August 28, 2018
THE LIST
Paula Jones is a name I've heard many times in relation to Bill Clinton. But I'll be honest, I never really knew how they were connected. This episode tells the story from a couple perspectives, and highlights anti-Clinton players who had complex and evolving ties to the former president.
Presidents do things in secret. Like have surgery. On a boat. This sort of secret goings-on maybe happens all the time, but the tale of the coverup and the tarnished reputations of those involved were what made this bit of history compelling.
The immense scale of World War II has the potential to congeal into one large bygone conflict in the minds of today's youth (including my own flirtations with the past). The Nuremberg Trials, like Paula Jones, were a thing I'd heard a lot about - and for the record I knew more about these war crime reckonings than I did about Paula - but never really studied. This piece, focusing on a now-ancient former judge who lead the prosecutions charge, decoded a dark time with the insatiably bright narrative lens of a man who lived through it all.
HONORABLE MENTION
SOMETHING NEW
Yahoo, that old search engine chestnut with a friendly yodel-jingle and a habitual super bowl ad presence, inhabited the early days of the popular internet use when all people really wanted was a hairpiece or a companion with a pet toucan. But somewhere along the way millions of users decided this company’s servers were as good a place as any to setup a repository for keeping up with family updates, propagating chain message superstitions, and falling prey to promise of enhanced virility. It was a shiny, happy, useful outlet for e-mail, news, fantasy sports, and for a brief moment even streaming television. But at the expense of convenience and entertainment came a lackadaisical approach to security. In a world where much of life is lived online, being the victim of a hack is more of a “when” than “if” inevitability. This doesn’t just apply to your grandma who didn’t grow up with a device as a requisite appendage. Nor does it exclude your ultra-confident roommate who prides herself on being an early adopter of all the latest tech. Most important to the focus of the new digital security podcast Breach, our new reality is one where behemoth corporate entities are equally if not more at risk than the rest of us.
Breach is a branded podcast, sponsored by the data protection company Carbonite, and so there is some built-in apprehension about creating the disease to sell the cure. A glance at the news at any point in the past, say, two years, pretty quickly puts to bed any notion that Carbonite is trafficking in baseless fear-mongering. If anything, the show serves to re-focus our attention on the all-but-forgotten Yahoo data breach that predated the DNC hack and subsequent perpetual ponderings of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. The show’s arc is pretty compelling: an incredibly powerful organization failed to protect consumer information, took its sweet time before telling anyone, and got off without much blowback. I guess the silver lining is that the lack of accountability correlates with the lack of interest in continued engagement with Yahoo, but for the CEO to walk away with $50 million seems insane.
Hosts Alia Tavakolian (podcast producer) and Bob Sullivan (tech journalist) bring both expertise and a warm report to a world that, frankly, can be pretty heady to parse. The duo goes deep, relaying not only the sumptuous details of the Yahoo story, but also outlining the way data flows (frighteningly freely) all across the web. The information is not hard to understand if you take it slowly and devote your complete focus to each episode. This is not, contrary to most other podcasts, a show you will enjoy very much as background listening. There are definite narrative elements capable of gripping a listener, but there is also enough unknown territory that make it a little difficult to process while you wash dishes. That said, putting in the devotion with season one has the power to convey some context that may be applied to future seasons should Carbonite continue producing them. Breach deftly utilizes some sound design to help endow the excellent reporting with some lightness. Listeners are also treated to “Dear Hacker” asides in which various members of the production team appeal to whatever clandestine figure may be dog-earing the digital pages of their past.
Perhaps the most resonate idea of the whole show is how often security is an afterthought - for individuals and companies alike. The lazy justification that our conversations and old love letters aren’t important doesn’t free us from the risk of having our information stolen and compromised in ways we didn’t think possible (guilty as charged). Many companies are learning this lesson on a massive scale, forcing executives to reckon with the price to be paid for not protecting the vast amounts of data stores that are increasingly becoming the life-blood of said organizations. In an almost hard to believe twist, Spoke Media (the studio producing the show) fell prey to a hack while the show was recording. This was far from the most interesting section of the show, which is both understandable (for fear of disclosing too much information) and a missed opportunity.
Verbiage on the site positions this five episode cycle as the first of a series of data breach investigations. If we do get subsequent seasons focusing on a variety of incidents, comparing violation to violation could prove insightful. From both a listener and PR perspective, rolling out the exact same treatment across industries that have faced the consequences of ignoring their security weak spots might feel more instructive. The podcast could even act as a new kind of case study that can be trotted out to prospective clients. Still, there is a decent balance of titillation and truth bombs in the current iteration. Even without a shift to such a perspective, Breach does manage to juggle a lot of complex subject manner while making it intelligible to listeners. Come for the intrigue and scandal, stay for the less sexy but essential reality check on our brave new world..
Breach is a branded podcast, sponsored by the data protection company Carbonite, and so there is some built-in apprehension about creating the disease to sell the cure. A glance at the news at any point in the past, say, two years, pretty quickly puts to bed any notion that Carbonite is trafficking in baseless fear-mongering. If anything, the show serves to re-focus our attention on the all-but-forgotten Yahoo data breach that predated the DNC hack and subsequent perpetual ponderings of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. The show’s arc is pretty compelling: an incredibly powerful organization failed to protect consumer information, took its sweet time before telling anyone, and got off without much blowback. I guess the silver lining is that the lack of accountability correlates with the lack of interest in continued engagement with Yahoo, but for the CEO to walk away with $50 million seems insane.
Hosts Alia Tavakolian (podcast producer) and Bob Sullivan (tech journalist) bring both expertise and a warm report to a world that, frankly, can be pretty heady to parse. The duo goes deep, relaying not only the sumptuous details of the Yahoo story, but also outlining the way data flows (frighteningly freely) all across the web. The information is not hard to understand if you take it slowly and devote your complete focus to each episode. This is not, contrary to most other podcasts, a show you will enjoy very much as background listening. There are definite narrative elements capable of gripping a listener, but there is also enough unknown territory that make it a little difficult to process while you wash dishes. That said, putting in the devotion with season one has the power to convey some context that may be applied to future seasons should Carbonite continue producing them. Breach deftly utilizes some sound design to help endow the excellent reporting with some lightness. Listeners are also treated to “Dear Hacker” asides in which various members of the production team appeal to whatever clandestine figure may be dog-earing the digital pages of their past.
Perhaps the most resonate idea of the whole show is how often security is an afterthought - for individuals and companies alike. The lazy justification that our conversations and old love letters aren’t important doesn’t free us from the risk of having our information stolen and compromised in ways we didn’t think possible (guilty as charged). Many companies are learning this lesson on a massive scale, forcing executives to reckon with the price to be paid for not protecting the vast amounts of data stores that are increasingly becoming the life-blood of said organizations. In an almost hard to believe twist, Spoke Media (the studio producing the show) fell prey to a hack while the show was recording. This was far from the most interesting section of the show, which is both understandable (for fear of disclosing too much information) and a missed opportunity.
Verbiage on the site positions this five episode cycle as the first of a series of data breach investigations. If we do get subsequent seasons focusing on a variety of incidents, comparing violation to violation could prove insightful. From both a listener and PR perspective, rolling out the exact same treatment across industries that have faced the consequences of ignoring their security weak spots might feel more instructive. The podcast could even act as a new kind of case study that can be trotted out to prospective clients. Still, there is a decent balance of titillation and truth bombs in the current iteration. Even without a shift to such a perspective, Breach does manage to juggle a lot of complex subject manner while making it intelligible to listeners. Come for the intrigue and scandal, stay for the less sexy but essential reality check on our brave new world..
From: Spoke Media (branded)
Recommended for: Sheeple.
Drop Schedule: Seasonal:One-Off, Monday (all episodes now available)
Average episode length: 45 minutes
Rating: Make It Work
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