Podcast: A 'cyber party' with John McAfee and the White House cybersecurity czar

For October's National Cybersecurity Awareness Month, The Cybersecurity Podcast team is bringing you an hour-long special episode.

How optimistic is the White House that the recent deal between the US and China banning economic espionage will hold? Are sanctions the next step? What was it like to be in charge of coordinating the US government’s cybersecurity policy at a time when the Office of Personnel Management suffered a massive breach?

Michael Daniel, the White House’s cybersecurity coordinator, addresses all these questions and more in an hour-long special episode of The Cybersecurity Podcast.

“I do not believe this is going to solve all the cybersecurity issues we have with China,” Mr. Daniel said of the agreement signed late last month between Washington and Beijing, in which both countries agreed not to use cyberespionage to steal the other country’s trade secrets for the benefit of their private sectors. “It will continue to be an area of tension within the bilateral relationship between the US and China – and the proof of it will be in how they carry out their end of the agreement.”

For October's National Cybersecurity Awareness Month, The Cybersecurity Podcast team is bringing you an hour-long special episode with a White House theme. Also joining the episode is John McAfee, the security pioneer who just founded his own political party – the Cyber Party – and is running for President of the United States.

Mr. McAfee, founder of the world's first commercial antivirus company, shares why he's running for President and some of his goals for the Oval Office, why he thinks we're at cyberwar with China, how cyberthreats have evolved in the decades since he started McAfee, why people's digital privacy is under attack, and who he thinks is the biggest hero in cybersecurity today.

The podcast is cohosted by Peter W. Singer, strategist at the New America think tank and author of "Cybersecurity and Cyberwar: What Everyone Needs to Know," and Sara Sorcher, deputy editor of The Christian Science Monitor's Passcode. The podcast is available for download on iTunes. You can find more information about the podcast on Passcode's long-form storytelling platform. Bookmark New America's SoundCloud page for new episodes or sign up for Passcode below.

In previous episodes, the team interviewed former undercover CIA agent-turned-Congressman, Texas Republican Will Hurd, about why it’s “outrageous” the Office of Personnel Management never apologized and how the government can improve its own cybersecurity. They also interviewed car hacker extraordinaire Chris Valasek, one of the researchers responsible for wirelessly hacking a Jeep Cherokee who is now working at Uber’s advanced technology center.

The team interviewed leading privacy and cyberlaw expert Peter Swire about the half-life of secrets, surveillance and whether law enforcement was truly "going dark" in its pursuit of criminals and terrorists. Rick Howard, chief security officer for Palo Alto Networks and an Army veteran, joined the last podcast to weigh in on the line between spying for economic advantage and state secrets and whether companies should be able to strike back online to protect their interests.

They also interviewed Katie Moussouris, chief policy officer for HackerOne, about ways to incentivize hackers to report vulnerabilities they find, and the Brunswick Group's Siobhan Gorman about the "golden rules" companies should follow when disclosing they've been breached.

Singer and Sorcher spoke with Cory Doctorow – science fiction author, journalist, and coeditor of Boing Boing – about the lessons about cyber conflict that can be learned from science fiction, and Dan Kaufman, who at the time was head of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's Information Innovation Office.

For the rest of the episodes, visit New America's SoundCloud page and they are available for download on iTunes.