Risky Business #296 -- Chilling effect in full swing

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This week's show is a shorter one -- there's no feature interview for two reasons. The first is that I'm in the process of moving house, which includes moving my office and studio, so I'm dealing with house painters, bond cleaners and a million other things. But the second reason is because the person I had wanted to interview has been silenced.

I had reached out to Matthew Green, a cryptography researcher at Johns Hopkins University, to do an interview about last week's stunning revelations about the NSA undermining public cryptography standards. Matthew has done some great blog posts on that topic. I tweeted. No response. I emailed. No response. I called. No response.

Then I realised the likely reason why. The university had actually demanded he remove one of the blog posts -- possibly at the behest of the NSA -- in an utterly disgraceful violation of academic freedom. We'll find out more about that in the news segment.

This week's show is brought to you by HackLabs, the Australian security consultancy. And HackLabs head honcho Chris Gatford joins the show to have a chat about the Syrian Electronic Army. Will the SEA stimulate the same type of security spend that LulzSec triggered in 2011? Chris says they probably won't, mostly because the SEA just isn't mysterious and enigmatic enough to intrigue the media.

Adam Boileau joins us for an epic news segment that is mostly concerned with giving the NSA a big can of FU. You can find links to the stories discussed here.