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The Lawfare Podcast: Patreon Edition – The Lawfare Institute — Government
The Lawfare Podcast: Patreon Edition – The Lawfare Institute

The Lawfare Podcast features discussions with experts, policymakers, and opinion leaders at the nexus of national security, law, and policy. On issues from foreign policy, homeland security, intelligence, and cybersecurity to governance and law, we have doubled down on seriousness at a time when others are running away from it. Visit us at www.lawfaremedia.org. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Copyright: © The Lawfare Institute

Latest Episodes:

Chatter: Debunking Nuclear Proliferation Myths with Målfrid Braut-Hegghammer Apr 02, 2023

Show notes

Misperceptions about nuclear proliferation attempts abound, particularly when we find authoritarian leaders involved. It is easy to picture these determined owners of nuclear weapons as omnipotent, unconstrained micromanagers—willing and able to do whatever is necessary to take their country over the threshold.

Political scientist Målfrid Braut-Hegghammer disagrees. She conducted extensive research in IAEA and other archives as well as in-depth interviews with senior scientists and regime officials from Iraq and Libya, including Muammar Gaddafi's son Saif Al-Islam Gaddafi. What she discovered led her to question much conventional wisdom about the Iraqi and Libyan nuclear programs, and about proliferation writ large. Her book “Unclear Physics”—which borrows its title from a typo in an Iraqi report from the late 1960s that characterized well the vague objectives of the early Iraqi nuclear program—presents intriguing information and insight on all of this.

David Priess speaks with Braut-Hegghammer about her interest in WMD proliferation, how she researched secretive nuclear programs, the value of archives, Iraq's quest for the bomb, the impact of Israel's strike on the Osirak reactor in 1981, how close Iraq was to breaking out when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, the origins of Libya's nuclear program, Gaddafi's turn to the A.Q. Khan network for the equipment and blueprints needed, implications for the potential proliferation paths of countries from North Korea and Iran to Saudi Arabia and South Korea, the rising salience of nuclear weapons in Arctic security debates, and Norwegian views on nuclear deterrence in today's evolving strategic environment.

Chatter is a production of Lawfare and Goat Rodeo. This episode was produced and edited by Cara Shillenn of Goat Rodeo. Podcast theme by David Priess, featuring music created using Groovepad.

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Lawfare Archive: John Sipher on Spy Swaps: Past, Present, and Future Apr 01, 2023

Show notes

From January 8, 2019: The Russian government's recent arrest of American Paul Whelan and its charges against him have many politicians and pundits speculating about the possibility of an intended spy swap for Maria Butina. There's a lot going on here, but there's also a lot of misunderstanding about the history of spy swaps, what they are, and what they aren't.

Earlier this week, David Priess sat down with his former CIA colleague John Sipher to talk about it all. They discussed the history of spy swaps, the current case involving Paul Whelan, and prospects for some kind of a release.

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Biden’s Executive Order on Commercial Spyware Mar 31, 2023

Show notes

On March 27, the Biden administration issued an Executive Order on Prohibition on Use by the United States Government of Commercial Spyware that Poses Risks to National Security. The Executive Order, as the title says, limits executive departments and agencies from using commercial spyware if they determine that its use would present a counterintelligence or security risk to the U.S., or if it poses significant risks of improper use by a foreign government or person.

To talk about the new executive order and its impact, Eugenia Lostri, Lawfare’s Fellow in Technology Policy and Law, sat down with Winnona DeSombre Bernsen, nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council. They talked about why this executive order is a welcomed development, how spyware companies might adjust their behavior in response, and what remains to be done to limit the misuse of these technologies.

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Israel’s Overlapping Crises Mar 30, 2023

Show notes

For months, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been promising a set of legal reforms favored by partners in his far-right coalition government that many fear would spell the end of liberal democracy in the state of Israel. But this week, these efforts hit a roadblock in the form of an unprecedented degree of popular resistance—one that ultimately led Netanyahu to put his reform proposals on hold, at least for the moment.

On Wednesday, Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Natan Sachs convened a panel of experts to discuss these fast-moving developments, including his Brookings colleagues Amos Harel, a leading Israeli military and defense expert, and Shibley Telhami, the Anwar Sadat Professor of Peace and Development at the University of Maryland, and leading Israeli journalist and legal expert Ilana Dayan. To give you some additional background, Lawfare Senior Editor and Brookings Fellow Scott R. Anderson sat down with Natan separately to lay out recent developments and their significance. That conversation will come first, and the panel discussion will follow.

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Talking IoT Security with Google Mar 29, 2023

Show notes

Tatyana Bolton is a Security Policy Manager working on cybersecurity at Google, and Dave Kleidermacher is the Vice President of Android Security & Privacy at Google. They are among the people at Google who are thinking about IoT, that is, Internet of Things security and privacy. They sat down with Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes to talk about Google's thinking on how to create a secure environment for all those little things that we have traveling with us, connected to our computers, running our houses, all connected to the internet, and all using different standards of security. How do we prevent them from being hijacked and turned into botnets? How do we prevent them from spying on us? How do we get them observing similar standards of security, and how do we do this across dozens of different countries, jurisdictions and regulatory environments, and platforms?

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Ashley Deeks on International Regulation of National Security AI Mar 28, 2023

Show notes

States are increasingly turning to artificial intelligence systems to enhance their national security decision-making. The real risks that states will deploy unlawful or unreliable national security AI make international regulations seem appealing, but what's the right model for them?

Ashley Deeks is the Class of 1948 Professor of Scholarly Research in Law at the University of Virginia Law School. She's just published a paper for Laware's ongoing Digital Social Contract research paper series, in which she argues that, instead of looking to nuclear arms control as the model for national security AI regulation, states should look to how cyber operations are regulated. Lawfare Senior Editor Alan Rozenshtein spoke with Ashley about her research and what a successful regulatory regime for national security AI would look like.

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Ravi Iyer on How to Improve Technology Through Design Mar 27, 2023

Show notes

On the latest episode of Arbiters of Truth, Lawfare's series on the information ecosystem, Quinta Jurecic and Alan Rozenshtein spoke with Ravi Iyer, the Managing Director of the Psychology of Technology Institute at the University of Southern California's Neely Center.

Earlier in his career, Ravi held a number of positions at Meta, where he worked to make Facebook's algorithm provide actual value, not just "engagement," to users. Quinta and Alan spoke with Ravi about why he thinks that content moderation is a dead-end and why thinking about the design of technology is the way forward to make sure that technology serves us and not the other way around.

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Rational Security: The “Mission Admonished” Edition Mar 26, 2023

Show notes

This week on Rational Security, Alan, Quinta, and Scott waited for a big shoe to drop by talking over the week's big national security news, including:

“What Else Can I Get Away With on Fifth Avenue...” Donald Trump is expected to become the first former president to be indicted on criminal charges this week—if, that is, local authorities are not deterred by the public protests Trump’s supporters are preparing to hold in New York City at his request. What will this move mean for the country? And how might it end?
“Territorial Refute.” After weeks of avoiding the issue, likely 2024 Republican presidential contender Ron Desantis adopted the position that supporting Ukraine—which he described as being involved in a “territorial dispute”—is not a vital U.S. interest, bringing him into alignment with former President Trump and signaling a strong lean towards isolationism in the 2024 Republican field. What will this mean for the likely candidates? And for U.S. support for Ukraine moving forward?
“The ‘Blood, Treasure, and Regret’ Anniversary.” This past week marked the 20th anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, which set out to remove a dictator and welcome a new wave of democracy in the Middle East—but has instead resulted in an Iraq that is still recovering from years of sectarian violence and increasingly under Iran’s influence. What is the legacy of the decision to invade? And what does it mean for U.S. foreign policy moving forward?

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Lawfare Archive: Alperovitch and Iftimie Talk Response to Russia and China Mar 25, 2023

Show notes

From April 28, 2021: The Biden administration has now responded to two major cyberattacks—one from Russia, the SolarWinds attack, and the other from China, the so-called Hafnium Microsoft Exchange Server attack. Recently, Lawfare has run articles on both of these incidents—a piece from Dmitri Alperovitch, the co-founder and former CTO of CrowdStrike, and a piece from Alex Iftimie, a former Justice Department official and a lawyer at Morrison & Foerster. They joined Benjamin Wittes to discuss the Biden administration's response to the attacks. Were they appropriate, both in absolute terms and in relation to each other? Do they send the right messages to the countries in question? Do they go far enough? And what more do we want to see?

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What We've Learned About Security and Intelligence Failures on Jan. 6 Mar 24, 2023

Show notes

Last month, the Government Accountability Office released its latest report on the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, focusing on the failures of several government agencies to fully process and share information about a potential attack in the days and weeks leading up to January 6, 2021.

Lawfare Senior Editor and Brookings Senior Fellow Molly Reynolds sat down with NBC News Justice Reporter Ryan Reilly, who's reported broadly on law enforcement issues related to Jan. 6, and Lawfare Senior Editor Quinta Jurecic. They discussed what we know about how and why law enforcement struggled in the lead-up to the insurrection and the challenges for the road ahead.

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