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We’ve had a few days of insightful discussions at the world’s largest legal IT security event, ILTA LegalSEC. Since many of you are not able to (or not in the right frame of mind to) travel to beautiful Baltimore to experience this event live, I thought I would dedicate this week’s Tech Essentials to sharing the top three FBI-special-agent speaker insights (from my perspective).

Remember that classic book from high school English class, Animal Farm by George Orwell? (This is when the teacher droned on about what an ‘allegory’ was 😊.) Even if you don’t remember, there’s a famous bit where one of the anthropomorphized sheep says, “four legs good, two legs baaad.” What he means is that you should trust the animal that is more sturdy—that sheep don’t teeter and wobble like those unruly two-legged humans.

Today, in fact, a few minutes ago, I received an email from a colleague’s assistant that said, “Good afternoon, earlier today you received an email for the upcoming Summit. Please do not use the information in the file that was at the link in that email. The file contains information some participants have deemed private.

In one of the weirdest stories of the year so far, highly sensitive Pentagon documents have shown up on Discord, a haven for young video gamers, as part of a debate about US involvement in the Ukraine war. It would almost be as if you and I were having a chat in the comments section on ESPN about whether the Chiefs could repeat as Super Bowl Champions, and I posted their entire playbook as evidence.

“If I have to read one more article or see one more talking head on TV rant about the coming AI apocalypse, about how the Terminator/Matrix movies are coming to reality, about how my job will disappear as soon as next week, I’ll move to a cabin in the woods!” This quotation has been uttered en masse all year long, in some form or another, and most recently by Taylor Swift (kidding).