The Tech Policy Press Podcast

Jessica Silbey, law professor and associate dean studying institutional impacts of AI. Woodrow Hartzog, law and technology scholar focused on AI design and governance. They describe how AI erodes institutional expertise, accountability, and civic functions. They trace risks to law, journalism, military chains of command, and argue for local, sectoral responses and institutional repair.

Workers describe organizing inside a major tech firm to oppose government surveillance contracts. They explain how petitions and past campaigns shaped tactics and demands. Conversations cover risks of speaking up, leadership responses, and debates over staying to reform versus leaving. The discussion highlights labor power, ethical boundaries in product work, and calls for collective action.

Anya Schiffrin, Columbia SIPA tech policy co-director who led regional consultations, and Alice Marwick, Data & Society research director studying online misinformation. They map industrialized deepfake financial fraud, trace the scam supply chain and platform ad roles. They discuss telecom and banking interventions, cross-border organized crime challenges, and policy ideas like watermarking and advertiser KYC.

Cindy Cohn, executive director emerita of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and longtime digital rights lawyer, reflects on three decades defending privacy and encryption. She recounts landmark legal fights from the Bernstein case to NSA revelations. Conversations cover surveillance’s threat to democracy, metadata power, building pro-democracy movements, and how to sustain activism without burning out.

Albert Fox Cahn, founder of STOP and civil rights advocate focused on surveillance and tech policy. Evan Selinger, philosophy professor and co-author exploring technology ethics and incremental innovation. They critique move-fast culture. They defend steady upgrades over risky disruption. They discuss AI hype, surveillance pitfalls like Ring, cybersecurity as incremental defense, and a practical upgrader checklist.

Amos Toh, senior counsel at the Brennan Center focused on national security law, and Kat Duffy, CFR senior fellow on geopolitics and AI policy, unpack the Anthropic-Pentagon standoff. They discuss Anthropic's red lines, how the dispute escalated into a supply-chain designation, risks to procurement and alliances, and broader implications for oversight, surveillance pathways, and AI adoption versus guardrails.

Marina Sacristán, a public policy officer researching information integrity, and Carlos Hernández-Echevarría, an associate director focused on platform accountability, reveal an investigation into AI-generated protest videos on TikTok. They describe finding hundreds of accounts using synthetic media to game recommendation systems for monetization. The conversation covers detection methods, monetization tactics, geographic workarounds, and policy enforcement gaps.

José Marichal, a political scientist at California Lutheran University who writes on technology and politics, explores how algorithms reshape public life. He discusses outliers and democratic value, the idea of an implicit bargain with platforms, optimization’s squeeze on novelty, surveillance’s harm to community, and proposals like a right to serendipity and cultivating idiosyncrasy.

Paddy Leerssen, postdoctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam focusing on social media regulation and DSA research. He discusses the DSA’s two-year enforcement milestone and evolving empirical work. Conversation covers audits and risk assessments, rising private litigation across Europe, national versus EU enforcement tensions, and blind spots like marketplaces and gender-based violence.

Carrie Goldberg, a victims’ rights attorney who sues tech platforms over design harms, shares stories from a decade of litigation. She discusses treating apps as products, building a practice around image-based abuse, battles over Section 230, algorithmic accountability, and high-profile suits against Amazon, Meta, Grindr and Omegle. Short, sharp takes on law, design, and online safety.