Privacy Talk with Steven Ward, Resident Privacy and Security Fellow, Cybersecurity and Emerging Threats at R Street Institute

Partial Transcript Below:

Kohei: Hi, everyone. Thank you for joining the privacy talk. We are inviting Mr. Steven from the US. He is a very brilliant researcher in the privacy and security space. So, Steven, thank you for joining us today.

Steven: Thank you for having me.

Kohei: Thank you. First of all, I will share his profile. Steven Ward is a privacy and security fellow for R Street’s Cybersecurity and Emerging Threats team. He focuses on data security, data privacy and cybersecurity at the federal and state levels, emerging cyber and national security threats, and cybersecurity impacts on the private sector.

Steven worked for nearly a decade in law enforcement. He had assignments in the Patrol Division and the Detective Division, where he was a senior and lead investigator on homicides, robberies, sexual assaults, white collar crimes and child abuse cases.

He also was a computer forensic examiner and a member of Sacramento Valley Hi-Tech Crime Task Force and Sacramento Internet Crimes Against Children’s Task Force. Steven has a JD from the University of California, Hastings College of Law, and graduated summa cum laude from California State University, Los Angeles, with a bachelor’s degree in English.

During law school, he interned at the Federal Trade Commission working on issues regarding federal and state privacy law, antitrust laws and consumer-related issues from blockchain technology.

Prior to that, Steven interned at SpeedLegal, a Silicon Valley tech startup company utilizing artificial intelligence in the legal space. At SpeedLegal, he worked on privacy-related issues, corporate governance and contract artificial intelligence quality control.

Steven, thank you for joining again.

Steven: Absolutely.

• Why did you start to work in a security and privacy field?

Kohei: Yeah, that’s awesome.

So let’s start the first interview agenda. You had a very great experience so far in the privacy and security space. Could you share with us “why did you start to work in a security and privacy field?”

Steven: I’d say that my initial interest in the privacy and security space started when I was in law enforcement, working on computer forensic cases and seeing law enforcement’s access to highly sensitive information on cell phones to computers.

All the types of data in between. There were a few cases back in like 2015, 2016, I believe. One was the Riley v California, decision by the Supreme Court that basically made a search warrant be required for any cell phone that was recovered incident to arrest. Prior to that case, an officer could make an arrest, locate a cell phone in the suspect’s pocket and search that without a search warrant.

So this case basically said nope. you can’t do that anymore. The other case was in reference to the San Bernardino terrorists case which was an issue with a locked Apple iPhone that the FBI wanted to get access to but they didn’t have it fully encrypted, and they couldn’t get access to it [the data].

So they’re trying to make it where Apple creates a backdoor to allow law enforcement to search. His phones and Apple fought that and eventually the FBI just dropped the case.

And it’s just also a, you know, exciting, emerging field. Even in the legal field. It’s just, it’s all green, and there’s a lot of places to explore that haven’t been explored yet. So that’s another reason why this area that I work in.

Kohei: Oh, that’s amazing and brilliant. And you also had some great experiences such as computer forensics, as I mentioned on your bio, then could you tell us about these experiences as well.

Steven: Yeah, before law school before I was even working in data privacy. I did work in computer forensics investigations. With this I was part of the Sacramento high tech task force which is a pretty impressive agency that is combined with federal and local law enforcement to kind of bring experience and expertise to local regions to help smaller departments and larger departments investigate Digital Crimes that can be from anything involving child abuse to homicide and things like that.

So it was fascinating work. It was yeah, it was just fascinating work.

• What is your role at R Street Institute and Federal agency?

Kohei: So that’s very important then to save the child’s or any vulnerabilities to use the new technology. I think forensic is the power of very important elements.

And you also take a part of very important role at R Street right now in Cybersecurity and Emerging Threats team. And so, could you tell us that your current role in your work and besides the experiences in the federal commission so far?

Steven: R Street is a Think Tank that focuses on limited government and free markets. And specifically I focus on data privacy and security issues at the federal and state levels and also as it intersects with the cybersecurity art of artificial intelligence.

I focus on that area as well as. At the FTC that was just an internship during law school that I focused on to work at the San Francisco regional office. Really got some exposure to some antitrust issues, a lot of, a lot of data privacy issues and of course, things popping up like cryptocurrency technology.

Kohei: That’s very interesting. And the like, experienced with the blockchain and cryptocurrency it’s also. That is my interest so far. So that’s great work.

From this part, we would like to start a conversation about the transition of privacy, the security situations. You had published a very important article about the kids’ data security and privacy, because it’s a very important discussion among the lawmakers, especially for CSAM or some kind of lawmaking processes. So what has it been discussed in the US about the kids’ data and security and privacy at this moment?

Hear Steven Ward’s answer and watch the rest of the interview here.