tech companies to, you know. We frequently are critical of large tech companies, and we're really quite outspoken in this area, but I also work closely with these companies when our interests are aligned. And as a result, EFF gets a lot of flack basically saying like, “ah, you are in the pocket of big tech because you agreed with big tech on this one thing once.” Uh, it's like, no, we stick to our guns. We are here for civil liberties and we will take big tech as partners when they agree with us. And we will set fire to them when they are wrong.
And the same thing goes for, you know, various parts of the US government for, you know, various senators and congressmen. And, different countries. It's less that we agree with any…there's almost no one we agree with all the time. But you also need to be able to find common ground with other organizations and with other stakeholders, or you're never gonna get anything done.
Michaela
You mentioned partnerships with other countries or conversations with other countries as well. Is there a sense of the US being a little bit behind the eight ball compared to others at this point in time? And what would it take to gain a little bit more momentum in the United States so that we can meet the pace of peer countries on these topics?
Eva
Well, it depends on what you mean. When it comes to innovation, I think that one of the things that the US really needs to come to grips with is the rise of Chinese companies and platforms as a major influence in social media. And the tools that we have to influence what Chinese companies do are much more limited than the tools that we have to influence a company that say, exists down the street from me.
So there's, there is that to consider. There's also…the United States is way behind Europe when it comes to privacy legislation. And I think that we should definitely be talking about something like a GDPR for the United States. California is actually quite progressive in this area. And I would really love to see California's privacy legislation used as a model in other states. And it has been in some, but I would like to see it like really more widespread.
We, on the other hand, there are also areas in which US policy leadership is still a pretty big deal. For example, in cases of defamation, or when it comes to the platforms the ToS and policies of large internet platforms. A lot of these large internet companies are still based in the United States and their ideas about you know, what they can and cannot do are still very influenced by US law. And I think their users are often in their terms of policy, in terms of service policy, agree to adjudicate in California court.
So in that case, California law rules. And I think that that is, that's still like a really strong influence. So it really depends on sort of what area you're looking at. There are areas where the US hs really fallen behind and there are areas where the US is still exhibiting leadership.
Michaela
Yeah. Privacy is a great example. And hopefully there is more privacy legislation in the near future, either at the federal level or certainly at the state level, that will come to fruition. We'll see how that goes.
Eva
Yeah. But instead we have a new backdoor encryption bill,
Michaela
Two steps forward, one step back.
Well it's great to get your take on that. Because I think that's something that our group has been thinking about how do we influence policy makers. And how do we think about the steps that are necessary to move things in the right direction, knowing that sometimes things are going to be a little bit piecemeal and sometimes it will feel like we're a little bit late to the game, but that should spur us further to take action on these topics.
Eva
There's actually a really great book called I think, Girls Lean Back Everywhere, which is a book about the sort of long term fights in US courts about free speech and obscenity. And I found it really useful–not just because I spend a lot of time working in free speech and so the kind of development of these cases means a lot to me–but because it taught me a lot about how to fight a long fight. Because these are fights that play out over, over decades and they require a lot of patience and a lot of strategic thinking.
And it's really easy to just wake up every day and put out today's fire, or at least try to put out today's fire. And that can make it really hard to fight a long term fight. So I recommend this to the people who are really getting started in the field to think about this as, you know, as a decades long project where you need to sort of stake out your smaller wins first and enjoy them while sort of keeping your eye on the prize.
Michaela
That's amazing. I'm definitely putting that on my summer reading list, where hopefully I'll be able to get through it this summer. It also makes me think about one of the analogies that our RAR team used around this long term fight.
And we talked about how cyber is often discussed in war terminology, thinking about adversaries and offenders, or crime terminology. But the way that our ecosystem is becoming more vulnerable over time and over a longer time frame is actually somewhat similar to that of climate change. And that it might be helpful to use that framing to better understand which communities will be most impacted by a cyber incident in the same way that we think about how communities are impacted by an extreme weather event.
And then how do you consider building resilience in those communities? What are your thoughts on that analogy? And about the ways in which we can use different framings of the problem to help us better address the human impacts of cyber?
Eva
I think that's really smart. This is actually a framing that I haven't heard before so I'm very excited to hear new and innovative thinking in this area. I think that you might want to look at the history of the fight for broadband in rural places in the United States. I think that that might be really informative because that's definitely a case where people who live in rural areas, not having access to fast internet has disproportionately affected people who are poorer and who need communication technologies more, and who are, you know, much more adversely impacted when they are stuck in places with with slow internet. Especially, you know, during our, our recent plague, when everybody suddenly had to move to remote learning. And that was extremely difficult for people in rural populations without access to fast internet to do.
Michaela
Yeah. COVID 19 really shined a spotlight on that problem. Is there a way that we can highlight these. Inequalities and focus on addressing them without needing a global pandemic to spur action on this.
Eva
But here's the thing. We already have a global pandemic, so like we might as well roll with it!
Michaela
It's true. We can definitely be using this as a great case study and I'm sure it will continue to be used for decades on how this brought to light a lot of different challenges that rural communities have and other communities with low socioeconomic status or who might not be connected in the same ways that other parts of the world, urban parts of the world are.
Eva
Yeah. And especially since these are communities that also really needed health information and access to vaccines and access to boosters, and PPE. And these were all things that you could get information about online.
Michaela
Yeah, absolutely. We'll see what the next year or two brings as we hopefully emerge from COVID times and have the opportunity to work on and fix some of these problems that we were just trying to, where we were trying to just put out fires over the last two years.
Eva
Yeah. I think trying to move from putting out fires to more long term thinking is sometimes the hardest part of activism because there's always something on fire.
Michaela
Can you give us and our audience a little bit of insight into how you manage that question? How you deal with the tension between putting out fires today and thinking about longer term issues?
Eva
Bold of you to assume I'm successful at it! I think I actually learned a lot from working with communities in North Africa and the Middle East during the Arab Spring. And a lot of that had to do with understanding both how to fight a long term fight, but also how to triage. How to look at, like, this is actually on fire and this is a thing where I can do some good where I am the right person in the right space to do this work. And so I should drop everything and do this.
Whereas there are a lot of people who want to do things and sometimes the right thing to do is to hand over work to someone else. That there is always somebody else in the space who can step up, and sharing the load is really important. For one thing, it helps to prevent the sort of rockstar syndrome, where one person gets, you know, elevated above everybody else. And suddenly the rules don't apply to them because they do good work, and they're allowed to be abusive in their communities, which is a problem that the information security and human rights community has had in spades.
But also, I think it's good because it encourages us to continue to build our networks. If you know that you can't hold all the work yourself, you start looking for other people who can do the work and you keep track of what kind of work they can do so that you can hand it over to them when it's time.
And we all rely on one another and we are not gonna make it through this fight unless we have each other's backs. And sometimes it can be really easy to lose sight of that. But I think that that is the only way to survive doing activism on on a grand scale and in the long term,
Michaela
Oh, I wholeheartedly agree with all of that. And I definitely think that one of the best things that I've gained in graduate school here at HKS is a community of other like-minded people who I know I will be able to fight alongside in the world that comes after HKS, especially people who are underrepresented, women, minorities, non-binary folks. And I'm just really excited about the prospect of going out there and doing something alongside these amazing people.
Eva
I have also been extremely impressed with this cohort.
Michaela
So what comes next? What can we do to better protect vulnerable populations in our own individual lives? And what should we recommend policy makers do about this problem as well?
Eva
Well this week's fire is just, the immediate thing is the protection of the people who are, who may need or are seeking abortions and sort of the maintenance of reproductive health and reproductive rights. I think that trans rights are also very much under attack right now. And so those are sort of the immediate fires.
I just did a video with a colleague of mine about sort of operational security for people who are doing abortion support right now. And that is a situation that is clearly about to get worse and is about to get much worse very quickly. So that's today's fire.
But in the longer term, there are some other things that we can work on, including changing the way that people think about domestic abuse and about tech-enabled abuse, which is also something which is in the news right now. Trying to make it clear that when you're looking at domestic abuse, that you need to look at the power dynamic, you need to ask yourself, like who, who has the power here? And that the person who has the power also has the responsibility and that is the person who needs to be held accountable first and foremost. So those discussions I think, are also really important. There is another backdoor bill in the Senate right now. Thanks Senator Blumenthal. That needs to be destroyed. There's a encryption backdoor proposal in, I think it's in the European parliament right now. Also needs to be destroyed. So a lot to do in that area. Also the previous fire, which I had been working on, and which I'm still working on is support for what's left of civil society in Russia and for Ukrainians everywhere, including Ukrainian refugees. So those have been sort of like the big things on my plate right now. That's a lot of fires.
Michaela
You must have a very big plate to be able to hold all of those. That's amazing. And it's clear. There's a lot of work to be done.
Eva
I am very lucky in that I have a large support network and a lot of people to share the load. And that's what allows us to get so much done.
Michaela
Well, do you have any last advice for people who are either early on in their careers, in this space, or transitioning from another field into this space. How should we be thinking about the work that we do and maintaining our idealism in a space where there are a lot of problems and a lot of good and a lot of bad happening right now. What's your advice for us?
Eva
My best advice is start with a community that you know. Start with a community that you are part of, that you have lived in, that you have, you know, relatives in, that you see and touch every day. Because the more marginalized you are, the better the chance is that the people who are making the decision aren't even thinking about this community. They're not. And even if they are that they don't understand what it needs and they don't understand how to speak to it. And the people who are listening to this podcast, I think, are largely people who are in a position to be translators to see the things that the people at the center of power can't see, because they're so far away. And also because they don't look.
And so what we can do is we can be messages from the margins and, and try to bring those concerns to the center and change the way that we have conversations about who deserves security, and about who deserves privacy, and what those things even look like, and how we would implement them, and sort of like what companies are for, and what these products are for, and what these laws are for, and you know, who they're meant to protect, and who are they meant to protect them from?
These are all questions that really need to be asked among the people who are making decisions that touch our everyday lives about products and platforms and laws and governments that touch our lives every day.
And I would think that the people who are listening to this podcast are going to be the people who are in the best position to bring these concerns to people who otherwise would not see them or would not think that they're important.
Michaela
Amazing. I love to hear that. And I think you're right, that the people who are listening here, the people that are listening to this podcast are not afraid of the hard problems, but excited to work on them. And so all the things that you laid out here, we're ready. We're ready to ask those questions and be those translators.
Eva
I'm very excited about it.
Michaela
Well, thank you so much, Eva, for joining us today on our podcast. We're so glad to have the opportunity to chat with you and look forward to speaking with you again in the near future.
Eva
Fantastic. It's been a pleasure.
SEASON 1 WRAP-UP
Michaela
Wow, this is it, team!
Laughter
Grace
We made it. I can't believe it.
Dani
How did we start it? Did we start it with Hello World? Goodbye World.
Laughter
Grace
Maybe not so dramatic. I remember I remember the, well, I was just telling Michaela. I remember getting the text from her when she was like, Hey, do you wanna do an independent study with Eric Rosenberg? And that feels honestly like it was last month and suddenly we're not writing a 25 page paper. We just got to hang out like every week together. Now we have a podcast. Like what ha, when did this happen? Why are we going so fast?
Sophie
Yeah, Michaela really rallied the team on this.
Grace
The Nick Fury to our Avengers!
Dani
The Nick fury of this crew!
Laughter
Michaela
I mean honestly, this wouldn't have happened without all of you. It was definitely a team effort.
Grace
Absolutely
Bethan
100 percent
Dani
I also wanna shout out all of our beautiful marketing materials largely from Bethan.
Grace
Oh, yes. It's like, “Hey, wouldn't it be so fun if we had stickers?” And literally the next week, you'd be like, “Anyway, here are two types of stickers that I made. What do you guys think? Should we give one to Eric?”
Laughter
Grace
I would be remiss not to thank Winnona, our task master. Getting us on track every day of the week.
Sophie
Running a tight ship.
Bethan
Truly.
Winnona
I’m just really good at sending follow up passive aggressive WhatsApp messages. That's really all it is.
Grace
I don't think passive. I wouldn't say passive.
Winnona
Oh just outright aggressive!
Grace
Assertive, assertive! Bossy is not a bad word, Winnona
Winnona
No, not even. I am so inspired by every single one of you and how much I've learned throughout this whole process. And then Dani and Grace being able to have all of those like amazing discussions. Like the amount of times, I feel like the three of us have disagreed with each other in such a productive way, I think has also been super good.
Grace
It's the greatest honor of my life. Winnona to disagree with you live on the air.
Well, I do think it would be…I'm interested to know what, what people are doing these days to afford stickers. I'm interning right now, remotely for Asian Americans Advancing Justice. Yeah, what's everyone else up to?
Sophie
I'm back at MITRE working as an analyst on emerging tech competition and program protection.
Bethan
I'm currently in DC, interning for Intel on their strategic issues team. Thankfully, I've got Sophie and Winnona also in DC with me, although I'm missing Dani, Grace and Michaela very much.
Grace
Well Michaela is moving there in the, well, I guess you guys will be back because me, Bethan, and Sophie, we’ll be back for our second year HKS, but Winnona is staying for, oh my God, 1L!
Winnona
Georgetown Law, baby!
Grace
Are you nervous?
Winnona
Oh yes. A hundred percent.
Grace
Hoya?
Bethan
Hoya lawya!
Winnona
Michaela, Dani, what are you guys doing now?
Michaela
I am doing a research fellowship this summer with the Krebs Stamos Group. And then I’ll be starting some cyber policy work with the federal government. I'm excited about that
Dani
Very exciting. I am doing some research this summer with the Belfer group on extremism in our intelligence communities and military. So if anybody wants to talk about that, do a podcast about that, let's chat. And then still exploring full-time roles. I start with my Army unit New York National Guard–shout out cyber protection team 173–in July. So doing that part-time.
Bethan
Woo woo!
Sophie
But you still have to come back for season two.
Dani
Yes, please.
Winnona
Yeah. Are we doing a season two?
Everyone
Yes!
Bethan
Stay tuned loyal listeners!
Winnona
But seriously. Yeah, I guess talking to our audience, if you have any ideas or would like to collaborate, especially for people who are experts that don't usually get the spotlight that we would love to highlight. Yeah, please send us a Twitter DM, a LinkedIn message. We have an email it's cyberRAR.podcast@gmail.com
Bethan
To that point of getting people, you know, unique voices on this podcast. I think that's what's so special about this group. And the mission that we came together is to, you know, elevate different types of voices, have conversations that are engaging and dynamic, which we've had, all of our discussions have been like that. And it's just really special to see this go from an idea into a real live podcast.
Dani
Yeah, I also, what's been really special in the last couple weeks, you know, at the time we're recording this, we've got a couple episodes released, but not all of them. And even in these early days, it's been really lovely to see the response from everyone, from people who I wouldn't say regularly follow this world, you know, who decided to dip their toes in, to people who are, you know, far, far deeper in this world than we are. Who've written to say, this has been really interesting and hey, I'd love to be a part of it.
So it feels like there's a lot of fertile ground still and, you know, maybe laying the seeds for season two!
Sophie
Yeah, and super grateful to all of the interviewees who have agreed to come on so far. And to the folks at the Belfer Center who've been so supportive, and so helpful, and so patient with getting all of the promotional materials out and just helping us bring this to life. So, so grateful.
Bethan
Yeah, calling out, of course, our advisor, Eric Rosenbach, Josh Burek, Benn Craig–to them and the whole Belfer Center, thank you so much for empowering us, as we decided to make this podcast.
Winnona
And finally, thank you to all of our listeners. This is so exciting for us to see how many people have reached out to us. And we are so excited that you've taken the time to listen.
Rawrr!
Grace
Listen. My attention is for sale any day.
Winnona
Grace, nooo!
CLOSER
Michaela
Thanks for listening to Cyber.RAR, a podcast by Harvard Kennedy school students. Given that this is a student-led program, this podcast doesn't represent the views of any institution that we are connected to, and our opinions on these topics are evolving, so they may change after we finished recording this episode on May 18th, 2022.
If you or anyone else, you know, might be at risk of a digital attack or targeting in any way, we've put some resources in the show notes that point you towards best practices, guidance and organizations that are looking out for people who might have digital security needs. Please take a look. Thanks and join us next time for Cyber.RAR.