What nation has jurisdiction if an astronaut commits a crime in space? Who owns the right to mine asteroids? How do countries co-manage the physical infrastructure of the internet – on earth and in orbit? On this month’s episode of Real Cases, Stetson Law Professor Roy Balleste discusses the complex web of maritime precedents and international agreements that govern space exploration. He explains why the final frontier holds a host of new ethical, technological, and legal questions that law scholars have only just begun to contemplate.
Transcript:
Speaker 1 (00:00.078)
The high seas cannot be owned by anybody. You cannot claim ownership or national control of the high seas. But you can go out and fishing. So if you can go out there and get that tuna and bring it with you without disturbing in any other way the ocean, then it's okay. So you cannot claim the ocean, but you can get resources from the ocean and bring it back to land. The same thing applies. You cannot claim ownership of a planet, but you can mine it and you can bring stuff back.
This is Real Cases, a legal podcast presented by the Stetson University College of Law. We'll sit down with Stetson Law faculty and students to examine today's critical cases and debates in environmental, international, elder, and business law, plus the role of social justice in these fields. Join us as we open the case file. Episode 22, Space Law and Cyber Law. I'm Daniel O'Keefe, Master of English Literature from Indiana University.
Speaker 2 (01:07.714)
Today we're joined by Stetson Law Professor Roy Baiste. Professor Baiste's scholarship focuses on the areas of internet governance, cybersecurity law, space law, space cybersecurity, and astronautical ethics. He's the Director of International Initiatives at Stetson's Office of International and Graduate Programs, and the Director of the Dali and Homer Hand Law Library. He's participated in numerous panels and conferences on his areas of expertise, including the United Nations Internet Governance Forum and their high-level forum on space as a driver of sustainable socioeconomic development.
Speaker 2 (01:49.398)
One of the areas that you specialize in is astronautical ethics, it's called. And I think that's a whole category that many people probably don't know anything about and might not have even known exists. So I'm interested, could you tell us a little bit about what does that entail?
Astronautical ethics deals mainly with the area of human space flight and how humanity deals with activities of humans in outer space. The problems they might encounter, the challenges, difficult questions. Just to give you a classical example from television that I...
many people have seen is in front of the movie Contact based on the book by Carl Sagan. And when the main character in the book is about to embark on her journey, NASA has their own appeal. They say, if you encounter a problem and you cannot make it back, they give it the spiel for suicide. And she said, oh, no, no, no, I don't wanna take it. I said, no, no, this is an old.
tradition that would give all our astronauts. Now NASA denies that they do this, but if you look at how the legal field has handled this question before, and you will have to go back to maritime times, every time a boat was sinking, for example, you had to pick and choose who's gonna live or who's gonna die. So, astronautical ethics,
has to do with preparing for questions like that. It also involves the intersects of the areas, they call it space sustainability. They talk also about losing the dark skies, which means we're putting so many satellites in outer space that now we're having problem observing the stars and keeping track.
Speaker 1 (04:04.878)
of asteroids and comets that in essence is, it covers all of those areas. It's putting humanity at the center.
Okay. Yeah, you mentioned maritime law in particular, having to look back to maritime law for precedents about this sort of thing. You wrote an article called The Ethics of Space Exploration in which you talk about voyages of discovery and long periods of, potentially long periods of human isolation that could occur as a result. And you compare some of the scenarios that could occur in deep space exploration to famous
shipwrecks and nautical disappearances from the 19th century. So I was wondering, could you talk a little bit about those similarities and the sorts of, and in particular about the sorts of legal problems that they could pose?
Yes, it will be at the most simple level. don't know if you... I mean, most people would remember some years ago, this individual that was walking by himself in a state park and got one of his arms got trapped between rocks. And in order to survive, had to cut himself. So the question is, what will human beings will do when things get very desperate?
So those shipwreck cases, for example, there were two types in general. Situations where the crew were trapped at sea for at least for a month. Why you do what you have been without food for that long? After a while, individuals get desperate and then they were resulting to cannibalism to survive. So that's one problem.
Speaker 1 (05:57.154)
The other problem is when the crew takes it upon themselves to start throwing people overboard. That's the other problem. So what the law has to do about that? There is something in common law in the English American tradition that talks about the law of necessity. And the law of necessity has to be conducted very reasonably. For example, individuals
get in trouble with the law if they don't want it long enough, for example. The shipwreck begins today and today you start throwing people overboard. Then there is no emergency. You have enough several weeks. As a matter of fact, you don't even have to throw anybody overboard. People start dying on their own. And so the law looks at why
You lived and the other ones died. That's the main question. And if you throw somebody out, why they had to die so you could live? That's the main question that the courts have used. And if it was very extreme cases, under maritime law, they were found innocent in those cases. But...
rules were not followed properly, steps were not followed properly, then there was severe penalties, jail, and hard labor, and things like that. When it comes to space, they look at the same types of questions that were asked in the maritime law. For example, was there a lottery to make it all fair? As I mentioned before, how long was the wait?
If you survive, why was it that important? Well, I was the only engineer in the group. I was the only doctor in the group. The people that stay behind have to maximize the life of all the others. Otherwise, you're a friend game for the lottery. And so we haven't encountered problems like that since the 19th century. But as we start sending individuals beyond Mars,
Speaker 1 (08:20.534)
And even in the way, the way to Mars is six months at the closest point. Every two years we'll be able to send people to Mars because that's when the planets align. And that's still six months. If three months in, there were a loss of oxygen and only two out of three astronauts could stay behind, how the decision is gonna be made? And if...
somebody has to sacrifice, how we're going to let them endure that hardship. These are questions that space law asks, but we don't have answers to. And so I wonder if you, in the field, that is trying to anticipate what should be the answer.
Now, and one of the questions that occurs to me as I begin to consider some of this also is what would be the jurisdiction under which these laws would be put into effect in the first place, right? And I mean, guess when I imagine like an American mission to Mars, then I imagine that somehow American law would apply, although like in conditions of maritime law, it seems like it would be
and a particular unusual instance of it. But I mean, I imagine also that there is a body of law that has developed kind of similar to international law regarding the use of outer space. So I'm curious if you could talk a little bit about that. Like what are some of the best established principles of space law at work today?
go back for a moment to maritime law. The sexual that will be applicable will be in situations like this, it will be the law of the flag. So if it's an American flag, the ship falls on the US jurisdiction. An international law, have two treaties that have the... So we have the outer space treaty that handles the use of outer space. But that treaty
Speaker 2 (10:24.79)
Okay, yeah.
Speaker 1 (10:36.876)
doesn't have the questions of ethics. So for the questions of ethics, we had to resort first to the rescue agreement, the rescue agreement of astronauts, which is a treaty, and the registration convention is the other one. To look at the ship first, the registration convention is similar to maritime law. It says that the jurisdiction of the spaceship or the rocket
will be the law of the nation that register the launch and that register the object. So we call it whatever we sent into a space, space object. So the space object has one law and the human being has the other. So registration convention for the objects and the rescue agreement for human beings.
And so the Restriction Convention will cover that part. The US send this capsule to Mars, and so US law applies. The only exception is what we have right now, the US is building the Gateway Station. it's to begin building the Gateway Station in 2027. next is going to be the lunar base. And when it is built by international agreement, then
internationally applied, and they most likely will have to create some kind of framework as they have done in the International Space Station. The International Space Station is not one law for the whole station. It's a law of the module. there are different, yes, there are different modules. The Russians put a module, the US put a module, Canadians, Europeans, they all send parts and components. So.
If a US astronaut is in the Russian modules and violates the law, it's Russian law. However, the US can request extradition. And technically, under the agreement, it is a specter cooperation. You would expect that we want to handle the matter of our own astronauts.
Speaker 1 (13:04.882)
A year and a half ago, one of our astronauts was accused of hacking bank from the International Space Station. so a lot of the media thought immediately that the outer space treaty applied here. But once they checked it more, they realized that it was Article 22 of the International Space Station agreement, completely separate in essence treaty for the behavior.
of astronauts at the station. And fortunately, we had to use it because it was later discovered that it was a, in essence, the astronauts was going through a divorce, which is very hard to endure when you are trapped in that.
I would imagine, yeah.
So this lady's partner decided to take advantage of that and accuse her of a crime. That wasn't true. Justice made her during the divorce process. Yes, it took a while to sort out, but in the end, the austenite was pretty unclear. So once we are in this space, we know that as they travel,
Wow.
Speaker 1 (14:22.222)
that our astronauts will be on the US jurisdiction. The rescue agreement was designed or written in the early 70s at a time when humans didn't go very far. So if you read that language, it applies to pretty much general emergencies that go all the way up to the moon. But beyond that, we really don't have the capability to prepare for a rescue mission.
So once they are in this space, all the provisions in the rescue agreement become irrelevant. We don't have any law beyond that point. And that is the problem that we have right now.
Wow, no, that's fascinating. One question that I'd like to ask you, and I think this is something that people are likely to have heard of in a popular sort of way, is the issue of property rights in outer space. I remember a while back hearing about this thing online that sounded like it was probably bogus, but it was never completely clear to me about someone allegedly selling property on the moon, right? Or trying to convince people
to purchase lots on the moon through his company. I assume that as colonization of the moon and of Mars and of, you know, I know people have even talked about like mining asteroids and things like that. So the topic of what kind of property rights individuals or companies or nations are going to have in space is something that is, I would imagine is very much on the horizon.
So I'm curious to ask you like, what is the current state of the way the law works in that regard now? And what is it moving towards?
Speaker 1 (16:16.438)
Yes. If you look at the history of space alone, when NASA and the Soviets and the Roscosmos started sending humans into outer space, was this desire to set some rules of the road. And so we end up with five treaties of which four are very useful. the other two, by the way, have to do with
Liability is one of them. Then we have the moon agreement, which is hasn't gone very far because of some of the questions that you asked. at the moment, the trend is to continue the pattern of the last 20 years, which is a lot of discussion, but no new treaties. So part of the problem that we have
is that we have to deal with the questions that you present now. How do we deal with space mining and colonization, claiming of property and things of that nature? Well, if you look at the outer space treaty, it's clear that the outer space is free for exploration and use, but there can be no claims of national control.
of any territory in outer space, includes any celestial body, including asteroids, including the moon, cetera. So let's tackle them with mining for a moment. This one is the easiest. So no international law for mining. The US, under Obama, passed a law to allow it.
On the federal level now, US companies can go out and mining. If you look at it from the practical point of view, we have to do it because there are limited resources and the population in the planet is increasing. So eventually we're gonna start running out of materials. And there are asteroids out there that are completely made out of diamonds. To give you an example, others are full of platinum and gold and things.
Speaker 1 (18:38.151)
things of that nature. So we had to go out there and bring that stuff.
I know I've heard accounts of there being asteroids out there that, like you said, that would contain so much wealth in them that if they were somehow successfully mined, it would tank the value of gold or something like that.
Unfortunately, gold is needed as a component for rockets. Because it doesn't corrode, it lasts a long time. So for us, it's shiny and beautiful, but really has a practical use. Many metals in outer space corrode, gold doesn't corrode. So it's very useful to have. Now, how do we get a...
Wow, huh.
Speaker 1 (19:22.51)
Well, I don't want to say get around. How do we make outer space law work and still get that mining materials? So we went back to the maritime law. The maritime law, the high seas cannot be owned by anybody. This is why the Russians have been trying to claim control of the Black Sea, but that's international waters. So the US constantly sends ships to travel to remind the Russians,
You can travel here and you can stop us. The same in the South China Sea. The Chinese are building islands and trying to corner a piece of the high seas. You cannot claim ownership of national control of the high seas. But you can go out and fishing. So if you can go out there and get that tuna and bring it with you without it.
disturbing in any other way the ocean, then it's okay. So you cannot claim the ocean, but you can get resources from the ocean and bring it back to land. The same thing applies. You cannot claim ownership of a planet, but you can mine it and you can bring stuff back. Asteroids, some of them are small enough. It's just one resource. I mean, it wouldn't be in the mother cells.
practical to just leave it floating there because you're not supposed to claim it. It's like finding a piece of rock in the road, so to speak. so I would say you cannot go in and blow up a planet, but you can extract stuff from large bodies of minerals of earth and collect what you need and come back. That's what the US law says now.
There's not much pushback of that because the other nations that are starting to enter the space race, India, China, know, Russia, the Emiratis, they all realize the same thing. This is why the Emiratis skipped the moon and started sending probes to Mars.
Speaker 1 (21:50.926)
the colonization is a little bit trickier because we don't have any colors yet. Elon Musk says he wants to have the first colony on Mars and that he wants to ignore any type of law from our planet. So how would you deal with that? For that we have to get out of space though and
Elon Musk, we had to prove certain elements that we use every time somebody claims we have a new nation. Do you have enough people? Do you have enough resources? Do you have a stable government? Do you have the recognition of others? I mean, you can create a colony, if you get there and that's it, the colony is going to die out. You have to stop each commerce.
And the way to establish commerce is having those other nations on earth, they're going to establish commerce with you, that they recognize you as a legitimate entity that can enter into agreements. can't have a Joseph people for fun, put a shark there, that's it. So the law is not completely developed for that. But we'll have to go back to
the age, 19, early 20th century, when nations started to get independence from European nations. In Africa, I always use a case of Indonesia and Israel, how these nations came about to being and being recognized. What rules were used to recognize those? I wanted to take those elements into other space.
One of the issues that you mentioned earlier when you were talking about astronautical ethics, one of the fields that you mentioned was losing dark skies. I suppose this isn't quite the same thing, but I know an issue that I have heard about before and that I believe is still an ongoing matter of concern is the issue of orbital debris and about the ramifications that that has
Speaker 2 (24:13.282)
globally for the very possibility of travel into outer space and of continuing to put up new satellites. I know there was a particular incident that I think occurred in 2007 where China performed an anti-satellite missile test that resulted in one of the largest orbital debris fields that had ever existed up until that point. So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about orbital debris, about the challenges it poses.
to space exploration and about the particular sorts of problems that it presents in terms of international law.
Sure. Just to start with that test, the US conducted a very similar test. And we brought the satellite closer to the edge of the atmosphere. So when it broke apart, it burned in re-entry. It burns cleanly, a few pieces end up in the ocean, and that's the end of it. So what is the problem with this? Part of international law and
our responsibility when we send items into outer space, these space objects, is that we are liable, are responsible for the functionality. And if they are malfunctioning, we had to drag them into reentry or use their engine. All of them have an engine, in many cases, nuclear. We had to expel them into deep space.
The problem with the Chinese was that, you know, as our geopolitical situation is changing, getting more conflictive, nations want to show that they have the capability to bring war into outer space, which until recently have been out of it. I mean, a case can be made that we need to be able to shoot stuff that
Speaker 1 (26:20.566)
is traveling out of space because we have an asteroid, what we call a cosmic hazard, that is approaching the earth. We're not going able to destroy it. So there is a case to be made that we should be able to shoot nuclear weapons into outer space. But other than that, nuclear weapons are not allowed in space. But other weapons are. And so the Chinese decided to shut down their satellite just to prove that they could do it.
but they did not plan it correctly. It was too high in orbit and that released thousands of pieces of debris. Once this debris is released, it takes a life of its own. It's small pieces the size of a bullet or even smaller. And they travel at thousands of miles per hour. One tiny piece could cut an astronaut in half.
it can dent or perforate the walls of the International Space Station. It could bring it down, really. As a matter of fact, the debris from the 2007 explosion, there are video simulations online, and you can see that the debris travel very close to the International Space Station. So right now, those pieces are going to stay around the planet.
for 100 years. Or some of them could be longer. That's not the only occasion. We had collision. Some years back we had iridium-33 and Cosmos 2251, I think it was. A Soviet-American satellite collided with one another and they created more debris. As satellites die, sometimes they are abandoned.
Every time we launch the shuttle, it releases the brain. You know that we lose one in orbit as well, unfortunately. So all of these accidents have been leaving the brain behind and collecting. And they have been creating, technically, a garbage disposal and minefield at the same time. The fear is that if there were to be a cascading effect, say,
Speaker 1 (28:46.542)
You know, Elon Musk is trying to put 40,000 satellites around the planet. Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin, another 20,000. There was a collision that involved many of them. There will be so much debris created that it will trap humanity in space. We wouldn't be able to even launch anything. That is a fear. So...
There is a lot of discussion of space sustainability now. How do we clean up the mess? For example, the Japanese are trying to come up with some kind of robotic satellite that goes in with a net and grabs some of this stuff. And it's more lucrative to set stuff up than to clean up. There is no money in collecting garbage, especially in other space.
So that's moving very slowly. And that is one of the biggest problems that we have now. That debris also obscured the night sky.
Now, shifting to another one of your specialties, so I know you specialize in cybersecurity. You also specialize in outer space law. And I think what people might be especially surprised to find out is that you also are studying the topic of cybersecurity in outer space. So I'm curious to ask just a little bit like very broadly for someone who knows nothing about it, like what
What do the outlines of that field look like?
Speaker 1 (30:25.866)
I always tell my students that the main component or the main factor to remember with cybersecurity is that it involves the human condition. So behind every problem in cyberspace, there is a human hacker. Even if you were to inject artificial intelligence, somebody programmed that agent. And so there is a...
a malicious mind always behind that. So if you have to deal with that element across all domains, you have land, air, sea, space, and cyber. So all of the domains except space have to worry about problems with the criminal mind in outer space because we're sending scientists
and individuals, know, military men that had missions that were highly supervised. And all those systems were completely disconnected from human activity in land. But we have been connecting the ground stations and the launching pads to the internet. So now, really, we have brought the internet to outer space.
Unfortunately, we launched over the satellites pre internet era. So they have no antivirus, no protection, no defensive of redundant systems, for example. And that has created a problem because there is no standards, no industry standards to protect those systems. In essence, let's think for electricity and water for a moment.
All of those systems are protected under industry standards. What are the steps that we take to protect them? How do we train the individuals that use them? How do we deploy the networks? Who has access to them, et cetera? There is none of that for space. The US government is starting to move into that direction.
Speaker 1 (32:53.368)
There are some reports that they are drafting about that, but no standard, no law whatsoever about that. So you can imagine even some of the observations that I have made is that if we don't have anything for satellites, are we going to start sending capsules that are connected to the internet, capsules with human beings into this space? How we deal with a hack?
We have reason to believe Voyager 2 was hacked years into its mission. that is, and also the, there is reason to, you know, the government doesn't like to share that, but there is enough facts out there to support that International Space Station was hacked more than once. So these things happen.
To what end, by the way? mean, like, do you know? Just to show it could be done, yeah.
Just to show that it is.
But now one thing is to do it to show that they can do it. And I know if we are, if we got a war or we entered into even a worse situation with another nation, and I will give you an example in a moment what I mean by that, then the danger increases. When it comes to cyber, we always have to go back to 2007, which is 2007 for China and the satellite. In 2007, something unique happened.
Speaker 1 (34:23.832)
For the first time, one nation hacked another. So this was not some random guy in a garage hacking a bank. This was an organized hack by Russia utilizing civilians to hack Estonia. And there is a longer history behind that. But I only mention it because exactly the same thing happened in
2022 last year, why don't you say, well, kind of like last year. At the very beginning of the Ukrainian invasion.
Speaker 2 (35:02.776)
I was going to ask you about that. Yeah.
When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, shortly after, within two weeks, they decided to tap into the network that the Ukrainians were using to keep track of the movement of the Russian military. That was, as you're going to might have given, the edge.
to roll those drones and we'll in essence to know what was going on. So the Russians found a hole in part of the network. At the time, the US was acquiring the network or that part of the network from Skylogic, an Italian company. And the US had taken all the precautions
But the third party they were dealing with had not. There was a vulnerability at the user end. That's what made the hacks so unique. So if you go into the hospital and you're bleeding to death, you have the best surgeon in the world, but he's locked in a closet.
It doesn't matter that you made it to the hospital. It's like you didn't have it. So this is exactly what happened. The motors at the user level were disabled and destroyed. So users could not utilize the satellite. Nothing happened to the satellite, but the user couldn't use it. This was the first time that a government disabled a space network.
Speaker 1 (37:01.742)
for military purposes. once again, the Russians took the award for breaking a bunch of laws and standards of practice. That also was a fire alarm in the legal field. my God, we don't have anything to do with this. What international server law? Well, nothing.
because international law is agreeing to deal with cyber crimes at the national level. For example, human trafficking, pornography, things like that. But nothing cross border with military undertow. The UN has been trying to find some common standards of principles to deal with this.
But even if finally agree on something, it's all voluntary, all enforceable. So at the end of the day, we rely on what NATO might do at the physical end and the private sector coming up with the standards.
Yeah, I was going to ask you about that because it seemed to me like the international law aspect of it would be something that further complicates this, right? There's the difference between how to deal with cyber attacks as a matter of just something going on domestically versus, like you said, how to deal with a nation cyber attacking another nation, which is something else completely. And as you said, it sounds like the
You were saying there's very little law to address it right now, if any, if even were they to come up with some, would be unenforceable.
Speaker 1 (38:56.974)
That's right. The US led a group of experts, or has been leading a group of experts for 13 years now, just so you know, how long they have taken to deal with this. And the Russians wanted to do their own group. And so they have been leading their own discussions from their end for about three years. it all boils down to very, very well intentioned, very well written. For example,
One of the principles that came out of this discussion was about utilizing proxies to disrupt another nation. So if I hire hackers in the private sector to go and disrupt the Pentagon, for example, Russia doing that to the United States. But Russia suddenly said, we're not...
had nothing to do with that. Those guys did it. But if you can prove that those guys were managed by the FSB, which is their CIA version, then they are under state control. So a state control proxies should not attack other nations. Now, that is a beautifully written principle, but
It's not international law. It might be one day, but at the moment when we need it, we don't have it. So what are we doing about it? Some experts in the legal field are writing manuals to share with the military, giving our expert opinion on how a military commander should deal with different type of cases. Looking at it from the available...
sovereign law and where the trend is going, trying to grab on to general international law, for example, the rules of self-defense, and also looking at military alliances in essence. So I have been keeping communication as much as possible with NATO lawyers. And once in a while, I share what I know with them. I get some more feedback from them.
Speaker 1 (41:22.734)
They share what they have been talking about. And once a year there's a conference, it's called SiCon, which is in Estonia in honor of Estonia having endured an attack. And they get together every year and they put out a report every year. They are also, these guys are also the editors of the TANNING manual on the use of cyber in military operations.
And so we have those tools. We're relying on the military and the academia working together to push forward a law to catch up to technology.
Speaker 2 (42:07.406)
I know we keep returning to maritime law, but I remember hearing a few years ago, and I'd be interested to know whether you've heard about this, that the US Navy had reintroduced a program to teach officers how to use sextants in order to determine their location without using GPS.
in the event of a cyber attack that prevented their ability to successfully determine their location using global positioning.
I'm not surprised that they did that because Vladimir Putin has threatened many times that if the US were to enter a conflict with them, that the first thing that he would do is try to knock out the GPS satellites. Now it's ironic because it's because of the Soviet Union that we gave, the US government gave GPS for free to the world.
There was a flight, Korean air flight in the late 1980s that entered Soviet space. And the general got nervous and trigger happy and knocked out the plane of civilians. And to avoid, what happened was that the pilot got lost. And so Ronald Reagan said, no, no, no, we're gonna let that happen. So he gave access to the world for GPS.
Right now, even in Vladimir Putin managed to do that, our allies in Europe launch Galileo, which is an overlap of GPS. The Russians have their own systems. The Chinese are getting ready to launch around just for national pride because all of them have been using since the late 80s GPS and they never needed another system.
Speaker 2 (44:15.17)
Yeah, yeah.
There's always these discussions, like, well, what happens if US block us from access to GPS? This is one example of how the US has been a good steward with this type of technologies. The same thing happened with the internet. They could have worked hard to block Russia from using the internet, and they didn't do that for some reason. There are some things that are for humanity, and they should be above
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (44:47.152)
All of these earthly
Yeah. That is fascinating though that you bring up the topic of who controls, which nations control the various physical pieces of infrastructure that are necessary in order to make some of these systems work. I know that you wrote an article about, you've written about supervisory control and data acquisition systems.
I don't know how you say the acronym SCADA or something like that, but I know you've written about them and their vulnerabilities to cyber attack. Could you talk a little bit about that? Because I think the issue of the ways in which the physical infrastructure of the United States, but also just of any country, the way in which those systems are vulnerable to cyber attack is something that people are...
The average person is starting to become more aware of that. There was that Netflix movie that came out just a month ago that was about a nationwide cyber attack that suddenly shuts down the internet and shuts down all sorts of other systems. So know this is something that's in the popular consciousness right now.
That is one of the main problems in Ukraine right now. The Russians have knocked down the sections of the energy infrastructure. They have been doing this since about 2014. It been a constant problem. And they don't care. They do it even during the winter. So you can imagine losing heat in the middle of the winter in Ukraine. Not a fun thing.
Speaker 1 (46:33.774)
So what I've been advocating for is that the legal field adopts the industry practices to develop new laws to deal with this problem. in a a way, states across the US are starting to do that based on one element. If you think about anything that connects to the internet, anything that makes money.
electricity, know, movies, the news, all kinds of services. The only way they work is if they are available. There has to be what they're in cybersecurity availability. Without it, nothing works. And so commerce is always more interested in keeping things going. If I have a lot of cars in the manufacturing line,
or computers or whatever, I want them out. I want them built and I want them out being sold so I can make money. However, I just speed up that process too much. Then the integrity and the confidentiality, which are the other two parts of self-security, are affected. The integrity of the product, how confident I am that the people who built it know what they were doing. And so those concepts are used
in cybersecurity to guarantee that individuals are properly trained, that we have the right equipment, and it's maintained correctly, and it's not only maintained, but protected. And at the end, that it is there and available. If you remember in 2013, Target got hacked. Nobody wanted to go. They got hacked at the point of service.
Every time people paid, the money and their identity got stolen. I was one of the victims. Sorry, I don't remember that very well.
Speaker 2 (48:42.017)
wow.
I remember going to Target after that news broke and paying cash because I was specifically concerned about I don't want to use my debit card here, yeah.
I paid cash in Target for a year after that. Target did not violate any of those things that I just mentioned. Unfortunately, and they had spent millions of dollars in the infrastructure. They had hired a brand new chief information security officer. They had a whole department for that.
Unfortunately, and this is something that we talk about a lot now, is that the vendors that connect to the systems of any other institution have to be vetted properly as well. This is what I just mentioned with the satellite in Europe. So via satellite in US and Skylogic in Europe. In this case, we target the air conditioning company.
They not keep the same standards that Target was keeping. And their system, the hacker entered the air conditioning software and they use a network to travel laterally to get to the financial systems of Target. It took them six months to do that. But the loss came for Target with all the customs. So I would tell my students that the same thing applies in Loughmore.
Speaker 1 (50:15.086)
You will not be accessible to clients, but if you don't protect your files, you're going to be liable. And this is what the government is using, liability. First of all, the government wants to know that you took all the precautions and once you encounter a hack, how do you handle it? What we call the incident response. And there are laws, for example, here in Florida,
or incident response. They had to do it within days and they had to engage the government. Otherwise, are hefty penalties in the millions of dollars. depending, could be, if there is a negligence, well, even worse.
I know that insurance for cyber attacks is a new form of insurance that companies seek out. Specifically to cover those related costs, yeah.
and they will cover you up to a point. So the insurance will cover the first hack, but there is a second hack over the same thing and the company, the organization did not take steps to correct the problem from before. The insurance will not pay.
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (51:28.482)
Yeah. One issue that I imagine must come up in any discussion of cyber law is personal privacy on the internet. Could you talk a little bit about the general landscape of laws in the US and Europe related to privacy online, particularly when it comes to all the lengthy, complicated user agreements people sign off on every day without really reading?
Sure. There is, I mean, in essence, if we want to use a computer, just to use the example of Microsoft, we have to agree to the user agreement. Those are unavoidable. It all boils down to two components, really. The user, and I'm talking about the United States now. The user and the state government, I should say.
So at the federal level, when it comes to privacy, there is limited protection. mean, students have protection over their files. We have protection of our health files. There are some corporate duties that organizations need to follow that intersect cybersecurity, but very little at the user level. The user in this case,
needs to be responsible user. So for example, every time anybody downloads a browser, I have the option to adjust the browser to send back to say Microsoft the information of our usage. Do not track, erase the cache, things of that nature.
So the user has a higher responsibility of the US law to protect our own files. If you're not sure, don't share it, that kind of thing. Now there are occasions that we cannot avoid that we have to share. And so at the state level, this has been happening throughout the United States. I would say it's getting close to half of the states, putting great liability on the company. So you demand that the user gives you
Speaker 1 (53:49.87)
the privacy information, but they could private the identifiable information. Once you have it, it is your duty to protect it and to use it responsibly. Otherwise, another user, we the state are coming after you. We have a law in Florida that does that. The only thing that the law in Florida doesn't allow, and there is discussions that were trying to amend the law to allow it. For now, it hasn't moved.
as far as some people would like to, is to allow under the same law, not only to state the state to file lawsuits against the businesses, but also the individual. You made me agree to your user agreement, you lost my files, now I'm gonna sue you. That at the moment, we cannot do that in Florida, but the state can do that in our behalf.
The most liberal law regarding user privacy data is California. And there are others like that. And all of that is being modeled after the Europeans. The Europeans had greater control over their files. So I can put anything I want on the internet, agree to anything I want. I can turn around and request some information which removed from the internet.
It's something that Google used to deny that could do.
Hey, yeah, what is what is that the the right to be forgotten or something? Yeah.
Speaker 1 (55:26.434)
But if they can build algorithms to capture all this data, they can capture algorithms that go rid of it. So the European Privacy Directive has influenced a lot how we manage privacy law in the United States. I would say it's a move in the right direction. I should say in the social media part,
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (55:54.604)
The Supreme Court has said that information that I share online, the consequences of that, it depends on the setting. So for example, if I say something, the case was about a student who was upset because she did not make it into the varsity team.
I cannot remember right now if it was softball or what. Anyway, the thing is that she cursed at the rule that didn't allow her to join.
I think I vaguely recall hearing about this. Yeah.
And so the fact that she shared that information with friends outside of campus made that protective speech. Not pretty, but the First Amendment doesn't say anything about how pretty. The First Amendment concepts have been brought into the cyber sphere to protect information that we share in social media. So...
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (57:06.69)
Whenever the cyber world doesn't get as far enough, we can try to get inventive enough and grab from other areas of law that are fully developed and make the arguments for the new technologies. So that brings us back to the beginning of where do we go for space? We'll go to Maritime Law, for example.
Yeah. Well, Professor Baezka, thank you so much for being here.
My pleasure.
This has been Real Cases. Thank you for listening. Check back for more episodes about an array of legal topics presented by the Stetson University College of Law. Learn more at stetson.edu.
Topics: Real Cases Podcast
