The Lawfare Podcast: Patreon Edition - The Lawfare Institute

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Lawfare Archive: How Internet Infrastructure Affects Digital Repression in Venezuela Oct 18, 2025

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Lawfare Fellow in Technology Policy and Law Eugenia Lostri sits down with Esteban Carisimo, a Postdoctoral Researcher at Northwestern University to talk about the digital repression in Venezuela after the recent elections. Carisimo co-authored a recent report on the effects of the Venezuelan crisis on internet infrastructure. They discuss how internet censorship impacts the protests, how Venezuela's infrastructure compares to other countries in the region, and what the path to recovery looks like.

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Scaling Laws: AI and Energy: What Do We Know? What Are We Learning? Oct 17, 2025

Show notes

Mosharaf Chowdhury, Associate Professor at the University of Michigan and Director of the ML Energy lab, and Dan Zhou, former Senior Research Scientist at the MIT Lincoln Lab, MIT Supercomputing Center, and MIT CSAIL, join Kevin Frazier, AI Innovation and Law Fellow at the University of Texas School of Law and a Senior Editor at Lawfare, to discuss the energy costs of AI.

They break down exactly how much energy fuels a single ChatGPT query, why this is difficult to figure out, how we might improve energy efficiency, and what kinds of policies might minimize AI’s growing energy and environmental costs.

Leo Wu provided excellent research assistance on this podcast.

Read more from Dan:

“From Words to Watts: Benchmarking the Energy Costs of Large Language Model Inference,” in Proc. IEEE High Perform. Extreme Comput. Conf. (HPEC)
“A Green(er) World for A.I.,” in IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium Workshops (IPDPSW)

Find Scaling Laws on the Lawfare website, and subscribe to never miss an episode.

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Lawfare Daily: Prosecuting Terrorism and the Pursuit of Justice, with Jake Tapper Oct 16, 2025

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Lawfare Public Service Fellow Michael Feinberg sits down with Jake Tapper, the lead Washington anchor for CNN, to discuss his new book, “Race Against Terror: Chasing an Al Qaeda Killer at the Dawn of the Forever War.” The book chronicles the investigation, prosecution, and ultimate conviction of Spin Ghul, an Al Qaeda operative who became the first major international terrorist tried in a U.S. civilian court.

Feinberg and Tapper explore what the case reveals about the American justice system in the post-9/11 era, the politics of counterterrorism, and how terrorism prosecutions have influenced the people and policies at the center of national security.

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Rational Security: The “Don’t Upset the Masks” Edition Oct 15, 2025

Show notes

This week, Scott sat down with his Lawfare colleagues Benjamin Wittes, Kate Klonick, and newly-minted Senior Editor Molly Roberts to talk through the week’s big national security news stories, including:

“Peace by Piece.” The first phase of the Trump administration’s peace plan for Gaza went into effect on Monday, resulting in the return of the last living hostages held by Hamas to Israel, among other exchanges. President Trump celebrated the moment with a triumphal speech in front of the Israeli Knesset, followed by a peace conference at Sharm el-Sheikh where the United States signed a joint statement with the heads of state of Egypt, Qatar, and Turkey. While much work remains to be done on implementing the deal, even Trump’s Democratic political rivals have lauded the deal. How much credit does the Trump administration truly deserve? And where is the conflict likely to head from here?
“Un-Civil Service.” Since the U.S. government shut down at the end of September, U.S. agency websites and emails have been plastered with messages unequivocally blaming congressional Democrats and the “radical Left.” It’s an unprecedented use of government resources for a set of messages that looks quite political—exactly what the Hatch Act, among other laws, was intended to prevent. Are these messages consistent with the law?
“Out of Our Element.” China kicked off a major new phase in its economic war with the United States last week, when it imposed major new export controls and rare earth metals and components derived from them—materials essential to various high-end technologies, including the semiconductors that power artificial intelligence. President Trump has since responded with a threat to impose 100% tariffs on Chinese imports—but what China may really want is a relaxation of export controls on AI-related semiconductors. How big a threat is China’s weaponization of its rare earth exports? And how should the United States and its allies respond?

In object lessons, Ben shares his new campaign to troll the Russian embassy—an offensive involving 100 dead sunflowers. Kate has an existential crisis over her (old? new? what is time?) college sweatshirt. Scott gets spicy with a plea to listeners about what to do with his abundance of Bhut Jolokia peppers. And Molly brings a bit of beauty to the party with a Prinsesstårta, no doubt something she’ll be asked to make for the office.

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Lawfare Daily: Serhii Plokhii on the History of the Nuclear Arms Race Oct 15, 2025

Show notes

Lawfare Contributor Mykhailo Soldatenko sits down with Serhii Plokhii, Harvard History Professor and a leading authority on the history of the Cold War and Ukraine, to discuss his new book, "The Nuclear Age: An Epic Race for Arms, Power and Survival," that tells a history of nuclear proliferation and international efforts to tame it. They discuss the role of fear and prestige in a country's decision to acquire nukes, nuclear strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, preventive wars against nuclear aspirants, Ukraine's decision to give up nuclear weapons it inherited from the Soviet Union, and more.

You may also want to look at the following Lawfare pieces about this topic:

"Filling the Security Void of the Budapest Memorandum," by Mykhailo Soldatenko
"Ukraine's Nuclear Moment," by Eric Ciaramella

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Lawfare Daily: How Technologists Can Help Regulators with Erie Meyer and Laura Edelson Oct 14, 2025

Show notes

Erie Meyer, Senior Fellow at Georgetown Law’s Institute for Technology Law & Policy and Senior Fellow at the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator, and Laura Edelson, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Northeastern University, who are coauthors of the recent toolkit, “Working with Technologists: Recommendations for State Enforcers and Regulators,” join Lawfare’s Justin Sherman to discuss how state enforcers and regulators can hire and better work with technologists, what technologists are and are not best-suited to help with, and what roles technologists can play across the different phases of enforcer and regulator casework. They also discuss how to best attract technologists to enforcement and regulation jobs; tips for technologists seeking to better communicate with those lawyers, compliance experts, and others in government with less technology background; and how this all fits into the future of AI, technology, and state and broader regulation.

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Lawfare Daily: The Trials of the Trump Administration, Oct. 10 Oct 13, 2025

Show notes

In a live conversation on YouTube, Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Lawfare Public Service Fellow Loren Voss andSenior Editors Anna Bower, Roger Parloff, Eric Columbus, and Molly Roberts to discuss the legal challenges to the National Guard deployment in Portland and Chicago, a hearing over the attempted deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the arraignment of James Comey, and so much more.You can find information on legal challenges to Trump administration actions here. And check out Lawfare’s new homepage on the litigation, new Bluesky account, and new WITOAD merch.

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Lawfare Archive: Justin Sherman on the FTC Settlement with Location Data Broker X-Mode Oct 12, 2025

Show notes

From January 19, 2024: Last week, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) reached a settlement with location data broker X-Mode Social. X-Mode collects over 10 billion location data points from all over the world every day, and sells it to clients in a range of industries, like advertisers, consulting firms, and private government contractors. The FTC argued that the data broker was conducting unfair business practices, including selling people’s sensitive location data.

To discuss the FTC settlement and its implications, Lawfare's Fellow in Technology Policy and Law Eugenia Lostri sat down with Justin Sherman, Founder and CEO of Global Cyber Strategies and a Senior Fellow at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy. They talked about the FTC’s groundbreaking decision to list sensitive locations about which X-Mode cannot sell data, the likelihood that we will see further FTC action against data brokers, and the persistent need for comprehensive privacy legislation to better address harms.

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Lawfare Archive: Noah Efron on the Awful Quiet of This Moment Oct 11, 2025

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From October 10, 2023: This morning, Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes connected with his old friend Noah Efron about the weekend's events in Israel. Noah is a professor at Bar-Ilan University, a prolific essayist and writer, and the host of The Promised Podcast, a podcast on Israeli life, politics, and culture.

In an interview punctuated twice by missile attacks, they discussed what happened over the weekend, the magnitude and horror of the Hamas attack, the impact on Israeli society, and the coming Israeli response in Gaza. They talked about the weird interregnum between the violence over the weekend and the violence that's to come and how quiet things are right now, about whether Israeli society is coming together or whether it is coming apart, about the implications of Hamas holding many hostages for the way the war is going to play out, and more.

Please note that this episode contains content that some people may find disturbing. Listener discretion is advised.

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Scaling Laws: AI Safety Meet Trust & Safety with Ravi Iyer and David Sullivan Oct 10, 2025

Show notes

David Sullivan, Executive Director of the Digital Trust & Safety Partnership, and Rayi Iyer, Managing Director of the Psychology of Technology Institute at USC’s Neely Center, join Kevin Frazier, AI Innovation and Law Fellow at the University of Texas School of Law and a Senior Editor at Lawfare, to discuss the evolution of the Trust & Safety field and its relevance to ongoing conversations about how best to govern AI.

They discuss the importance of thinking about the end user in regulation, debate the differences and similarities between social media and AI companions, and evaluate current policy proposals.

Leo Wu provided excellent research assistance to prepare for this podcast.

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