Chuck Cosson

Position / Title:

Non-Residential Fellow

Focus Areas:

Areas of Expertise:

Chuck Cosson is Director, Legal Affairs, Privacy & Security, at T-Mobile US, based in Bellevue, WA. At T-Mobile, Chuck oversees privacy compliance programs and provides legal guidance on mobile Internet, location services, incident response, and other privacy, security, and business issues. Chuck spent 7 years at Microsoft leading that company’s public policy work on human rights, free expression, and child online safety. He has also worked in Washington, D.C. on telecommunications policy and regulation. His engagement with Stanford focuses on the role of metaphor as a guide for contemporary technology law and policy - a conception of the Internet not as a “place you go” but as a “tool you use.”

Blog Posts

Tool Without A Handle: Guerilla Information Warfare

By Chuck Cosson on June 2, 2019 at 11:27 pm

“The enemies of liberal democracy hack our feelings of fear and hate and vanity, and then use these feelings to polarize and destroy" - Yuval Noah Harari.

The security of our news and media information systems matters as much as the security of personal and commercial information systems. "Information warfare" shows that harms can arise even when there is no unauthorized access, when tools are used as intended, and when there’s no compromise of user privacy settings. In both cases of cybersecurity and news/media security, the threats are asymmetric, the tools readily available, usable for many purposes, and threats are easily disguised as benign. Whether it is a business conference used for economic espionage, or a product order form email used to inject malware, the tools of everyday information exchange are capable of use as a weapon.

Robust resistance to phishing and social engineering, as well as “fake news” and disinformation campaigns is unlikely to be fully achieved on the basis of refinements to the tools (including information platforms). It will require users to, to the extent possible, acquire greater understanding of themselves as sorters and interpreters of information. If there is a territory to explore in addressing issues of information warfare, let it be the territory of the mind.

Tool Without A Handle: A Mere Gallimaufry

By Chuck Cosson on January 24, 2019 at 9:25 pm

Tool Without A Handle: “A Mere Gallimaufry”

This blog has spent a good deal of real estate discussing networked information technologies as tools, but has not yet dealt thoroughly with the qualifier in its title: tools “without handles.” The addition of “without a handle” is intended to indicate that my primary metaphor of a tool in the control of a user - and thus my general preferred approach to Internet policy and regulation, favoring individual control and accountability for uses of tools – needs to be leavened a bit.

Tool Without A Handle: Tools For Meaning, Part 2

By Chuck Cosson on November 23, 2018 at 2:14 pm

“Tool Without A Handle”: Tools and the Search for Meaning – Part II

"If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment." ~ Marcus Aurelius

The last post in this series observed optimal policy thinking aims at allowing people sufficient control over technologies they may use them to apply their own capacities and, in that process, find meaning. This post explores that point further; in particular how emphasis on technology, rather than people, falls short of that aim.

Tool Without A Handle: Tools and the Search for Meaning

By Chuck Cosson on September 3, 2018 at 5:29 pm

“Tool Without A Handle”: Tools and the Search for Meaning

In a New York Times review of Edward Tenner’s book The Efficiency Paradox, Gal Beckerman observes that a key point is not simply to watch how much time we spend using technology, but to remember that “the tools we’ve invented to improve our lives are just that, tools, to be picked up and put down. We wield them.”

Which pretty succinctly states the main point of this entire series of blog posts: that human agency matters. Or, perhaps more directly, that while we all know human agency matters, we all too frequently overlook that point. This post (on Labor Day, 2018) thus asks what is the real value of human agency? By identifying value in it, I hope to set the stage for future posts on the urgency of fostering greater awareness of it.

Tool Without A Handle: Online Confessions

By Chuck Cosson on March 22, 2018 at 8:49 pm

In my last post, I wrote of moral hazards created by privacy, using extramarital affairs as just one example (really, any legal or moral wrongdoing facilitated by secrecy illustrates the point). Privacy, as it happens, also encourages use of networked information technologies for confession of moral wrongs and provides incentives for both wrongdoers and victims to find support from others with similar interests and concerns.

Chuck Cosson

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