Publications & Expert Commentary

Writing & Press

Authored articles and expert commentary on cybersecurity operations, AI governance, supply chain security, and compliance engineering.

42
Articles
24
Publications
2
Authored Pieces
From Lab to Life book cover
New Release

From Lab to Life: How AI Works in China

Collin Spears delivers the operational guide Western policymakers, strategists, and governance practitioners need to understand how AI actually ships in China.

Coming Aug'26 arrow_forward

Authored Work

Bylined Articles

Authored

Strategic AI Governance: Navigating Compliance and Risk in the AI Era

Cybersecurity Insiders · February 17, 2026
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Authored

Defending Supply Chain Software Pipelines Against Nation-State Attacks

Manufacturing Business Technology · March 19, 2026
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Expert Commentary

Selected Quotes

"Ransomware negotiators see more of a company's crisis-time financials than most board directors do. Yet they tend to work through private chat channels that clients can't read in real time. That is a structural trust problem."

The Wall Street Journal · Ransomware Negotiator Trust · April 2026 Incident Response

"Meta has built moderation that protects celebrities and abandons nonprofits, and scammers exploit that asymmetry as operational cover. The reporting button exists to satisfy an audit, not to stop a scammer; it is a suggestion box."

Security Boulevard · Manhattan DA vs. Meta · April 2026 Platform Trust

"Lockdown Mode is the one control that the attacker's own code respects. Google's researchers confirmed the kit actively checks for Lockdown Mode and private browsing before delivering a payload, and abandons the attack if either is detected. That makes Lockdown Mode a verified, attacker-tested kill switch."

SC Magazine UK · Zero-Click Spyware · April 2026 Mobile Threats

"Enterprise procurement is enforcing the AI Act before any regulator levies a fine. Vendor Risk Assessments demand technical documentation, risk-tier classifications, human oversight statements and CSRD Scope 3 disclosures as contract preconditions. That dynamic converts compliance from cost centre to procurement differentiator."

TechRound · EU AI Act and Startups · April 2026 AI Compliance

"Safety teams can't keep pace, and the reason is architectural. Deterministic compliance frameworks cannot govern stochastic agents generating novel outputs on every invocation. Non-human agent identities now outnumber human identities 82 to one. This is not an effort problem. It is a tool-category problem."

TechRound · AI Safety Race · April 2026 AI Governance

"If your CFO reviews headcount every quarter but has never seen a friction score, you're funding a ghost workforce and calling it overhead. IT friction isn't a cost center. It's a ghost headcount."

CIO.com · IT Inefficiency · April 2026 IT Operations

"The plan assumes a partner agency operating at a capacity it no longer has. Add the plan's scope expansion across cybersecurity, physical security, counter-UAS, and facility hardening, and CESER is asking 66 people to coordinate across more mission areas than 96 people managed before."

Gov Info Security · DOE Grid Security Plan · March 2026 Critical Infrastructure

"The weapon was not custom malware deployed endpoint-by-endpoint. The weapon was the management plane, doing exactly what it was designed to do under adversary control. Handala did not need a zero-day. They needed one set of privileged credentials and the tools Stryker already paid for."

SC Media · Stryker Wiper Attack · March 2026 Nation-State Threats

"DeepSeek told the world it built a frontier AI for $6 million, but that was only the cost of the last training run. You do not build a 671-billion-parameter model on a startup budget. You build it on a stockpile of restricted chips and then announce the number that makes the best headline."

TechRound · DeepSeek Analysis · February 2026 AI & Geopolitics

"The return on a single management-plane compromise exceeds what you get from a hundred endpoint compromises, because the firewall does not just protect the network. It defines the network."

Dark Reading · Cisco Firewall Vulnerabilities · March 2026 Edge Security

"Agent telemetry records what you considered, what you rejected and why you changed your mind. Most organizations acquired that footage without deciding they wanted it."

Reworked · AI Agent Surveillance · February 2026 AI Governance

"The hiring filter is no longer 'Do you hold the right compliance credential?' It is: 'Can you explain how an attacker would bypass the control you just implemented?'"

Dice · Trump Cybersecurity Strategy · March 2026 Workforce