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Lawfare No Bull: Matt Olsen Talks Cyber Threats and the ODNI's Latest Report May 08, 2022

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Today on Lawfare No Bull: On April 29, at the 2022 Verify Conference hosted by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Aspen Institute, journalist Aruna Viswanatha hosted a fireside chat with Matt Olsen, the Assistant Attorney General for the National Security Division at the Justice Department. They discussed the report published earlier that day from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence that disclosed, for the first time, that the FBI had searched the section 702 database 3.4 million times to access information regarding U.S. persons last year. They also spoke about current cyber powers, how cyber threats have shifted in the past decade and the Justice Department’s recent efforts to go after Russian oligarchs following the invasion of Ukraine.

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Lawfare Archive: Bruce Riedel on Al Qaeda's Many Faces May 07, 2022

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From August 5, 2012: Ritika Singh sat down with Bruce Riedel, one of the country’s leading experts on Al Qaeda. Riedel’s long and impressive career speaks for itself. A 30-year veteran of the CIA, a senior advisor on South Asia and the Middle East to the last four presidents of the United States in the staff of the National Security Council, and an expert advisor to the prosecution of underwear bomber Omar Farooq Abdulmutallab, he is also the author of Deadly Embrace: Pakistan, America, and the Future of the Global Jihad and The Search for Al Qaeda: Its Leadership, Ideology, and Future, among much else.

The discussion ranged from the state of Al Qaeda today, to the posture of the Taliban and other regional terrorist groups that the United States engages by both military and diplomatic means, to targeted killing and the way forward for U.S. counterterrorism policy. They don’t discuss the law—but any lawyer interested in the power to confront the enemy will find Riedel’s discussion of the enemy itself particularly valuable.

In May 2022, Lawfare and Goat Rodeo will debut their latest podcast, Allies, a series about America’s eyes and ears over 20 years of war in Afghanistan. Thousands of Afghans who worked with the American soldiers as translators, interpreters and partners made it onto U.S. military planes. But despite the decades-long efforts of veterans, lawmakers and senior leaders in the military, even more were left behind. This show will take you from the frontlines of the war to the halls of Congress to find out: How did this happen? Learn more and subscribe to Allies at https://pod.link/1619035873.

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Ensuring the Continuity of Congress May 06, 2022

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The COVID-19 pandemic, disputed elections and threats against election officials have brought back into focus a set of questions first raised for many after the terrorist attacks of September 11. What would happen if a large number of members of Congress were dead, incapacitated or otherwise unable to meet to do the work of the country?

A new report from the American Enterprise Institute’s Continuity of Government Commission explores these questions. Lawfare senior editor and Brookings senior fellow Molly Reynolds sat down with Greg Jacob, a member of the commission, and AEI’s John Fortier, the commission's executive director, to discuss the continuity challenges facing Congress and what we might do to address them.

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Pay Attention to Europe’s Digital Services Act May 05, 2022

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While the U.S. Congress has been doing hearing after hearing with tech executives that include a lot of yelling and not much progress, Europe has been quietly working away on some major tech regulations. Last month, it reached agreement on the content moderation piece of this package: the Digital Services Act. It's sweeping in scope and likely to have effects far beyond Europe.

This week on Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek sat down with Daphne Keller, the director of the Program on Platform Regulation at the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, to get the rundown. What exactly is in the act? What does she like and what doesn't she? And how will the internet look different once it comes into force?

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Catarina Buchatskiy on The Shadows Project May 04, 2022

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Catarina Buchatskiy was—until a couple of months ago—a student at Stanford University. For the past couple of years, she has run The Shadows Project, an online forum devoted to the preservation of Ukrainian cultural heritage. A couple of months ago, she took a leave to go to Poland where she has been shuttling protective equipment into Ukraine to help museums preserve artifacts. She joined Benjamin Wittes from Krakow to talk about The Shadows Project, about preservation of artifacts in the middle of the war in Ukraine and about what it means to be a Ukrainian nationalist as a young person in 2022.

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Cybersecurity and Ukraine at Verify 2022 May 03, 2022

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Hosted by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation Cyber Initiative and Aspen Digital, Verify 2022 brings together journalists and cyber and tech policy experts to discuss critical issues in cybersecurity. On this live recording of the Lawfare Podcast, Benjamin Wittes sat down at Verify 2022 to talk about cybersecurity and Ukraine with a truly remarkable panel: Kori Schake of the American Enterprise Institute, Megan Stifel of the Institute for Security and Technology, and Mieke Eoyang, currently the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Cyber Policy.

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What the War in Ukraine Means for China’s Global Strategy May 02, 2022

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Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine is putting one of its closest partners, China, in a difficult position. Just weeks before the conflict began, China and Russia announced a new partnership without limits that was seen as a shared bulwark against pressure by the United States and its allies. But Russia's choice to attack its neighbor Ukraine is an awkward tension with China's long-standing position against the use of force between states, and some cracks may be showing in the new relationship as China has so far not proven willing to come as wholeheartedly to Russia’s support as its pre-war declaration might have suggested.

To better understand how the war in Ukraine is impacting China's strategy toward the rest of the world, Scott R. Anderson sat down with two legal experts: Dr. Patricia Kim, a David M. Rubenstein Fellow at the Brookings Institution who specializes in China policy, and Professor Julian Ku, a professor at Hofstra University School of Law who has studied China's approach to the international system. They discussed the new relationship between China and Russia, China's role in the Ukraine conflict and what lessons it is taking away from the Western response, including for its own interests in Taiwan.

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Rational Security 2.0: The “In Lieu of Q” Edition May 01, 2022

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This week on Rational Security, Alan Rozenshtein and Scott R. Anderson were joined by Lawfare executive editor Natalie Orpett and law professor extraordinaire Kate Klonick to hash through some of the week's big national security news, including:

“Time to Musk Up.” Prototypical eccentric billionaire Elon Musk has just finalized a deal to purchase Twitter, bring it private and implement a number of changes he claims are intended to expand freedom of speech. What will this mean for the future of Twitter and other social media platforms?
“Lvivin’ so Soon?” The Secretary of Defense and Secretary of State just finished a visit to Kyiv, where they committed more support and to gradually restaff the U.S. diplomatic presence in-country. Why are U.S. diplomats behind Europe in returning to Kyiv? Should the Biden administration move more quickly?
“Too Much MTG Gives Me Headaches.” Georgia representative Marjorie Taylor Greene gave several hours of testimony at a hearing on Friday triggered by efforts by progressive activists to disqualify her from holding office for supporting the Jan. 6 insurrection, pursuant to section 3 of the 14th Amendment. What did we learn about Greene’s activities that day? And what should we make of the broader effort to disqualify legislators?

For object lessons, Alan endorsed the sci-fi action adventure comedy drama "Everything Everywhere All at Once" and its stirring depiction of laundromats and the IRS. Kate shouted out her decade old "Loose Tweets Sink Fleets" poster and celebrated the fact that it becomes more relevant by the day. Scott announced that his effort to make flavored rotten pineapple water succeeded with flying colors, and encouraged listeners to use pineapple scraps to make their own tepache. And Natalie finally took a stand in support of comprehension and encouraged others to do the same with tee shirts that practically shout one's preference for the Oxford Comma from the rooftops.

Be sure to visit our show page at www.lawfareblog.com and to follow the show on Twitter at @RatlSecurity.

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Lawfare Archive: Daniel Byman on Al Qaeda and its Affiliates Apr 30, 2022

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From August 22, 2012: This is the second in a series of interviews Ritika Singh is doing with scholars around town who have non-legal expertise that bears on the national security law issues Lawfare readers care about. As she did in her first piece with Brookings Senior Fellow Bruce Riedel, she is posting the full interview as an episode of the Lawfare Podcast and writing up a summary of their conversation as well.

The subject this time is Daniel Byman, Senior Fellow and Director of Research at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings, and a professor at Georgetown University's Security Studies Program. Byman is one of the country’s foremost experts on counterterrorism and the Middle East. He served as a staff member on the 9/11 Commission, and has worked for the U.S. government and at the RAND Corporation. He recently published a paper entitled Breaking the Bonds between Al Qaeda and its Affiliate Organizations that Ritika describes in more detail here. They sat down for a discussion of the major themes that make up his paper—themes that dovetail with those Ritika discussed with Riedel in her first interview.

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Understanding the Legal Decision that Ended the Mask Mandate and What Comes Next Apr 29, 2022

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Last week, a federal district judge in Florida named Kathryn Mizelle struck down the Biden administration's policy requiring that individuals wear masks on airplanes and other forms of interstate travel. In doing so, she adopted an extremely narrow reading of relevant public health statutes to conclude that they did not authorize any such masking policies, a move that has since triggered more questions about what public health tools the federal government will have left if Mizelle’s decision is left to stand.

To better understand this decision and its ramifications, Scott R. Anderson sat down with two legal experts: Lindsay Wiley, a professor specializing in health, law and policy at the University of California Los Angeles School of Law, and Alan Rozenshtein, a Lawfare senior editor and professor of, among other things, legislative and regulatory law at the University of Minnesota Law School. They talked about Mizelle’s approach to statutory interpretation, the role of the major questions doctrine, whether her views are likely to survive appeal and how the entire endeavor is likely to impact ongoing efforts to combat the coronavirus pandemic.

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