Stay ConnectedThe 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.lawfareblog.com.
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Chatter, a podcast from Lawfare, features weekly long-form conversations with fascinating people at the creative edges of national security. This week on Chatter, David Priess talked with former U.S. Secret Service agent Jonathan Wackrow to discuss the inherent dilemmas that come along with the job. One of them can arise if agents become partisan actors or allow themselves to even be perceived as such. We heard another one described in shocking terms during this week's testimony before the Jan. 6 committee: A protectee and the agents protecting him or her can disagree with the protectee about the latter's presence in a threatening situation or movement toward it.
It turns out a whole lot of training prepares agents for these contingencies--as well as more predictable ones like how to respond instantaneously to myriad threats. Many lessons emerge from the study of past service failures, up to and including presidential assassinations and attempts. And some others can shed light elsewhere, such as on personal security and safety of institutions from schools to churches.
Jonathan is now the COO and Global Head of Security for Teneo Risk and a law enforcement analyst for CNN. He and David have a deep and wide discussion about how cable news networks cover tragedy, the challenges of providing insight on security incidents in real time, his path into the Secret Service, how agents are trained, the lessons learned from historical failures of presidential protection, his own experiences with security breaches during the Obama administration, the dangers of perceived or actual politicization in the service, the balance between protecting a president and allowing a president's desired movements, agents' duty to testify in criminal investigations involving their protectees, how Secret Service experiences can help other institutions during an era of rising political violence, the benefits and drawbacks of school active shooter drills, and more.
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.
Among the works discussed in this episode:
The movie The Bodyguard
The movie In the LIne of Fire
The book Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service by Carol Leonnig
The book The Devil Never Sleeps: Learning to Live in an Age of Disasters by Juliette Kayyem
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When a Russian missile recently struck a TV tower in Kyiv, near Babyn Yar, the site of Nazi mass murders during the Holocaust, some saw the attack as a potent symbol of the tragic occurrence of violence in Ukraine. To talk through the historical significance of the attack, Lawfare Managing Editor Tyler McBrien sat down with Maksym Rokmaniko, an architect, designer, entrepreneur, and director at the Center for Spatial Technologies in Kyiv, and Linda Kinstler, a PhD candidate in the rhetoric department at UC Berkeley.
In her recent New York times essay, the Bloody Echoes of Babyn Yar, Linda wrote, "the current war in Ukraine is so oversaturated with historical meaning, it is unfolding on soil that has absorbed wave after wave of the dead, where soldiers do not always have to dig trenches in the forest because the old ones remain."
Linda's writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic and Jewish Currents, where she recently reported on the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial center. Linda is also the author of Come to This Court and Cry: How the Holocaust Ends, which is out in the U.S. on August 23rd, from Public Affairs.
Tyler, Linda and Maksym discuss the history of Babyn Yar as a sight and symbol, the role of open source investigative techniques and forensic modeling in the documentation of war crimes, the battle over historical narratives, memorialization and memory, as well as the limits of the law in achieving justice for victims of negation and genocide.
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The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection is midway through a blockbuster series of hearings exploring Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election and disrupt the peaceful transfer of power. Central to those efforts, of course, was the Big Lie—the false notion that Trump was cheated out of victory in 2020.
This week on Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Kate Starbird, an associate professor of Human Centered Design & Engineering at the University of Washington—and repeat Arbiters of Truth guest. Kate has come on the show before to talk about misinformation and Jan. 6, and she and a team of coauthors just released a comprehensive analysis of tweets spreading misinformation around the 2020 election. So she’s the perfect person with whom to discuss the Jan. 6 committee hearings and misinformation. What does Kate’s research show about how election falsehoods spread, and who spread them? How has, and hasn’t, the Jan. 6 committee incorporated the role of misinformation into the story it’s telling about the insurrection? And is there any chance the committee can break through and get the truth to the people who most need to hear it?
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It was a blockbuster day at the Jan. 6 committee hearings. Cassidy Hutchinson, former aide to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows testified in riveting detail about what the president was up to and what the people around him were up to in the days leading up to Jan. 6 and on the day itself. There's an assault against a Secret Service officer. There's a shattered plate and ketchup dripping down the wall. And there are a lot of warnings that violence was coming, warnings that the president really didn't seem to mind.
Benjamin Wittes sat down on Twitter Spaces to debrief it all with Lawfare publisher David Priess, Lawfare executive editor Natalie Orpett, and Lawfare senior editors Alan Rozenshtein, and Roger Parloff. They went over what was new and what it means for the investigation to come.
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On May 19, the Department of Justice announced a new policy concerning how it will charge cases under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, or CFAA, the primary statute used against those who engage in unlawful computer intrusions. Over the years, the statute has been criticized because it has been difficult to determine the kinds of conduct it criminalizes, which has led to a number of problems, including the chilling of security research.
Stephanie Pell sat down with Andrea Matwyshyn, professor of law and associate dean of innovation at Penn State Law School to discuss DOJ's new charging policy and some of the issues it attempts to address. They talked about some of the problems created by the CFAA's vague terms, how the new charging policy tries to protect good faith security research, and the significance of the requirement that prosecutors must now consult with the Computer Crimes and Intellectual Property section at main Justice before charging a case under the CFAA.
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An interesting subplot of the Russian invasion and subsequent war in Ukraine has been the rush of fighters from other countries to join the Ukrainian foreign legion and to fight as legionnaires on behalf of the Ukrainian government. The phenomenon of legionnaires is an interesting one that crops up all throughout history yet has remained relatively understudied. What role do legionnaires play in conflicts? How does their impact differ from that of typical soldiers? How can we distinguish them from contractors or mercenaries or other categories of fighters? And what can legionnaires tell us about the ways that states like to conduct international affairs and international conflict?
To talk through these issues, Jacob Schulz spoke with Elizabeth Grasmeder, a researcher and author of an international security article entitled “Leaning on Legionnaires: Why Modern States Recruit Foreign Soldiers.” They talked about the historical practice of use of legionnaires and what it can reveal about conflicts today.
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Chatter, a podcast from Lawfare, features weekly long-form conversations with fascinating people at the creative edges of national security.This week on Chatter, Shane Harris talked with historian Tim Naftali about the legacy of Watergate and how we tell stories, fifty years later, about America’s most notorious presidential scandal. What is it about Watergate that still captures our attention? What do historians, journalists, and citizens misremember about the events? And how does the scandal shape our understanding of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol?
Naftali was the first federal director of the Richard Nixon library and earned accolades from historians—and criticism from Nixon loyalists—for his efforts to truthfully tell the story of Watergate in the Nixon museum. Naftali has written about intelligence, counterterrorism, national security, and the American presidency in the modern era. He is currently a professor at New York University.
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. Learn more and subscribe to Chatter.
Among the works discussed in this episode:
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From May 4, 2021: 2020 was a remarkable year in so many ways, not least of which was the COVID-19 pandemic and its effects. Why did so many countries bungle their responses to it so badly? And what should their leaders have learned from earlier disasters and the pathologies clearly visible in the responses of their predecessors to them?
Niall Ferguson is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and the author of more than a dozen books, including, most recently, "Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe." David Priess sat down with Niall to discuss everything from earthquake zones, to viruses, to world wars, all with a mind to how our political and social structures have or have not adapted to the certainty of continued crises.
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It was Day Five of the House select committee hearings on Jan. 6. This time, the committee was focused on the president's efforts to pressure, and one may even say decapitate, the Justice Department to get it to put pressure on states on voter fraud matters and overturn the results of the 2020 election. In front of the committee were senior Justice Department officials who threatened to resign if an obscure environmental lawyer was made acting attorney general.
It was another dramatic day of testimony, and to chew it all over, Benjamin Wittes sat down on Twitter Spaces with Lawfare senior editors Quinta Jurecic and Roger Parloff, and New York Times reporter Katie Benner, who broke the whole story of the coup attempt at the Justice Department shortly after it happened. They talked about whether they learned anything new. They talked about how the department officials came off: are they heroes or are they apparatchiks? And they talked about how all of it fits into the committee's larger story.
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If you’ve been watching the hearings convened by the House select committee on Jan. 6, you’ve seen a great deal about how the Trump campaign generated and spread falsehoods about supposed election fraud in 2020. As the committee has argued, those falsehoods were crucial in generating the political energy that culminated in the explosion of the January 6 insurrection.
What shape did those lies take, and how did social media platforms attempt to deal with them at the time? Today, we’re bringing you an episode of our Arbiters of Truth series on the online information ecosystem. In fact, we’re rebroadcasting an episode we recorded in November 2020 about disinformation and the 2020 election. In late November 2020, after Joe Biden cemented his victory as the next president but while the Trump campaign was still pushing its claims of election fraud online and in court, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Alex Stamos, the director of the Stanford Internet Observatory. Their conversation then was a great overview of the state of election security and the difficulty of countering false claims around the integrity of the vote. It’s worth a listen today as the Jan. 6 committee reminds us what the political and media environment was like in the aftermath of the election and how the Trump campaign committed to election lies that still echo all too loudly. And though it’s a year and a half later, the problems we’re discussing here certainly haven’t gone away.
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Tuesday was day four of the Jan. 6 committee hearings, this time on Donald Trump's efforts to coax, cajole, and threaten state election officials and legislators into overturning their state election results in 2020. To go over it all, Benjamin Wittes sat down in Twitter Spaces with Lawfare senior editors Roger Parloff, Quinta Jurecic, and Molly Reynolds. They talked about where this story fits in with the larger narrative the committee is trying to spin, about what is working and what is not working in the committee's presentation, and they took live questions from the audience.
The committee’s next hearing is currently scheduled for Thursday, June 23, at 3pm Eastern. We'll be hosting these events on Twitter Spaces after every hearing. Find us on Twitter @lawfareblog for more details.
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Asfandyar Mir of the U.S. Institute of Peace and Daniel Byman of Lawfare, Brookings, and Georgetown, are both analysts of al-Qaeda and terrorist groups. They have a different analysis, however, of how al-Qaeda is faring in the current world. Rather than argue about the subject on Twitter, they wrote an article on it, spelling out where they agree and where they disagree, and they joined Benjamin Wittes to talk it all through. Where is al-Qaeda strong and resilient? Where is it weak and failing? And where has it disappeared altogether?
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Today we’re bringing you another episode of Lawfare No Bull, a podcast featuring primary source audio from the world of national security law and policy. Today’s episode features audio of the third of a series of public hearings held by the House select committee to investigate the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. The committee heard in-person testimony from former Vice President Pence’s general counsel Greg Jacob and retired federal judge Michael Luttig.
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Today we’re bringing you another episode of Lawfare No Bull, a podcast featuring primary source audio from the world of national security law and policy. Today’s episode features audio of the second of a series of public hearings held by the House select committee to investigate the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. The committee heard in-person and video testimony, including from former Attorney General William Barr and former Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien.
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Today we’re bringing you an episode of Lawfare No Bull, a podcast featuring primary source audio from the world of national security law and policy. This episode features audio of the first of a series of public hearings held by the House select committee to investigate the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. The hearing included testimony from documentarian Nick Quested and Capitol police officer Caroline Edwards, as well as video footage of interviews from a number of Trump aides.
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On Thursday, June 16, the Jan. 6 committee held its third day of public hearings. Afterwards, the Lawfare team convened once again in Twitter Spaces for a live recording of the podcast. Lawfare senior editor Quinta Jurecic talked with editor-in-chief Benjamin Wittes, executive editor Natalie Orpett, and senior editor Alan Rozenshtein about the substance of the day’s hearing, which focused on President Trump’s efforts to pressure Vice President Mike Pence into overturning the results of the 2020 election.
The committee’s next hearing is currently scheduled for Tuesday, June 21, at 1pm Eastern. We'll be hosting these events on Twitter Spaces after every hearing. Find us on Twitter @lawfareblog for more details.
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If you loaded up the internet or turned on the television somewhere in the United States over the last two months, it’s been impossible to avoid news coverage of the defamation trial of actors Johnny Depp and Amber Heard—both of whom sued each other over a dispute relating to allegations by Heard of domestic abuse by Depp. In early June, a Virginia jury found that both had defamed the other. The litigation has received a great deal of coverage for what it might say about the fate of the Me Too movement—but the flood of falsehoods online around the trial raises questions about how useful defamation law can really be in countering lies.
This week on Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with RonNell Andersen Jones, the Lee E. Teitelbaum Professor of Law at the University of Utah College of Law and an expert on the First Amendment and the interaction between the press and the courts. Along with Lyrissa Lidsky, she’s written about defamation law, disinformation, and the Depp-Heard litigation. They talked about why some commentators think defamation could be a useful route to counter falsehoods, why RonNell thinks the celebrity litigation undercuts that argument, and the few cases in which claims of libel or slander really could have an impact in limiting the spread of lies.
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On Monday, the Brookings Institution hosted a panel discussion titled, “Allies: How America failed its partners in Afghanistan.” The event featured comments from Lawfare editor-in-chief Benjamin Wittes, a preview clip of Episode 6 of the podcast Allies, and a moderated discussion with an all-star panel.
Lawfare associate editor Bryce Klehm sat down with Shala Gafary, the managing attorney for Project: Afghan Legal Assistance at Human Rights First; Col. Steven Miska, who serves on the steering committee of the Evacuate Our Allies Coalition; and Matt Zeller, a U.S. Army veteran, co-founder of No One Left Behind, and an advisory board chair of the Association of Wartime Allies. They discussed some of the past failures that led to a situation where tens of thousands of the U.S.’s allies were left behind in Afghanistan. They also discussed current resettlement issues and relocation for those still in Afghanistan or other third countries.
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Recorded almost immediately after the Jan. 6 committee conducted its second public hearing, Benjamin Wittes sat down on Twitter Spaces with Lawfare’s Quinta Jurecic, Natalie Orpett, and Rohini Kurup. They talked about what the committee accomplished in this second hearing, what evidence it put forth, and whether Donald Trump actually knew that the election lies were false or whether he had convinced himself that they were true.
We'll be hosting these events on Twitter Spaces the morning after every hearing. Find us on Twitter for more details.
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Lawfare senior editor Roger Parloff has been following in a way that just about nobody else has the litigation to keep people off ballots under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment—the part of the amendment that says that if you engaged in an insurrection, you're excluded from public office. It was the subject of a recent major Fourth Circuit opinion, and the state of Section 3 litigation is also the subject of a significant new Roger Parloff piece on Lawfare entitled, “After the Cawthorn Ruling, Can Trump Be Saved From Section 3 of the 14th Amendment?”
Roger joined Benjamin Wittes to talk through the piece. What are the major legal arguments that people involved in Jan. 6 are using to keep themselves on the ballots? How strong are the factual cases against different gubernatorial and congressional actors? And why is Donald Trump uniquely vulnerable to a challenge on this basis?
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When the term "intelligence" comes up regarding an organization, most of us immediately think of government institutions. And there's a good reason for that: nation-states have become the centers of the most prominent intelligence collection, analysis, and direct action. But that's far from the whole story. Increasingly, corporations are developing intelligence units of their own to uncover and assess threats to their personnel and facilities, analyze geopolitical and environmental risks that might affect their business prospects, and even take actions traditionally associated with governments.
In this episode of Chatter, David Priess chats about all of this and more with Lewis Sage-Passant, who has built on his experiences in British military intelligence, private sector intelligence, crisis management, and related PhD research to explore the history, evolution, and ethics of this intriguing and challenging domain. They discuss the long history of private sector intelligence efforts, the difficulty disentangling early commercial efforts from government purposes, the fabled Pinkertons in the United States, the development of intelligence around modern corporations, the ethical issues that arise in this realm—and James Bond.
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. Learn more and subscribe to Chatter.
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On Thursday, the House select committee to investigate the Jan. 6 Capitol attack held the first in a series of public hearings that they will use to present the findings of its ongoing investigation. The hearing laid out the evidence of Trump's culpability in bringing about the attack and also heard from witnesses about the role of the Proud Boys and the experience of law enforcement officers guarding the Capitol that day.
On Friday, June 10, the morning after the hearing, Benjamin Wittes sat down on Twitter with Lawfare’s Quinta Jurecic, Molly Reynolds, and Roger Parloff to discuss their impressions and answer questions from the audience.
We'll be hosting these events on Twitter Spaces the morning after every hearing, and you can join us for the next one on Tuesday, June 14, at 8:30 AM Eastern. Find us on Twitter for more details.
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Oleksandra Matviychuk is the head of the Center for Civil Liberties in Ukraine. She founded the organization to work on internal reform in her own country, but for the last eight years, she has spent a great deal of her time investigating and documenting Russian war crimes. She began this in the wake of the 2014 Russian invasion of the Donbas and Crimea, but the work has really accelerated since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February of this year. While in Washington to talk to U.S. policymakers about her vision of a hybrid tribunal to try Russian war crimes, she took some time to speak with Lawfare editor-in-chief Benjamin Wittes. It's a wide-ranging conversation covering her own history as a war crimes investigator and documenter, the current challenge of documenting and prosecuting Russian war crimes on a scale we haven't seen in a very long time, and how the Ukrainian war effort relates to the project of defending civilians and preventing further war crimes.
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On May 31, by a five-four vote, the Supreme Court blocked a Texas law from going into effect that would have sharply limited how social media companies could moderate their platforms and required companies to abide by various transparency requirements. We’ve covered the law on this show before—we recorded an episode right after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit allowed Texas to implement the law, in the same ruling that the Supreme Court just vacated. But there’s enough interesting stuff in the Supreme Court’s order—and in Justice Samuel Alito’s dissent—that we thought it was worth another bite at the apple.
So this week on Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic invited Genevieve Lakier, professor of law at the University of Chicago and Evelyn’s colleague at the Knight First Amendment Institute, to walk us through just what happened. What exactly did the Supreme Court do? Why does Justice Alito seem to think that the Texas law has a decent chance of surviving a First Amendment challenge? And what does this suggest about the possible futures of the extremely unsettled landscape of First Amendment law?
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What does the American public actually know concretely about the effectiveness of U.S. drone strikes? Jack Goldsmith sat down with Mitt Regan, a professor at Georgetown Law School and the co-director of its Center on National Security and Law, who seeks to answer this question in his new book, “Drone Strike—Analyzing the Impacts of Targeted Killing.” They discussed his deep analysis of the empirical literature on the effectiveness of targeted strikes outside active theaters of combat against al-Qaeda and affiliates and the impact of these strikes on civilians. They also explore the theoretical challenges to real empirical knowledge of these questions, the extent to which drone strikes have contributed to security within the United States, and what his findings imply about the consequences of the impact of the Afghanistan withdrawal.
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What, if any, theory of international relations best explains U.S. foreign policy outcomes? Why, for example, did President Biden withdraw American forces from Afghanistan, re-engage Iran on the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, impose harsher than expected sanctions on Russia, and give more than expected support to Ukraine following the Russian invasion? Jack Goldsmith sat down with Richard Hanania, the president of the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, whose new book, “Public Choice Theory and the Illusion of Grand Strategy,” seeks to provide answers to these types of questions. They discussed Hanania’s view that academic theories about American grand strategy cannot explain important U.S. foreign policy outcomes, and his argument that these outcomes are better explained by public choice theory, especially by the dominant influences on the presidency of government contractors, the national security bureaucracy, and foreign governments. They also discussed whether realistic complaints about these influences are consistent with realistic premises about how to discern the national interest and the value, if any, of international relations theorizing.
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The business of offensive cyber operations and intelligence gathering increasingly requires the military and intelligence community to exploit networks, hardware, and software owned or produced by American companies and used by American citizens. Sometimes this exploitation occurs with the use of zero-day vulnerabilities. In order to determine when zero-day vulnerabilities should be exploited versus disclosed to the relevant vendor so that the vulnerability can be patched, the United States government engages in an interagency process known as the Vulnerabilities Equities Process or VEP.
Stephanie Pell sat down with Dr. Lindsey Polley, director of defense and national security at Starburst Aerospace, to talk about her recently defended dissertation, “To Disclose or Not to Disclose, That Is the Question: A Methods-Based Approach for Examining & Improving the US Government's Vulnerabilities Equities Process.” They discussed the purpose of the VEP, how it is structured to operate, and how its current state and structure impedes its ability to promote longer-term social good through its vulnerability adjudications. They also talked about some of Lindsey's recommendations to improve the VEP.
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This week on Chatter, Shane Harris talks with journalist Jamie Kirchick about his new book Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington. Kirchick’s story unfolds over several decades and reveals the secret history of gays and lesbians in the capital, as well as the history of secrecy in which they played pivotal roles.
The book is a set of personal stories as well as an exploration of the national security bureaucracy at the heart of power and influence in Washington. And Kirchick explores a provocative idea: Were gays and lesbians, already accustomed to living secret lives, well-suited to work as intelligence officers?
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. Learn more and subscribe to Chatter.
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From October 29, 2020: On this episode of Lawfare's Arbiters of Truth series on disinformation, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Casey Newton, veteran Silicon Valley editor for The Verge who recently went independent to start a newsletter on Substack called Platformer. Few people have followed the stories of platforms and content moderation in recent years as closely and carefully as Casey, so Evelyn and Quinta asked him about what’s changed in the last four years—especially in the lead-up to the election. They also spoke about the challenges of reporting on the tech industry and whether the increased willingness of platforms to moderate content means that the name of this podcast series will have to change.
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In May, news came out that the U.S. government was thinking of putting the Chinese video surveillance company Hikvision on the Treasury Department’s Specially Designated Nationals list, otherwise known as the SDN list. The move would have huge impacts on Hikvision’s business prospects in the U.S. and around the world and would represent yet another escalation in the way that the U.S. government handles Chinese technology companies.
To talk through the news and why it's so significant, Jacob Schulz sat down with Katrina Northrop, a reporter at The Wire China who wrote a story about the Hikvision saga, and Alex Iftimie, a partner at Morrison & Foerster and a former official within the National Security Division at the Justice Department.
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As transparency reporting about content moderation enforcement has become standard across the platform industry, there's been growing questions about the reliability and accuracy of the reports the platforms are producing. With all reporting being entirely voluntary and the content moderation industry in general being very opaque, it’s hard to know how much to trust the figures that companies report in their quarterly or biannual enforcement reports. As a result, there's been growing calls for independent audits of these figures, and last month, Meta released its first ever independent audit of its content moderation reporting systems.
This week on Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek sat down with someone who actually knows something about auditing: Colleen Honigsberg, an associate professor of law at Stanford Law School, whose research is focused on the empirical study of corporate and securities law. They talked about how auditors work, the promises and pitfalls of auditing in other contexts and what that might teach us for auditing in the content moderation context, and whether this is going to be a useful regulatory tool.
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Non-Fungible Tokens, or NFTs, have captured the attention of thousands over the past few weeks and months. This technology's use has encompassed various forms of digital art such as the popular depictions of cartoon apes. But, one country has begun looking beyond NFT’s use as a digital asset toward using it for the creation of a more centralized and restrictive internet ecosystem.
Lawfare fellow in cybersecurity law Alvaro Marañon sat down with Yaya Fanusie, an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, to speak about the China government’s vision for the next iteration of the internet. Yaya is an expert on the national security implications of cryptocurrencies and recently has written Lawfare posts analyzing China’s NFT and national digital currency initiatives.
They broke down an NFT and the other technical acronyms, what the Chinese government’s aspirations are with its national blockchain project, and what the strategic risk to nation-states is if China can implement its technological vision.
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A few weeks ago, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released the latest FISA transparency data. It was notable in at least two major respects: the continued decline of traditional Title I FISA applications—that is, warrants for individual surveillance—and separately, the rather large number of U.S. persons who had been searched under so-called 702 surveillance.
To discuss the news, the data and what it all means, Benjamin Wittes sat down on Lawfare Live with Carrie Cordero of the Center for a New American Security and Adam Klein of the Strauss Center at the University of Texas. They talked about the 702 number. Is it really big, or does it just seem big? They talked about what's causing the decline in traditional FISA, about whether reforms in the wake of the Carter Page debacle have gone too far, and they talked about where it is all going from here.
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Chatter is a podcast hosted by David Priess and Shane Harris that features in-depth discussions with fascinating people at the creative edges of national security.
In this episode of Chatter, Priess sits down with Meredith Henley to discuss the movie “Casablanca,” the city's wartime history, and the veracity of “Casablanca”’s representations about Casablanca. Their conversation covers her advocacy for the humanities and history, unexpected discoveries in archival research, an appreciation of the film, American and French resistance intelligence operations in French Morocco, intersections between wartime Casablanca and personalities from Franklin Roosevelt to Josephine Baker, and what the film got right and wrong about the experiences of refugees, and more.
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Rational Security is a weekly roundtable podcast featuring Quinta Jurecic, Scott R. Anderson and Alan Z. Rozenshtein. It's a lively, irreverent discussion of news, ideas, foreign policy and law. And there’s always a laugh.
This week, Quinta, Scott and Alan were joined by Shane Harris to talk about the week's biggest national security news, including the recent House public hearing on unidentified aerial phenomena, Biden's statement confirming that the United States would defend Taiwan against Chinese aggression and more.
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From November 19, 2016: At this week's Hoover Book Soiree, Benjamin Wittes sat down with Bill Banks, Professor of Law at Syracuse University and the Founding Director of the Institute for National Security and Counterterrorism, to talk about Bill's book, “Soldiers on the Homefront: The Domestic Role of the American Military,”with Stephen Dycus. The book examines how both law and culture has shaped and constrained the military's domestic activities, reviewing the legal history of the various different roles that soldiers have played at home, from law enforcement to martial law. Given the widespread concern over the strength of the next administration's commitment to civil liberties and the rule of law, it's a conversation that's unfortunately more relevant than ever.
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Bryce Klehm sat down with Phil Klay, the author of the new book, “Uncertain Ground: Citizenship in an Age of Endless Invisible War.” Klay is a winner of the National Book Award for fiction and a veteran of the war in Iraq. His latest book is a collection of essays from the past ten years that deal with the consequences of America's endless wars. His essays cover a number of topics, ranging from the concept of citizen soldier, to a history of the AR-15. Phil and Bryce talked about a number of themes in the book, including Phil’s experience as a public affairs officer in the Marine Corps, the way that America chooses to exercise its power and the obligations of citizenship.
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On May 14, a shooter attacked a supermarket in a historically Black neighborhood of Buffalo, New York, killing ten people and wounding three. The streaming platform Twitch quickly disabled the livestream the shooter had published of the attack—but video of the violence, and copies of the white supremacist manifesto released by the attacker online, continue to circulate on the internet.
How should we evaluate the response of social media platforms to the tragedy in Buffalo? This week on Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Brian Fishman, who formerly worked at Facebook, now Meta, as the policy director for counterterrorism and dangerous organizations. Brian helped lead Facebook’s response to the 2019 Christchurch shooting, another act of far-right violence livestreamed online. He walked us through how platforms respond to crises like these, why it’s so difficult to remove material like the Buffalo video and manifesto from the internet, and what it would look like for platforms to do better.
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Finland and Sweden have made the historic choice to apply to NATO, but there's a lot of misunderstanding out there about the context for these decisions. To talk through it all, David Priess sat down with Emanuel Örtengren, the acting director of the Stockholm Free World Forum, a Swedish foreign and security policy think tank; Minna Ålander from the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, where she focuses on northern Europe and Nordic security; and Henri Vanhanen a foreign policy advisor to Finland’s center-right National Coalition Party. They discussed the history of Finnish and Swedish nonalignment, the shift in public and government opinion toward NATO in recent months, and both countries’ processes for applying to the alliance.
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For years, Russia has both officially and unofficially used cyber tools to ruthlessly advance its international agenda. For this reason, many expected Russia's recent invasion of Ukraine to also kick off a new and brutal era of international cyberwar. Instead, cyber measures have only played a small part in the overall conflict compared to more conventional capabilities, leading many to ask whether Russian cyber capabilities and the role of cyber in the future of warfare more generally might well have been exaggerated.
To dig into these issues, Scott R, Anderson sat down with University of Virginia law professor Kristen Eichensehr, who wrote a recent article on the topic for the American Journal of International Law. They discussed possible explanations for the limited role that cyber capabilities have played in the conflict, whether that might change in the next stage of the conflict and what it all means for the future of cyber measures in warfare.
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The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, known by its initials as SIGAR, released an interim report last week on the reasons for the collapse of the Afghan army. To break down the report’s findings, Bryce Klehm spoke with Dr. Jonathan Schroden, the research program director at the Center for Naval Analysis. Dr. Schroden is a longtime analyst of the Afghan military and has deployed or traveled to Afghanistan 13 times since 2003. He is quoted and cited several times in the latest report. They spoke about a range of topics covered in the report, including the U.S.’s efforts to build an Afghan army, the Afghan government's decisions that contributed to the collapse and the Taliban's highly effective military campaign.
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Rational Security is Lawfare’s weekly roundtable podcast, featuring Quinta Jurecic, Scott R. Anderson and Alan Z. Rozenshtein. It's a lively and irreverent discussion of news, ideas, foreign policy and law—and there’s always a laugh.
In this episode, Jurecic, Rozenshtein and Anderson were joined by Lawfare associate editor Bryce Klehm to hash through some of the week's big national security news, including the recent mass shooting in Buffalo, NY, and the House select committee investigating Jan. 6’s decision to subpoena five house Republicans. They also encouraged listeners to check out the newest podcast series from Lawfare and Goat Rodeo, Allies, which does a deep dive into how the decades-long failure of the Afghan Special Immigrant Visa Program led the United States to leave so many allies behind following its withdrawal from Afghanistan.
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From September 21, 2020: Elizabeth Neumann served as the assistant secretary for threat prevention and security policy at the Department of Homeland Security. She has recently been speaking out about President Trump and, among other things, his failure of leadership with respect to the threat of white supremacist violence. In the course of doing so, she made reference to a book by Kathleen Belew, a historian at the University of Chicago: "Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America," a history of violent white power movements in the modern United States.
Elizabeth and Kathleen joined Benjamin Wittes to discuss the interactions of policy and the history that Belew describes. Why have we underestimated this threat for so long? How has it come to be one of the foremost threats that DHS faces? And what can we do about it, given the First Amendment?
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Congress this week held its first public hearing on unidentified flying objects in more than 50 years, as the House Intelligence Committee’s Subcommittee on Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence and Counterproliferation hosted two Department of Defense officials to discuss military encounters with unexplained objects.
David Priess sat down with the Washington Post’s Shane Harris—who has been watching this issue for quite some time and who watched the hearings quite closely—to talk about the long U.S. government history with UFOs (now called unidentified aerial phenomena), the recent move toward more transparency, and the legitimate reasons, having nothing to do with aliens, why some things will remain classified.
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On May 12, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit allowed an aggressive new Texas law regulating social media to go into effect. The law, known as HB20, seeks to restrict large social media platforms from taking down content on the basis of viewpoint—effectively restricting companies from engaging in a great deal of the content moderation that they currently perform. It also imposes a range of transparency and due process requirements on platforms with respect to their content moderation. A group of technology companies challenging the law have filed an emergency application to the Supreme Court seeking to put HB20 back on hold while they continue to litigate the law’s constitutionality under the First Amendment.
This week on Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Alex Abdo, litigation director at the Knight First Amendment Institute, and Scott Wilkens, senior staff attorney at Knight. The Institute, where Evelyn is a senior research fellow, filed an amicus brief in the Fifth Circuit, taking a middle ground between Texas—which argues that the First Amendment poses no bar to HB20—and the plaintiffs—who argue that the First Amendment prohibits this regulation and many other types of social media regulation besides. So what does the Texas law actually do? Where does the litigation stand—and what will the impact of the Fifth Circuit’s ruling be? And how does the Knight First Amendment Institute interpret, well, the First Amendment?
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In October 2021, the House of Representatives voted to find Trump associate Steve Bannon in contempt of Congress after Bannon refused to comply with a subpoena from the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection. In November 2021, the Justice Department indicted Bannon, and the trial is currently scheduled to begin this summer. So what’s been happening in the interim?
To catch up, Quinta Jurecic spoke with Lawfare senior editors Roger Parloff and Jonathan David Shaub. Roger has been following the Bannon prosecution closely and wrote about it in a recent Lawfare article—and Jonathan has written a great deal on Lawfare about the Office of Legal Counsel’s positions on executive privilege, including how they might affect prosecutions for contempt of Congress. Bannon recently filed a motion to dismiss, making the argument that he believed Donald Trump’s supposed invocation of executive privilege made it unnecessary for him to comply with the subpoena—relying heavily on memos from OLC. What should we make of Bannon’s arguments? How is the Justice Department navigating a legally tricky situation? And what, if anything, might this case tell us about the other contempt of Congress cases coming out of the Jan. 6 committee, which the Justice Department has yet to bring?
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Bryce Klehm is an associate editor at Lawfare. Max Johnston is a creative producer at Goat Rodeo. Together, they are the creators of Lawfare and Goat Rodeo’s newest podcast series, Allies, which launched on Monday and covers the history of the Special Immigrant Visa Program in Afghanistan. It's an amazing story. It covers a lot of time, a lot of action and a lot of people, all through the lens of the efforts—legislative and administrative—to get visas for Afghan translators to come to the United States to protect them from Taliban retaliation. Benjamin Wittes sat down with Bryce and Max to talk about the creation of the podcast, and how you take a wonky visa program and turn it into drama. Following the conversation, we’re bringing you the entirety of Episode One of Allies.
Learn more and subscribe to Allies at https://pod.link/1619035873.
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During the past couple of months, since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, there have been several claims that Russia was invading its neighbor to seize its oil and gas resources. And even in the cases where pundits were claiming that Russia was not doing this, they would often phrase it as, “This is not yet another oil war.” But do oil wars happen at all?
David Priess sat down with the woman who has literally written the book on this: Emily Meierding, assistant professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. She has argued that countries do not launch major conflicts to acquire hydrocarbon resources because the costs of foreign invasion, territorial occupation, international retaliation and damage to oil company relations deter even the most powerful countries from doing so. They talked about the myth of oil wars, about the logic behind why they will not happen and about why it is that the Russian invasion of Ukraine probably has very little to do with hydrocarbons at all.
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For today's episode, the team at Lawfare decided to cross-post the latest episode of The Aftermath, a narrative podcast series from Lawfare and Goat Rodeo on picking up the pieces after the Jan. 6 insurrection. Episode 3 of The Aftermath looks at what Congress was doing in the days immediately after Jan. 6. In the episode, you'll hear from experts and from people who were actually on both sides of the proceedings, including Rep. Jamie Raskin, the lead impeachment manager, and David Schoen, the lead defense lawyer for Donald Trump.
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From April 16, 2021: On Wednesday, President Biden announced a full withdrawal of all U.S. military personnel from Afghanistan by September 11, 2021, an announcement that comes as the U.S. and Afghan governments have been trying to reach a power sharing agreement with the Taliban. Prior to the withdrawal announcement, Bryce Klehm spoke with Thomas Gibbons-Neff, a New York Times correspondent based in the Kabul bureau and a former Marine infantryman, who walked us through the situation on the ground in Afghanistan over the last year. Following Biden's announcement, Bryce spoke with Madiha Afzal, the David M. Rubenstein Fellow in the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution, who talked about the broader implications of a U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.
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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David Fahrenthold is a reporter who works for the New York Times. In his capacity as a reporter at the Washington Post, he reported on misdeeds within the Trump financial universe, and now he’s come out with a story in the Times about a peculiar financial scandal at the United Nations. It’s about a little known UN agency trusting tens of millions of dollars to a relatively unknown British businessman and the investment not quite working out. Jacob Schulz talked with David about his story and about the broader world at the United Nations that enabled this to happen.
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Internet blackouts are on the rise. Since 2016, governments around the world have fully or partially shut down access to the internet almost 1000 times, according to a tally by the human rights organization Access Now. As the power of the internet grows, this tactic has only become more common as a means of political repression. Why is this and how, exactly, does a government go about turning off the internet?
This week on Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke on this topic with Peter Guest, the enterprise editor for the publication Rest of World, which covers technology outside the regions usually described as the West. He’s just published a new project with Rest of World diving deep into internet shutdowns—and the three dug into the mechanics of internet blackouts, why they’re increasing and their wide-reaching effects.
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Dmytro Kuzubov is the editor-in-chief of Lyuk Media in Kharkiv, Ukraine. It is a publication that used to be devoted to the culture and people and underground life of the country's second largest city. Then came the war. Dmytro joined Benjamin Wittes from 10 kilometers outside of Kharkiv to talk about his work as a Ukrainian cultural journalist before the war, and about how everything has changed during the war in a Russian-speaking city that has become very Ukrainian.
Some of this discussion takes place in English, and some takes place in Russian. Simultaneous translation from Russian to English is provided by Dominic Cruz Bustillos.
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Modern life relies on digital technology, but with that reliance comes vulnerability. How can we trust our technology? How can we be sure that it does what we expect it to do? Earlier this month, Lawfare released the results of a long-term research project on those very questions. The report, prepared by the Lawfare Institute’s Trusted Hardware and Software Working Group, is titled, “Creating a Framework for Supply Chain Trust in Hardware and Software.” On a recent Lawfare Live, Alan Rozenshtein spoke with three members of the team that wrote the piece: Lawfare editor-in-chief Benjamin Wittes; Lawfare contributing editor Paul Rosenzweig, who served as the report’s chief drafter; and Justin Sherman, a fellow at the Atlantic Council.
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Many individuals seeking asylum or other forms of immigration relief in the U.S. are subject to a program run by Immigration Customs Enforcement, or ICE, called the Intensive Supervision Appearance Program, which uses various kinds of tracking technologies as a way of keeping tabs on individuals who are not detained in ICE custody
Stephanie Pell sat down with Sejal Zota, legal director of Just Futures Law, to talk about this program and the kinds of tracking technologies it employees. They discussed what is publicly known about these technologies, the privacy concerns associated with them, as well as some of the harms experienced by individuals who are subjected to the surveillance. Not withstanding these concerns, they also discussed whether the Intensive Supervision Appearance Program is a reasonable alternative to ICE detention, considering ICE’s need to keep track of individuals who are both seeking immigration relief and who may be ordered removed from the U.S. if that relief is not granted.
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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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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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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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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 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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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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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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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:
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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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.
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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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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This week on Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek spoke to Charlotte Willner, who has been working in content moderation longer than just about anyone. Charlotte is now the executive director of the Trust and Safety Professionals Association, an organization that brings together the professionals that write and enforce the rules for what’s fair game and what’s not on online platforms. Before that, she worked in Trust and Safety at Pinterest and before that she built the very first safety operations team at Facebook. Evelyn asked Charlotte what it was like trying to build a content moderation system from the ground up, what has changed since those early days (spoilers: it’s a lot!) and—of course—if she had any advice for Twitter’s new owner given all her experience helping keep platforms safe.
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Finlandization is a troubled concept. It is generally used to describe the attempt by the Soviet Union during the Cold War to hold Finland in a position of neutrality and friendliness toward the Soviet Union, even while politically, Finland was more aligned with the West. In recent years—before the Russian invasion of Ukraine—it was sometimes brought up as a model for Ukraine to straddle the boundary between east and west. But for Finns, Finlandization meant something quite dark—the long-term subjugation of Finland's politics to the will of an authoritarian neighbor.
David Priess sat down with Antti Ruokonen, who wrote an article recently for Lawfare titled, “Why Finlandization is a Terrible Model for Ukraine.” They spoke about Finland's experience in the second World War, the imposed restrictions on its sovereignty because of this Finlandization during the Cold War, and the dangers of seeing Finlandization as a model for peaceful coexistence with Russia.
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Vladislav Davidzon is a journalist and author. He is a New Yorker, a Parisian and an Odessa resident. He's the author of “From Odessa with Love: Political and Literary Essays in Post-Soviet Ukraine,” and he joined Benjamin Wittes from Odessa where he is covering the war.
It's a wide-ranging conversation about the course of the war, the state of life in Odessa today and the current state of Ukrainian politics. They talked about how the war is really going, about myths and facts about denazification of Ukraine and about what Ukraine will look like as a political society when the war is over.
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Emily Hoge is a PhD candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, writing a dissertation on Russian veterans groups from the Afghan war and their evolution over time. She wrote a recent piece in Lawfare about how these groups, which started as anti-war, anti-state, pro-veterans activist organizations, morphed into a big part of Vladimir Putin's propaganda operations. She joined Benjamin Wittes to talk about the history of these groups, how they emerged from the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan and the collapse of the Soviet Union to represent veterans all over the country, how Putin adopted their victimization narrative and made it key to his vision of the state's relations with the international order more broadly, and how these groups are now promoting the war in Ukraine.
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In this episode of Chatter, a podcast hosted by David Priess and Shane Harris that features in-depth discussions with fascinating people at the creative edges of national security, Harris and Priess speak jointly with former intelligence officer, prominent yacht-watcher and book author Alex Finley. They talk about her career in the CIA's Directorate of Operations (which became the National Clandestine Service during her tenure there), her keen observation and analysis of Russian oligarchs' mega-yachts (which brought her onto cable news networks this spring after several countries started to seize the ships in the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine), and her experience writing a series of spy satire novels (which take espionage absurdity to a new level). The three of them also kicked around views on a range of spy satire films, from 1985's Spies Like Us to the puppet-centric Team America to Spy with Melissa McCarthy. Learn more about Chatter at https://shows.acast.com/chatter.
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From July 12, 2014: As the election crisis in Afghanistan comes to a head, all eyes—or some of them, anyway—are once again on the future of Afghan democracy. But the United States's history in the region extends back much further than its nation-building efforts there since September 2001. On Tuesday, at a Brookings Institution launch event for his newest book entitled, “What We Won: America’s Secret War in Afghanistan, 1979-1989,” Bruce Riedel, Senior Fellow and Director of the Intelligence Project at Brookings, discussed lessons the United States can learn from its successful efforts in the 1970s and 1980s in Afghanistan. In his talk, Riedel discusses why the American intelligence operation in Afghanistan in the 1980s was so successful, and what, if any lessons, the United States can apply to its ongoing operations in the country. Riedel also explored the complex personalities and individuals who shaped the war, and explained how their influence still affects the region today. Brookings Institution President Strobe Talbott provided introductory remarks and moderated the conversation.
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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In this live recording of the Lawfare Live event, “Ukraine and the Future of National Security Law,” Natalie Orpett moderated a panel of experts, including Brian Finucane, senior adviser for the U.S. Program at the International Crisis Group; Chimene Keitner, professor of international law at UC Hastings; Todd Huntley, director of the National Security Law Program at Georgetown Law; and Scott R. Anderson, Lawfare senior editor and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. They talked about a wide range of issues coming out of the current conflict in Ukraine, ranging from war crimes, to sanctions, to information operations, to the multidimensional role that technology is playing. They talked about what we're seeing now and what it may mean for the future of national security law and international law.
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This week on Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with a reporter who has carved out a unique beat writing about not just technology but the creativity and peculiarities of the people who use it—Taylor Lorenz, a columnist at the Washington Post covering technology and online culture. Her recent writing includes reporting on “algospeak”—that is, how algorithmic amplification changes how people talk online—and coverage of the viral Twitter account Libs of TikTok, which promotes social media posts of LGBTQ people for right-wing mockery. They talked about the quirks of a culture shaped in conversation with algorithms, the porous border between internet culture and political life in the United States, and what it means to take the influence of social media seriously, for good and for ill.
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Monday evening on the Tucker Carlson show, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene was complaining that she had to submit to sworn questioning in connection with the Jan. 6 insurrection. That will come on Friday in a case designed to disqualify her as an insurrectionist from future holding of office. It will take place before an administrative law judge in Georgia, her home state, and that makes this the first case brought under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to actually move to discovery.
For an update on the Marjorie Taylor Greene case and the other Section 3 of the 14th Amendment disqualification litigations, Benjamin Wittes sat down with Lawfare senior editor Roger Parloff. They talked about how this case came to an actual testimony by Marjorie Taylor Greene, where the other 14th Amendment disqualifications are and what we should expect in her livestream testimony on Friday.
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Throughout human history, democracies have been the exception, not the rule, and that's been doubly true for ethnically, religiously or linguistically diverse societies. But these are precisely the societies that benefit the most from politically stable and inclusive institutions. So why is it so hard to get them to work? And what can we do to encourage them?
Yascha Mounk teaches political science at Johns Hopkins University and is one of the leading commentators on the threats to liberal democracy. And he's just published a book, “The Great Experiment: Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure.” Alan Rozenshtein spoke with Yascha about his book, his diagnosis of what ails diverse democracies and what can be done to strengthen them.
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Scott R. Anderson is a senior editor at Lawfare, a fellow at the Brookings Institution and a senior fellow with the National Security Law Program at Columbia Law School. He’s also the author of a new Politico Magazine piece that raises an often overlooked vulnerability in the presidential election. A lot of attention after Jan. 6 and Nov. 2020 has rightly gone to the Electoral Count Act and other similar reforms, but Scott argues that if Congress really wants to protect the presidency, it can't just reform the process for counting electoral votes. Jacob Schulz sat down with Scott to talk about his Politico article and about the broader landscape of electoral reforms in the aftermath of 2020.
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From March 6, 2019: Susan Hennessey interviewed FBI Director Chris Wray at the 2019 RSA Conference. They discussed how the Director views the cyber threat landscape 18 months into his term, his concerns about the threats posed by Russia and China, what the FBI is doing to protect the 2020 elections, and more.
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From November 14, 2012: Ritika Singh interviews American University scholar Stephen Tankel on Pakistani counterterrorism cooperation, the endgame in Afghanistan, and Lashkar-e-Taiba.
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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American political life is defined by what can seem like a paradox. Our society is incredibly politically polarized, but our parties are as weak as they've ever been. How else could a reality TV star have so quickly and completely taken control of one of our major political parties?
For Larry Jacobs, a political scientist and professor at the University of Minnesota, the weakness of our parties is a major threat to American democracy. But as he explains in his new book, “Democracy under Fire: Donald Trump and the Breaking of American History,” the roots of this weakness go back all the way to the earliest years of the United States and today manifest in our broken system of presidential primaries.
Alan Rozenshtein spoke with Larry about his new book, his diagnosis of what ails American politics and what, if anything, can be done to fix it.
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The internet is increasingly emerging as a source for identification and documentation of war crimes, as the Russian invasion of Ukraine has devastatingly proven yet again. But how does an image of a possible war crime go from social media to before a tribunal in a potential war crimes prosecution?
On a recent episode of Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Nick Waters, the lead on Justice and Accountability at Bellingcat, about how open-source investigators go about documenting evidence of atrocity. This week on the show, Evelyn and Quinta interviewed Alexa Koenig, the executive director of the Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley, and an expert on using digital evidence for justice and accountability. They talked about how international tribunals have adapted to using new forms of evidence derived from the internet, how social media platforms have helped—and hindered—collection of this kind of evidence, and the work Alexa has done to create a playbook for investigators downloading and collecting material documenting atrocities.
Because of the nature of the conversation, this discussion contains some descriptions of violence that might be upsetting for some listeners.
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Over the weekend, France held the first round of its presidential elections for 2022. The result was that the same two candidates as last time will move on to the final round: incumbent President Emmanuel Macron and far-right challenger Marine Le Pen. To talk through the election results and what comes next, Jacob Schulz sat down with Agneska Bloch, a senior research assistant at a DC-based think tank where she works on European affairs.
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Over the weekend, Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan, a former international cricket star who later ascended to the role of prime minister, was removed from office. Khan lost a no confidence vote in Pakistan’s parliament that came after a few weeks of intense legal and political turmoil.
To make sense of the complicated developments, Jacob Schulz sat down with Madiha Afzal, a fellow in the Foreign Policy Program at the Brookings Institution. They talked about how the situation has developed, how to think about the relative roles of opposition political parties and the military, and what comes next.
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The period after Watergate and President Nixon's resignation saw an unprecedented barrage of congressional efforts at reforming the executive branch. The period after Donald Trump's departure from office has seen no comparable spree of legislative action—at least not yet. In a recent Lawfare article, Quinta Jurecic and Andrew Kent explored the disparity and the reasons for it, and they analyzed whether any of the legislative reforms that have been so far proposed have any prospect of passage. They joined Benjamin Wittes to talk about why things are so different today than they were in the late 1970s, what happened in that period and whether Congress will actually be able to do anything now.
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From December 19, 2019: In this episode of Lawfare's Arbiters of Truth series, Alina Polyakova and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Peter Pomerantsev, a research fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University and the author of "This is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality." The book explores how the nature of propaganda has shifted as authoritarian governments move from silencing dissent to drowning dissent out with squalls of disinformation. Pomerantsev argues that this transformation traces back to the cynicism and chaos in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union, but now it's become all too familiar around the world.
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From August 26, 2020: Yemen is home to the most tragic circumstances imaginable right now—years upon years of war, environmental disasters and severe humanitarian plight, exacerbated by cholera, diphtheria and now COVID-19. To discuss the ongoing situation, David Priess sat down with Elisabeth Kendall, a senior research fellow in Arabic and Islamic Studies at Pembroke College, Oxford University, who has spent extensive time on the ground in Yemen, and Mick Mulroy, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East. They talked about the roots of the Yemeni war and its humanitarian toll, its evolution through conflict and COVID-19, and prospects for improved conditions.
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Last week on Lawfare Live, Jacob Schulz sat down with Andrew Mines, a research fellow at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism. Mines helps lead the Program on Extremism's efforts to keep track of criminal charges resulting from the Jan. 6 Capitol Hill siege. They talked about the U.S military’s efforts to counter extremism within its ranks. Mines is the recent author of a Lawfare piece on the subject, and they talked through the history of the problem, the history of Defense Department efforts to fix it and where the department is still coming up short.
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We’re taking a look back at one of the stranger stories about social media platforms and the role of the press in the last presidential election. In the weeks before the 2020 election, the New York Post published an “October Surprise”: a set of stories on the business and personal life of Hunter Biden, the son of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, based on emails contained on a mysterious laptop. A great deal was questionable about the Post’s reporting, including to what extent the emails in question were real and how the tabloid had obtained them in the first place. The mainstream press was far more circumspect in reporting out the story—and meanwhile, Twitter and Facebook sharply restricted circulation of the Post’s stories on their platforms.
It’s a year and half later. And the Washington Post just published a lengthy report verifying the authenticity of some of the emails on the mysterious laptop—though a lot still remains unclear about the incident. In light of this news, how should we understand Facebook and Twitter’s actions in 2020?
Washington Post technology reporter Will Oremus weighed in on this question in his own reflection for the paper. This week on Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic asked him on the show to discuss the story. Did the social media platforms go too far in limiting access to the New York Post’s reporting? How did the mainstream press deal with the incident? What have we learned from the failures of how the press and social media responded to information operations around the 2016 election, and what can we learn from how they behaved differently in 2020?
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In the last few weeks, much has been said about how energy issues are playing into Russia's ongoing war in Ukraine. It's especially coming up in the context of sanctions regimes against Russia, whose economy relies so heavily on energy production. But the war has serious implications for energy security more broadly.
Natalie Orpett sat down with Erin Sikorsky, director of the Center for Climate and Security, to talk about how the events in Ukraine are both exposing and exacerbating threats to energy security and climate security. They discussed the effect of European dependence on Russian oil and gas, how ecological damage is causing both immediate crises and long-term threats, why the conflict is causing food insecurity at a global scale, and what, if anything, can be done about it.
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On June 3, President Biden issued a national security memorandum that established the “Fight Against Corruption” as a core national security interest for the United States. The memo described the staggering costs of corruption, with it being “estimated that acts of corruption sap between 2 and 5 percent from global gross domestic product.” The memo also directed U.S. officials to develop a comprehensive presidential strategy focused on anti-corruption.
Alvaro Marañon sat down with Paul Massaro, the senior policy advisor for counter-kleptocracy at the Helsinki Commission, to speak about the United States government's latest anti-corruption efforts following the June memo. They discussed the latest developments in the efforts to combat corruption, details around the first-ever presidential strategy on anti-corruption and the kinds of messages these unified efforts send to other authoritarian regimes beyond Russia.
For more on this topic, consider watching “Countering Oligarchs, Enablers, and Lawfare,” a hearing on Wednesday, April 6, at 2:30 p.m., hosted by the Helsinki Commission.
Disclaimer: Paul Massaro serves on the staff of the U.S. Helsinki Commission. The views expressed here are his own and do not represent an official position of the U.S. government.
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Madeleine Albright passed away on March 23. She was the first woman to serve as secretary of state in United States history, and she had a long legacy, both from her time as secretary and beyond. To talk through what made her special and what her impact was, David Priess sat down with Kori Schake and Natalie Orpett. Kori is the director of Foreign and Defense Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, and she worked in the Department of Defense, the Department of State and the National Security Council staff. Natalie Orpett is the executive editor of Lawfare, and she worked with Secretary Albright as her executive assistant after she had left the Department of State. They talked about some of the foreign policy developments during Secretary Albright's tenure; about her personal relationships, including with those with whom she did not agree; and about her legacy when it comes to helping women in national security positions.
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From October 1, 2019: The first two years of the Trump presidency were tied up with the Russia scandal. Now, there’s another scandal involving Russia’s next-door neighbor: Ukraine. The revelation that President Trump and his envoys pressured the Ukrainian government for information about debunked claims of Biden family corruption in Ukraine have brought Ukrainian domestic politics onto the American stage. The Ukrainian side of this very American scandal is complicated yet vital to understanding the whistleblower complaint and the reality of what happened with the Ukrainian prosecutor and Joe Biden’s son. Quinta Jurecic sat down with Alina Polyakova, the Director of the Project on Global Democracy and Emerging Technology at the Brookings Institution, to break it all down. They talked about recent Ukrainian political developments, what exactly Joe Biden did or didn’t do in Ukraine, and what this might mean for the U.S.-Ukraine relationship going forward.
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From April 13, 2020: Whether it has been travel bans, family separation, or changes to asylum rules, the Trump administration has long been embroiled in controversies over its immigration and detention policy. Those controversies have come amidst surges in migrants and asylum seekers, particularly at the U.S. southern border. The Trump administration's new policies have been legally and technically complex, and that was all before COVID-19.
Mikhaila Fogel sat down with immigration reporters Hamed Aleaziz of Buzzfeed News and Dara Lind of ProPublica, as well as Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a lawyer at the American Immigration Council. They discussed how Immigration and Customs Enforcement, as well as Customs and Border Protection, are responding to COVID-19; the changing legal landscape for those agencies before the pandemic; and the challenges faced by migrants, asylum seekers and the U.S. immigration system during coronavirus and beyond.
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Andrea Chalupa is a writer, podcaster and Ukrainian American who worked for 15 years on a screenplay about a man named Gareth Jones, a journalist who uncovered the genocide perpetrated by Stalin against Ukrainians in the early 1930s. Directed by the great filmmaker Agnieszka Holland, the film is called “Mr. Jones,” and it was released in the middle of the pandemic. It is an incredible piece of work that could not be more relevant to the current news about the conflict in Ukraine. Chalupa sat down with Benjamin Wittes to discuss Gareth Jones; the New York Times reporter in Moscow at the time, Walter Duranty; her own grandfather; and the story of how she came to write this film.
Please note that this episode contains brief depictions of violence, including against children, that some listeners may find disturbing. Listener discretion is advised.
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This week on Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information environment, we’re turning our attention to the United Kingdom, where the government has just introduced into Parliament a broad proposal for regulating the internet: the Online Safety Bill. The U.K. government has proclaimed that the Bill represents new “world-first online safety laws” and includes “tougher and quicker criminal sanctions for tech bosses.” So … what would it actually do?
To answer this question, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Ellen Judson, a senior researcher at the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at Demos, a U.K. think tank. Ellen has been closely tracking the legislation as it has developed. And she helped walk us through the tangled system of regulations created by the bill. What new obligations does the Online Safety Bill create, and what companies would those obligations apply to? Why is the answer to so many questions “yet to be defined”—a phrase we kept saying again and again throughout the show—and how much of the legislation is just punting the really difficult questions for another day? What happens now that the bill has been formally introduced in Parliament?
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In the hours following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Ukraine's foreign minister tweeted out a call for what he called an international legion of fighters to come to Ukraine and fight against Russia. And so far, it seems that some have heeded that call. Jacob Schulz talked with Daniel Byman, Lawfare’s foreign policy editor and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, who is the author of a book on foreign fighters. They talked through the history of foreign fighters in different conflicts, how to think about the inflows into Ukraine and what the downsides might be of the phenomenon of foreign fighters traveling to Ukraine.
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We live in a time of seemingly constant catastrophes, and we always seem a step behind and still fumble when they occur. It's no longer about preventing disasters from occurring, but learning how to use the tools at our disposal to minimize the consequences when they inevitably do.
Juliette Kayyem has just written a book about it all called, “The Devil Never Sleeps: Learning to Live in an Age of Disasters.” Juliette is a lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and a CNN national security analyst, and David Priess sat down with her to talk about it all. They talked about the traditional focus of the disaster framework; consequences minimalization; the paradox of preparedness; and a variety of disasters and what we can learn from them, ranging from the Y2K incident, to Super Bowl XLVII, to the shipping incident in the Suez Canal back in 2021. They talk a lot about how to recover from disasters, and how to deal with them in a way that stops the bleeding and keeps them from getting worse, even as they’re occurring.
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Polina Ivanova is a Moscow correspondent for the Financial Times, and has spent the better part of the last decade reporting from Russia for that publication, for Reuters and elsewhere. She joined Benjamin Wittes to talk through the Russian military press conference that took place on Friday in which the Ministry of Defense seemed to walk back Russia's war aims in the Ukraine conflict. Ben and Polina talked about what the Ministry of Defense said, how different or similar it is from previous Russian statements about what this war is about, whether it was intended for international or domestic consumption, or maybe both, and whether it provides a plausible basis for resolution of the conflict.
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From February 19, 2021: On February 1, Myanmar's military overthrew the country's democratically elected government in a coup and declared a state of emergency for a year. Since then, the country has seen daily peaceful protests and large-scale strikes against military rule, at times clashing with security forces who have been seen using tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse crowds. To break it all down, Rohini Kurup spoke with Aye Min Thant, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist based in Myanmar. They discussed Myanmar's history of military rule, what it is like living through a coup and what to expect in the coming weeks.
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From March 4, 2021: On this episode of Arbiters of Truth, the Lawfare Podcast’s miniseries on disinformation and misinformation, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Emily Bell, the founding director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School. Emily testified before Congress last week about the role of legacy media, and cable news in particular, in spreading disinformation, but she’s also one of the keenest observers of the online news ecosystem and knows a lot about it from her days as director of digital content for The Guardian. They talked about the relationship between online and offline media in spreading disinformation, the role different institutions need to play in fixing what’s broken and whether all the talk about “fighting misinformation” is a bit of a red herring.
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Earlier this month, the Supreme Court issued rulings in two separate cases involving the state secrets privilege: United States v. Abu Zubaydah and Federal Bureau of Investigation v. Fazaga. To talk about the Court's decision and what it means for state secrets doctrine and executive power, Rohini Kurup sat down with Liza Goitein, co-director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, and Bob Loeb, partner in Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe’s Supreme Court and Appellate Litigation practice, and former acting deputy director of the Civil Division Appellate Staff at the Department of Justice. Rohini first talked to them on the Lawfare Podcast back in October when they discussed the cases that were then before the Court. Now that the Court has issued its ruling, they got back together to discuss the Court's decision and what it means for the future of state secrets doctrine.
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Over the last few weeks, we’ve talked a lot about the war in Ukraine on this series—how the Russian, Ukrainian and American governments are leveraging information as part of the conflict; how tech platforms are navigating the flood of information coming out of Ukraine and the crackdown from the Kremlin; and how open-source investigators are documenting the war.
This week on Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information environment, we’re going to talk about getting information into Russia during a period of rapidly increasing repression by the Russian government. Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Thomas Kent, a former president of the U.S. government-funded media organization Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, who now teaches at Columbia University. He recently wrote an essay published by the Center for European Policy Analysis on “How to Reach Russian Ears,” suggesting creative ways that reporters, civil society and even the U.S. government might approach communicating the truth about the war in Ukraine to Russians. This was a thoughtful and nuanced conversation about a tricky topic—whether, and how, democracies should think about leveraging information as a tool against repressive governments, and how to distinguish journalism from such strategic efforts.
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Cyberwar is here, proclaims Thomas Rid, professor of strategic studies at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies in a New York Times op-ed last week entitled, “Why You Haven’t Heard About the Secret Cyberwar in Ukraine.” While some cyber warfare experts expected massive cyberattacks against Ukraine before Russia invaded in February of this year, Rid suggests in his op-ed that significant cyberattacks have occurred, but they are more covert and insidious in nature, and we're not focusing on them. Stephanie Pell spoke with Rid about the kinds of cyber operations and attacks we have seen in Ukraine, how we might compare and contrast them, along with some of his insights about the use of leaks and disinformation in this conflict.
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General John Baker served until December as the chief defense council at the military commissions. The military commissions’ prosecutors and defense lawyers are in conversations now about a possible plea deal to resolve the 9/11 case once and for all—that's the case of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Ramzi Binalshibh and three others of their al-Qaeda co-conspirators. It has been hanging around in the military commissions for more than a dozen years, and until the other day, it showed no sign of coming to a close. Trial is still some time away, and appeals will take years more than that, but the current round of plea negotiations promises a potential way out—removing the death penalty from the table in exchange for guilty pleas and presumably life sentences.
Benjamin Wittes sat down with General Baker to talk about his history at the military commissions, why the process has gotten so bogged down and the promise of the current negotiations. Are they different from earlier rounds, or is this another fit and start before policymakers fail to take the leap?
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Alex Finley is a former officer of the CIA's Directorate of Operations, who now is a novelist and a writer. Most recently, though, Alex has taken up a different task. She is the leader of #YachtWatch, an effort to track down and monitor the movements of massive yachts belonging to Russian oligarchs. #YachtWatch has become a popular way of following and staying engaged with the fallout from the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Jacob Schulz spoke with Alex about #YachtWatch, how she conducts the project and what its value is in an oversaturated media ecosystem.
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From February 8, 2020: Russia continues to sporadically poke its head into American media headlines, whether it be for its role in Syria or for anxieties about fresh election interference in 2020. But these news stories seldom provide a window into life in Putin’s Russia. Jacob Schulz sat down with Joshua Yaffa, the Moscow correspondent for the New Yorker, to talk about his new book, "Between Two Fires: Truth, Ambition, and Compromise in Putin’s Russia." The book gives a series of portraits of prominent figures within Putin’s Russia and details the compromises they make to maintain their status and goodwill with the Kremlin. They talked about this framework as a way to understand Russia, what Putin’s rule looks like on the peripheries of the country, and about a couple of the fascinating characters that animate the book.
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We're bringing you the second episode of Lawfare’s new narrative series, The Aftermath, which deals specifically with the early phases of the criminal investigation launched by the FBI, even as the perpetrators of the riot were heading home. The episode features interviews with former FBI and Justice Department official Chuck Rosenberg, New York Times reporter Katie Benner, and Seamus Hughes of the George Washington University Program on Extremism. The episode tells the story of how the investigation got started, the challenges investigators faced in a nationwide manhunt featuring thousands of suspects and perpetrators, and the internal struggle that had just taken place within the Justice Department itself.
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In the aftermath of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, one of the groups receiving the most attention for its participation in the insurrection on the Hill was the Oath Keepers, a right-wing extremist group that's been in existence since 2009 but has taken on an increased public profile since the riot last year. In early January, the group’s leader, Stewart Rhodes, along with 10 others, was indicted in U.S. federal court for seditious conspiracy in connection with the Capitol breach. To discuss the group, its history, and its role on Jan. 6, Jacob Schulz sat down with Sam Jackson, an assistant professor at the University of Albany and the author of a 2020 book about the Oath Keepers and their ideology.
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Open-source investigations—sometimes referred to as OSINT, or open-source intelligence—have been crucial to public understanding of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. An enormous number of researchers have devoted their time to sifting through social media posts, satellite images, and even Google Maps to track what’s happening in Ukraine and debunk false claims about the conflict.
This week on Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, we devoted the show to understanding how open-source investigations work and why they’re important. Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke to Nick Waters, the lead on Justice and Accountability at Bellingcat, one of the most prominent groups devoted to conducting these types of investigations. They talked about the crucial role played by open-source investigators in documenting the conflict in Syria—well before the war in Ukraine—and how the field has developed since its origins in the Arab Spring and the start of the Syrian Civil War. And Nick walked us through the mechanics of how open-source investigations actually happen, and how social media platforms have helped—and hindered—that work.
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Alexander Stubb is the former prime minister, foreign minister and finance minister of Finland. Back in 2008, after the Russian invasion of Georgia, he worked on the ceasefire between Russia and Georgia, giving him a valuable perspective on much of what's going on today. He sat down with David Priess for a conversation covering his experience negotiating that ceasefire in 2008, his experienced impressions of Vladimir Putin and Sergey Lavrov, the differences between this Russian action in Ukraine now and its previous aggressions, and what it all means for European unity and for Finland's place in NATO.
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It's been an eventful week in the department of criminal cases arising out of Jan. 6. We had the first jury verdict convicting an alleged 1/6 perpetrator, an Oath Keeper guilty plea for seditious conspiracy, the indictment of the head of the Proud Boys, and a judge rejecting the lead charge the government has used in a whole lot of criminal cases arising out of the Capitol insurrection. To catch up, Benjamin Wittes sat down with Roger Parloff, who has been covering 1/6 criminal matters for Lawfare. They talked about the news of the last couple of weeks, focusing particularly on Judge Carl Nichols’s controversial ruling about the availability of an obstruction prosecution to the government.
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Russia's war of aggression in Ukraine has undermined some of the fundamental assumptions underlying the security of Europe through much of the post-World War II era. As a result, several European nations have begun to consider dramatic changes in how they approach national security, both individually and collectively.
To better understand how the war in Ukraine is reshaping the European security order, Scott R. Anderson sat down with two of his colleagues from the Brookings Institution: Célia Belin, a visiting fellow at Brookings and a former official in the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and Constanze Stelzenmüller, the Fritz Stern Chair on Germany and trans-Atlantic Relations in the Center on the United States and Europe.
They discussed how the Ukraine conflict is reshaping Europe's approach to security affairs, what this means for institutions like the European Union and NATO, and how these changes are likely to impact the fundamental debate over what it means to be a part of Europe.
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From February 18, 2020: In what ways did American foreign policy fail to capitalize on victory in the Cold War? Andrew Bacevich, professor emeritus at Boston University and co-founder and president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, tackles that question and more in "The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory." Jack Goldsmith sat down with Professor Bacevich to talk about his new book. The pair discussed the establishment consensus on American foreign policy, the state of civil-military relations, and the mission of the newly founded Quincy Institute.
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From November 20, 2020: Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman (Ret.) is the Pritzker Military Fellow at the Lawfare Institute. You've heard his story, likely in his testimony in the impeachment proceedings for President Trump. But Benjamin Wittes sat down with him for a different reason—his substantive expertise in Eastern Europe policy, Russia matters and great power competition. They talked about the challenges the Biden administration will face as it tries to pick up the pieces the Trump administration has left it, how democracies can hang together and harden themselves against attacks from authoritarian regimes, what a good Russia policy looks like, how China fits in and how we can rebuild traditional American alliances.
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As the war in Ukraine grinds into its third week, conditions on the ground have grown increasingly brutal. While Ukrainian forces have proven remarkably successful at repelling the Russian advance so far, Russian forces have continued to make slow and steady progress into the country, with no clear resolution in sight. To get a sense of the state of the conflict and where it might be headed, Scott R. Anderson sat down with Michael Kofman, director of the Russia Studies Program at CNA and a leading analyst on the Ukraine conflict. They talked about what's gone wrong for Russia so far, how Western assistance is empowering the Ukrainians and how both sides are likely to adapt as the conflict enters its next stage.
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As Russia’s brutal war in Ukraine continues, tech platforms like Facebook and Twitter have been key geopolitical players in the conflict. The Kremlin has banned those platforms and others as part of a sharp clampdown on freedoms within Russia. Meanwhile, these companies must decide what to do with state-funded Russian propaganda outlets like RT and Sputnik that have accounts on their platforms—and how best to moderate the flood of information, some of it gruesome or untrue, that’s appearing as users share material about the war.
This week on Arbiters of Truth, our podcast series on the online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Alex Stamos, director of the Stanford Internet Observatory. They discussed how various platforms, from Twitter to TikTok and Telegram, are moderating the content coming out of Russia and Ukraine right now; the costs and benefits of Western companies pulling operations out of Russia during a period of increasing crackdown; and how the events of the last few weeks might shape our thinking about the nature and power of information operations.
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You may think you know all that you need to about the Watergate scandal, its origins, its evolution and its implications. But there has been a lot of new information in the last couple of decades that is simply not in earlier full histories of the scandal. Journalist and popular historian Garrett Graff has written a new history of Watergate called, “Watergate: A New History,” the first overall picture of Watergate in quite some time.
David Priess sat down with Garrett to talk about the contours of the Watergate scandal, and in particular, about some of its national security and foreign policy episodes. They discussed the evolution of Nixon's thinking involving the tapes that he recorded of his White House conversations, the extraordinary order that the Secretary of Defense gave during the height of the scandal to warn soldiers about following the commander-in-chief's orders, and more.
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Kateryna is a fourth-year law student at a university in Kharkiv, Ukraine—at least she was until a few days ago. That's when the Russian army came in and started bombarding the town she grew up in and studies in. Benjamin Wittes spoke with her recently about life as a Russian-speaking Ukrainian in Kharkiv before and after the invasion, about getting out of town, and about being a refugee law student in an adjacent country.
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The Russian invasion of Ukraine continues full blast with a great deal of brutality, a great deal of destruction and indeterminate levels of success. To talk about it, Benjamin Wittes sat down on Lawfare Live with Alina Polyakova of the Center for European Policy Analysis; Toomas Ilves, the former president of Estonia; Dmitri Alperovitch, the head of the Silverado Policy Accelerator; Alex Vindman, the Pritzker Military Fellow at the Lawfare Institute; and Lawfare’s Dominic Bustillos. They talked about how the Russian incursion is going, whether the Russians are succeeding or falling short, how firm the the European opposition is and how debilitating it is to the Russian economy.
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From December 9, 2017: When the Department of Justice required RT, the Russian-funded news outlet, to register as a foreign agent last month, the Russian government responded in kind. Yet the Kremlin's recent crackdown on Western media is just part of a longer history of stifling independent media in Russia. For this episode of the Lawfare Podcast's special Russia series, Alina Polyakova talked to Mikhail Zygar, a Russian independent journalist, filmmaker, and author of two books on the Kremlin’s elite circle. They discussed what it’s like to be an independent journalist in Russia today, why Putin may be far from a strategic mastermind, and much more.
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From March 22, 2014: On March 19, the Center on the United States and Europe (CUSE) hosted NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen for a Statesman’s Forum address on the importance of the transatlantic alliance and how the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is evolving to address new common security challenges. As the crisis in Ukraine shows that security in the Euro-Atlantic area cannot be taken for granted, the secretary-general discussed NATO’s essential role in an unpredictable world. He outlined the agenda for the September NATO summit in Wales as a critical opportunity to ensure that the alliance has the military capabilities necessary to deal with the threats it now faces, to consider how NATO members can better share the collective burden of defense and to engage constructively with partners around the world.
Anders Fogh Rasmussen took office as North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s 12th secretary-general in August 2009. Previously, he served in numerous positions in the Danish government and opposition throughout his political career, including as prime minister of Denmark from November 2001 to April 2009.
Brookings Senior Fellow and CUSE Director Fiona Hill provided introductory remarks and moderated the discussion.
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Over the past two decades, much of the public's attention has been focused on private markets for individual data, but another equally invasive and expansive market has emerged during this time. The public sector, composed of the federal government, states and cities, have created a substantially and rapidly expanding inter-governmental marketplace in individual data. It is used in areas ranging from policing and immigration, to public health and housing. But this exchange around individual data brings about serious concerns for both privacy and federalism.
Alvaro Marañon sat down with Bridget Fahey, a law professor at the University of Chicago Law School, to discuss her new law review article, “Data Federalism.” They go into detail about the hybrid structures governing these exchanges of individual data, the risk and protections afforded by existing federalism principles and doctrines, and how and why data is power.
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Almost immediately since he was banned from Twitter and Facebook in January 2021, Donald Trump has been promising the launch of a new, Trump-run platform to share his thoughts with the world. In February 2022, that network—Truth Social—finally launched. But it’s been a debacle from start to finish, with a lengthy waitlist and a glitchy website that awaits users who finally make it online.
Drew Harwell, who covers technology at the Washington Post, has been reporting on the less-than-smooth launch of Truth Social. This week on Arbiters of Truth, our podcast series on the online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with him about who, exactly, this platform is for and who is running it. What explains the glitchy rollout? What’s the business plan … if there is one? And how does the platform fit into the ever-expanding universe of alternative social media sites for right-wing users?
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For the past two decades, there has been an epidemic of data breaches, from Target, to Home Depot, to Equifax, to Uber, just to name a few. In their new book, “Breached! Why Data Security Law Fails and How to Improve It,” Daniel Solove, the John Marshall Harlan Research Professor of Law at the George Washington University Law School, and Woodrow Hartzog, Professor of Law and Computer Science at Northeastern University, tell us why current data security law fails and how we can improve it.
Stephanie Pell spoke with Dan and Woody about a number of issues they raise in their book, including how current data security law overemphasizes the conduct of breached entities and fails to distribute responsibility among a range of actors in the data ecosystem that contributes to the data breach. They also talked about their ideas for more proactive data security laws that work to reduce the harm caused by data breaches once they occur, encourage greater integration of privacy and security principles, and promote data security rules and practices designed with humans in mind.
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Over the past week, the United States and its allies have responded to Russia's military invasion of Ukraine with some unprecedented actions of their own—economic sanctions that target Russia in ways that have never been tried before, let alone applied to one of the world's largest economies over just a handful of days.
To discuss this revolutionary sanctions strategy and what it may mean moving forward, Scott R. Anderson sat down with two sanctions experts: Julia Friedlander, senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, and Rachel Ziemba, adjunct fellow at the Center for a New American Security. They talked about the different types of sanctions being applied, what impact they will have on the Russian economy and what the consequences may be, not just for the conflict in Ukraine, but for the rest of the world moving forward.
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In the national security world, including on Lawfare, a lot of attention gets paid to China's tech sector and other parts of its economy. Comparatively less attention is paid to China's illicit economies, illegal trade involving China and other countries around the world. But China has been involved in numerous acts of transnational criminal activity with occasionally lax enforcement, and there's a new series of Brookings papers and blog posts about this very subject.
To talk it through. Jacob Schulz sat down with Vanda Felbab-Brown, the director of the Initiative on Nonstate Armed Actors and a senior fellow in the Foreign Policy program at Brookings, and Madiha Afzal, a fellow in the Foreign Policy program at Brookings. They talked through the project and papers that each of them have written on the subject, including one on illegal wildlife trafficking, one on narcotic precursor trafficking and one on human trafficking.
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From October 31, 2015: Perhaps you’ve heard, but tensions between the United States and Russia are heating up. With Putin upping the ante in Syria, Marvin Kalb, journalist, scholar, and a nonresident senior fellow in Foreign Policy at Brookings, came to Brookings to launch his new book that looks at the Russian leader’s last foray into another country. Entitled, Imperial Gamble: Putin, Ukraine, and the New Cold War. Putin’s recent actions in Crimea, eastern Ukraine and, more recently, in Syria have provoked a sharp deterioration in East-West relations. Is this the beginning of a new Cold War, or is Putin just wearing the costume of a prizefighter?
Joining the discussion were Thomas Friedman of the New York Times and Nina Khrushcheva, a professor at The New School. Brookings President Strobe Talbott provided introductory remarks while Martin Indyk, Executive Vice President of Brookings moderated the conversation.
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From November 27, 2018: This week, Russia and Ukraine went at it in the Kerch Strait, which separates the Black Sea from the Sea of Azov. It's the latest salvo in Russia's secret (not-so-secret) war against Ukraine and its eastern provinces, and it's the latest thing that has the world talking about Vladimir Putin's lawlessness in his back yard.
To understand it all, Benjamin Wittes spoke with Alina Polyakova and Scott Anderson. They talked about what happened this week, the international law implications, and the domestic politics in both Ukraine and Russia.
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Bryce Klehm sat down with Matthieu Aikins, a Canadian journalist and the author of the new book, “The Naked Don't Fear the Water: An Underground Journey with Afghan Refugees.” The book details Matthieu’s undercover journey from Afghanistan to Europe. He made the trip with his translator, Omar, who had been denied a special immigrant visa despite having been a translator for coalition forces in Afghanistan. Following his visa denial, Omar decided to flee as a refugee, and Matthieu decided to join him for the journey. Matthieu and Bryce talked about a range of topics, including Matthieu and Omar's journey and the politics of migration in Europe.
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Over the last several weeks, Russian aggression toward Ukraine has escalated dramatically. Russian President Vladimir Putin announced on Feb. 21 that Russia would recognize the sovereignty of two breakaway regions in Ukraine’s east, Donetsk and Luhansk, whose years-long effort to secede from Ukraine has been engineered by Russia. Russian troops have entered eastern Ukraine as supposed “peacekeepers,” and the Russian military has taken up positions along a broad stretch of Ukraine’s border.
Along with the military dimensions of the crisis, there’s also the question of how various actors are using information to provoke or defuse violence. Russia has been spreading disinformation about supposed violence against ethnic Russians in Ukraine. The United States and its Western partners, meanwhile, have been releasing intelligence about Russia’s plans—and about Russian disinformation—at a rapid and maybe even unprecedented clip.
So today on Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, we’re bringing you an episode about the role of truth and falsehoods in the Russian attack on Ukraine. Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Olga Lautman, a non-resident senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis—who has been tracking Russian disinformation in Ukraine—and Shane Harris, a reporter at the Washington Post—who has been reporting on the crisis.
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Vladimir Putin has recognized two separatist regions in Ukraine, he has sent Russian troops as so-called peacekeepers to defend them, and all of this seems to be presaging a wider war in Ukraine. The United States and lots of other countries have announced sanctions, and it’s all heating up very fast.
To talk it all through, Benjamin Wittes sat down with Alex Vindman, Pritzker Military Fellow at Lawfare, and Lawfare, senior editor Scott R. Anderson. What is Vladimir Putin doing? What can we expect militarily? Why did he go through this Byzantine process of recognizing these two non-states? Are we expecting a wider conflict or a narrow one, and what do the prospects look like for either? And will the international community hang together?
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Last week, the Michael V. Hayden Center for Intelligence, Policy, and International Security and Lawfare hosted an event with Amy Zegart, a professor at Stanford University and one of the leading academic analysts of the intelligence community, to talk about her new book, “Spies, Lies, and Algorithms.”
David Priess hosted her for this live recording of the podcast, and they talked about intelligence education, about problems with the current structure of congressional oversight of the intelligence community, about the public role of intelligence in the crisis with Russia and Ukraine, about the growing role of open source information in intelligence, and much more.
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Happy Presidents' Day! To mark the day, Lawfare publisher David Priess recorded a special episode of Chatter with historian and author Lindsay Chervinsky, who discusses the history of this odd holiday—and the legacy of the first president, George Washington.
Chatteris Lawfare’s weekly long form interview podcast co-hosted by the Washington Post's Shane Harris and Lawfare’s David Priess, focusing on where intriguing ideas in culture, technology, entertainment and history intersect with the worlds of espionage and foreign affairs. Subscribe to Chatter on your favorite podcast platform and follow us on Twitter at @ThatWasChatter.
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From November 1, 2017: Stalin’s 1929 agricultural collectivization policy, which catalyzed the most lethal famine in European history, left millions of Ukrainian peasants dead. Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist Anne Applebaum recently published a book on this famine and the horrors of Stalin’s agricultural collectivization in Ukraine, revealing the more insidious intent behind the Soviet Union’s policy and enforcement. Last week, Benjamin Wittes interviewed Applebaum on her new book, Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine, to discuss the scope of the book, the devastating impact of Stalin’s policy on Ukraine’s peasant population, and the book’s relevance to Putin’s current agenda.
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From November 12, 2017: Matters Russia have been prevalent in U.S. politics since news of the Kremlin’s meddling in the 2016 elections first surfaced. It's time to pay some serious attention to the Russian surveillance apparatus. Andrei Soldatov, a Russian investigative journalist and co-author of the book, “The Red Web,” brings a unique interpretation of the Kremlin’s actions as an independent reporter in the very country Americans find so confusing. Special guest host Alina Polyakova, David M. Rubenstein fellow in Brookings’s Foreign Policy Program, interviewed Soldatov last week to discuss Russia’s perspective on the 2016 election meddling, the Kremlin’s surveillance operations, Edward Snowden, and much more.
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Madison Cawthorn is a Republican congressman from North Carolina. His candidacy for reelection is the subject of challenge under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment—the part that says that people who engage in insurrection are disqualified from holding future office under the Constitution.
Roger Parloff has written a lengthy article on Lawfare on the Cawthorn case, entitled “Can Madison Cawthorn Be Blocked From the North Carolina Ballot as an Insurrectionist?” He joined Benjamin Wittes to discuss the various ins and outs of this case, what constitutes an insurrection for purposes of the section, what Madison Cawthorn did, why he—of all members of Congress—is the one who is being subjected to this challenge, and who gets to decide who gets disqualified.
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Brandon Silverman is a former Facebook executive and founder of the data analytics tool CrowdTangle. Brandon joined Facebook in 2016 after the company acquired CrowdTangle, a startup designed to provide insight into what content is performing well on Facebook and Instagram, and he left in October 2021, in the midst of a debate over how much information the company should make public about its platform. As the New York Times described it, CrowdTangle “had increasingly become an irritant” to Facebook’s leadership “as it revealed the extent to which Facebook users engaged with hyperpartisan right-wing politics and misleading health information.”
This week on Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Brandon about what we mean when we talk about transparency from social media platforms and why that transparency matters. They also discussed his work with the Congress and other regulators to advise on what legislation ensuring more openness from platforms would look like—and why it’s so hard to draft regulation that works.
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Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland has been one of the most prominent voices in Congress speaking about Jan. 6 and the aftermath of the insurrection. He has a uniquely personal relationship with the violence that day: he lost his son shortly before the riot, and went on to serve both as an impeachment manager prosecuting the second impeachment of Donald Trump, and as a member of the House select committee on Jan. 6, on which he still sits.
On February 15, the Brookings Institution welcomed Representative Raskin to discuss his new book, “Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy.” For this special episode of the Lawfare Podcast, we’re bringing you audio of the event. First, you’ll hear Brookings President John R. Allen in conversation with Rep. Raskin. Then, you’ll hear a panel of Brookings scholars discuss Jan. 6 and Rep. Raskin’s reflections. Brookings senior fellow Sarah Binder moderated a discussion with Brookings senior fellows Fiona Hill, Rashawn Ray, Molly Reynolds, and Brookings fellow Quinta Jurecic.
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The Biden administration on Friday notified a court of a novel proposal to dispose of $7 billion in frozen Afghanistan assets, producing some pretty confusing media and a lot of anger. To try to unpack it, Benjamin Wittes sat down with Alex Zerden, the founder and principal of Capitol Peak Strategies and the former lead of the Treasury Department's office at the U.S.-Kabul embassy, and Lawfare senior editor Scott R. Anderson. They talked about what the Biden administration did and its executive order on Friday, how the media subtly got it wrong, what the implications are for pending litigation and for providing relief to the Afghan people, and whether the administration has successfully threaded a needle.
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Today on Lawfare, we’re publishing a piece by our editor-in-chief Benjamin Wittes and Lawfare senior editor Quinta Jurecic that revisits the Mueller report. Why? Because as of today, the statutes of limitations on potential obstruction charges against Donald Trump are beginning to expire.
Trump's attorney general declined to prosecute, but we have heard nothing from the current Department of Justice about what, if anything, it is thinking about potential obstruction charges against the now former president. Natalie Orpett sat down with Ben and Quinta to talk about why that may be, what could be going on inside DOJ, and what we can expect from Attorney General Garland.
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From January 16, 2016: Last week, we hated on bitcoin. This week we give it some love. This week, Brookings hosted a discussion on Bitcoin and the technology that undergirds the currency, specifically focusing on the promise of the distributed-ledger. The panel featured David Wessel, Michael Barr, Brad Peterson, Barry Silbert, and Margaret Liu, on how the blockchain could revolutionize payment flows and reduce the cost of financial transactions, all while securing information and enhancing privacy. They also tackle some of the most pressing policy questions facing the technology—from consumer protection to terrorists' finances—and how those tensions can be addressed.It's a relatively positive take on Bitcoin and its future potential and an argument for why you should buy back your Bitcoin if you sold it after last week's show featuring Lawfare's Bitcoin skeptic, Nick Weaver.
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From January 9, 2016: This week we have Nick Weaver on the show. Nick's a regular Lawfare contributor, senior staff researcher at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, California, and as you’ll see, quite the Bitcoin skeptic. Nick walks Ben through what exactly Bitcoin is, answering whether the platform is really a financial opportunity of historic proportions, the massive criminal problem law enforcement officials have suggested, or something else entirely: a waste of everyone's time and money. He also outlines some of the design flaws he sees in Bitcoin and why those flaws, which many in the Bitcoin community view as important features, will actually lead to the platform’s eventual downfall.
It’s a discussion of Ponzi schemes, the limits of the blockchain, and the future of international currency transactions.
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Over the past few weeks, Canada has been living through its own insurrectionary moment, as a series of trucker convoys have used tractor trailer trucks to occupy much of downtown Ottawa, launch protests in other major Canadian cities, and block points of entry along the country's southern border with the United States. While nominally objecting to Canadian vaccination mandates, particularly as applied to truckers, the convoy movement has at times made even more ambitious demands, including the dissolution of the Trudeau government, and it has close ties to far right-wing nationalists and ethno-nationalist organizations, both in Canada and the United States. While the convoy movement began in Canada, there are signs that is beginning to spread, with similar efforts appearing in Australia and New Zealand and intelligence reports suggesting the same may soon happen in the United States.
To put these recent developments in context, Scott R. Anderson sat down with three Canadian national security experts who have been following the convoy crisis closely: Amarnath Amarasingam, assistant professor at Queen’s University; Stephanie Carvin, associate professor at Carleton University; and Jessica Davis, president of Insight Threat Intelligence. They discussed the origins of the convoy movement, its relationship with domestic violent extremism and what it might mean for both Canada and the rest of the world.
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The Joe Rogan Experience is perhaps the most popular podcast in the world—and it’s been at the center of a weeks-long controversy over COVID misinformation and content moderation. After Rogan invited on a guest who told falsehoods about the safety of COVID vaccines, outrage mounted toward Spotify, the podcasting and music streaming company that recently signed an exclusive deal with Rogan to distribute his show. Spotify came under pressure to intervene, as nearly 300 experts sent the company a letter demanding it take action, and musicians Neil Young and Joni Mitchell pulled their music from Spotify’s streaming service. And the controversy only seems to be growing.
This week on Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Ashley Carman, a senior reporter at The Verge who writes the newsletter Hot Pod, covering the podcast and audio industry. She’s broken news on Spotify’s content guidelines and Spotify CEO’s Daniel Ek’s comments to the company’s staff, and we couldn’t think of a better person to talk to about this slow-moving disaster. How has Spotify responded to the complaints over Rogan, and what does that tell us about how the company is thinking about its responsibilities in curating content? What’s Ashley’s read on the state of content moderation in the podcast industry more broadly? And … is this debate even about content moderation at all?
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Last month, a court in Germany convicted a senior Assad government official for a crime against humanity and sentenced him to life in prison for activities overseeing detention centers in Syria, where the government interrogated and tortured suspected antigovernment activists. The case was unique, not just for the profile of the defendant, but for the fact that the crime had no nexus to Germany. Instead, it's an example of what scholars call a universal jurisdiction case. In these cases, a country like Germany exercises criminal jurisdiction over certain crimes like war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity. A collection of European countries, as well as Argentina, have incorporated provisions like this into their criminal code, and universal jurisdiction cases have served to bring justice for offenses committed in a range of conflicts across the world.
To talk through the most recent developments and the phenomenon of universal jurisdiction cases, Jacob Schulz sat down with Hayley Evans, a research fellow working on Afghanistan projects at the Max Planck Foundation for International Peace and Rule of Law.
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The House of Representatives last week passed the COMPETES Act, its counterpart to a Senate bill last year on competitiveness with China. What's in the bill? What would it do? How similar is it to the Senate bill? And how close are we to a major piece of China legislation?
Benjamin Wittes sat down on Lawfare Live with Susan Thornton, a retired U.S. diplomat who is currently a visiting lecturer in law at Yale Law School and a senior fellow at the Paul Tsai China Center, and Jordan Schneider, the host of the ChinaTalk podcast and newsletter. They talked about the legislation, the prospects for reconciling it for the Senate bill, and whether this is a real start or just window dressing.
This episode was recorded live for our Material Supporters.
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Last week was scary for historically black colleges and universities, 17 of which received bomb threats that caused disruptions, building closures and class cancellations. The FBI is investigating, but we don't know a lot about what happened. To go over what we do know, Benjamin Wittes sat down with Andy McCabe, former deputy director of the FBI who ran his share of counter-terrorism investigations, and Yasmin Cader, a deputy legal director at the ACLU and the director of the Trone Center for Justice and Equality. They talked about what we know about the investigation, how these investigations take place, and the tensions they involve between the FBI and communities of color. They also talked about the role of HBCUs and why people may be targeting them, whether the FBI is well positioned to investigate hate crimes, and what it needs to do to better position itself for this mission. They even talked about Jan. 6 and what the FBI's preparedness for that event says about its preparedness now.
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From February 23, 2021: For more than a week now, Texas has been struggling with a massive power outage caused by record low temperatures. Millions have been without power, heat and running water, and at least dozens have been confirmed to have died as a result. All states are confronting extreme weather, but Texas is unique in that its electricity is almost completely independent from the rest of the United States' grid. This has at times lowered costs and increased innovation in the Texas energy markets, but as the current crisis shows, Texas's energy exceptionalism comes at a cost. Alexandra Klass is the Distinguished McKnight University Professor at the University of Minnesota Law School and a nationally recognized expert on energy law and policy who recently wrote about the Texas energy crisis for Lawfare. Alan Rozenshtein spoke with her about the current situation and the future of energy policy, both for Texas and for the United States.
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From October 28, 2019: President Donald Trump announced on Sunday that Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State, died in a raid conducted by U.S. Special Operation Forces. The president used highly unusual language to describe the raid, including that al-Baghdadi “died like a dog.” He also stated that the U.S. would be “leaving soldiers to secure the oil.” Scott R. Anderson and Dan Byman join Benjamin Wittes to discuss the raid, what it means for the future of the Islamic State, Trump’s speech and what it all means for the broader region.
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Last night, U.S. forces in Northern Syria killed Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi who until yesterday was the current leader of ISIS. It was an operation in which at least 13 people, including civilians, were killed, apparently when al-Qurayshi detonated a bomb that destroyed the building they were in.
What are the implications for the future of ISIS, for the future of Syria and for the future of the U.S. military, which is supposedly at peace these days? To chew it over, Benjamin Wittes sat down with Lawfare senior editor Scott R. Anderson, and Hassan Hassan, editor-in-chief of New Lines Magazine. They talked about who al-Qurayshi was, what we know about him, who on the ground was helping the United States, the future of Syria and its new political landscape, and what this all means for Joe Biden.
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We talk a lot on this show about the responsibility of major tech platforms when it comes to content moderation. But what about problems the platforms can’t—or won’t—fix? Tracy Chou’s solution involves going around platforms entirely and creating tools that give power back to users to control their own experience. She’s the engineer behind Block Party, an app that allows Twitter users to protect themselves against online harassment and abuse. It’s a fine-tuned solution to a problem that a lot of Twitter users struggle with, especially women and particularly women of color.
This week on Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Tracy about her work developing Block Party and how the persistent lack of diversity in Silicon Valley contributes to an environment where users have little protection against harassment. They also talked about what it’s like working with the platforms that Block Party and other apps like it are seeking to improve. And they discussed what content moderation problems these kinds of user-driven tools might help solve–and which they won’t.
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Last month, the New York Times ran a story about YouTube videos promoting tourism to China and promoting messages sympathetic to the Chinese government. The accounts are a part of a broader network of profiles on Twitter, YouTube and other social media, spreading pro-Beijing narratives. To talk through the story and what to make of the accounts, Jacob Schulz sat down with one of the story's authors, Paul Mozur, a reporter at the New York Times, and Darren Linvill, an associate professor at the University of Clemson. They talked through who exactly these accounts are, what messages they promote and how to think about what impact they're having.
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Nearly six months have passed since the Taliban’s sudden takeover of Afghanistan. As the country faces down a failing economy and looming humanitarian catastrophe, the new Taliban regime is still struggling with what it means to govern, both internally within the country and externally in its relations with the broader international community.
To get a sense of the state of play in Afghanistan, Scott R. Anderson sat down with a panel of experts: Laurel Miller, director of the International Crisis Group’s Asia Program; Andrew Watkins, a senior expert on Afghanistan at the U.S. Institute of Peace; and Obaidullah Baheer, a lecturer at the American University in Afghanistan and a visiting scholar at The New School. They talked about the Taliban's approach to governing, its changing relationships with the outside world and what it all means for Afghanistan's future.
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What’s the best historical analogue for the American political situation today? Often, pundits will compare our current age of rising polarization and increasing political violence to the era preceding the American Civil War. If they’re alarmed and looking for a European analogy, sometimes they’ll point to Weimar Germany. But another point of comparison from prewar Europe might be more apt: the French Third Republic, from the late 19th century leading up to World War II.
Lawfare Managing Editor Jacob Schulz and Quinta Jurecic spoke with John Ganz, who writes the Substack newsletter Unpopular Front and is working on a book about American politics in the 1990s. He’s written in depth about the political crises roiling the Third Republic, from the Dreyfus Affair to February 6, 1934—a violent riot outside the French National Assembly, which has striking echoes in January 6. So why is France a more apt comparison than Germany or Italy? What can studying the Third Republic, and February 6, tell us about January 6 and the rise of an American far right? And what might we learn from the striking differences between how French civil society responded to February 6, as opposed to the more muted American response to a similar riot almost 90 years later?
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From July 28, 2020: For a while, there have been large numbers of alleged former Islamic State state fighters and affiliates detained by the Iraqi government and by autonomous authorities in Syria. The fate of these detainees—and the more than 60,000 people in refugee affiliated with the men who live in refugee camps in the region—remains a pressing national security issue for countries in the region, as well as the United States and its Western allies. To talk about the situation, Jacob Schulz spoke with Bobby Chesney, Lawfare co-founder and professor of law at the University of Texas; Vera Mironova, a research fellow at Harvard and, among other things, author of a recent Lawfare post on trials of Islamic State fighters in Iraq; and Leah West, a lecturer at the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs at Carleton University and a fellow at the McCain Institute. They talked about how the trials have gone in Iraq and Syria; how the U.S., Canada and European countries have responded to the situation; and what lessons can be drawn from U.S. experiences with post-9/11 detention and trials of suspected terrorists.
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From January 30, 2016: Last week at The Brookings Institution, United States Supreme Court Associate Justice Stephen Breyer participated in a discussion with Lawfare’s Benjamin Wittes and Newsweek’sDahlia Lithwick about his new book, "The Court and the World: American Law and the New Global Realities." During their conversation, Justice Breyer provides an overview of how in a globalizing world, the steady operation of American laws depends more on the cooperation of other jurisdictions than at any other time. He also examines how the Court's decisions regarding presidential power in national security have evolved throughout American history, and weighs how the Court can balance national security objectives in an increasingly connected world.
Strobe Talbott, President of the Brookings Institution, introduced Justice Breyer and the panel.
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Late last week and early this week saw fighting between Islamic State fighters and Syrian democratic forces after the Islamic State attempted a jailbreak of a Kurdish prison containing significant numbers of alleged Islamic State fighters. The makeshift jail housed Syrians, Iraqis, and also alleged fighters from Western Europe and North Africa. It's the most significant jailbreak since ISIS’s territorial defeat—and a major national security story that's gone under the radar.
To talk it all through and to think about the scale of the damage and all of the things that led to this point, Jacob Schulz talked with Leah West, assistant professor of international affairs at Carleton University, and Louisa Loveluck, the Baghdad bureau chief at the Washington Post. They broke down what's happened so far and what to make of it all.
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As we’ve discussed on the show, online advertisements are the shifting, unstable sand on which the contemporary internet is built. And one of the many, many ways in which the online ad ecosystem is confusing and opaque involves how advertisers can find their ads popping up alongside content they’d rather not be associated with—and, all too often, not having any idea how that happened.
This week on Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke to Nandini Jammi and Claire Atkin of the Check My Ads Institute. Their goal is to serve as a watchdog for the ad industry, and they’ve just started a campaign to let companies know—and call them out—when their ads are showing up next to content published by far-right figures like Steve Bannon who supported the Jan. 6 insurrection. So what is it about the ads industry that makes things so opaque, even for the companies paying to have their ads appear online? What techniques do Claire and Nandini use to trace ad distribution? And how do advertisers usually respond when Check My Ads alerts them that they’re funding “brand unsafe” content?
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What if we declared an end to the costly system of how we classify national security information in the United States? Oona Hathaway, the Gerard C. and Bernice Latrobe Smith Professor of International Law at Yale Law School, poses this question in her article “Secrecy’s End.” Stephanie Pell talked with Oona about some of our classification system’s most corrosive effects on our democratic system of governance and some proposals she has for reforming it.
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Over the last year, our national dialogue about the Jan. 6 Capitol attack has become ever more focused on politics, congressional investigations and criminal prosecutions. But what about the people who were actually on the front lines on Jan. 6?
Natalie Orpett sat down with Susan Dominus and Luke Broadwater, who recently published an article in The New York Times Magazine called, “The Capitol Police and the Scars of Jan. 6.” The article tells the stories of some of the law enforcement officers who were there that day, many of whom continue to experience the impact of Jan. 6 in profoundly personal ways. They talked about what they learned through their reporting and what it means for ongoing efforts to respond to the attack.
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As the prospect of broader election reform has grown more remote, bipartisan discussions have increasingly come to center on one long standing law: the Electoral Count Act of 1887. Designed to regulate the process through which Congress counts electoral votes, ambiguities in this antiquated law have been a frequent source of anxiety, most recently in the wake of the 2020 election, when many feared outgoing President Trump would successfully capitalize on them to prevent the certification of his loss. To discuss the Electoral Count Act and its potential reform, Scott R. Anderson sat down with Ned Foley, a professor at The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law and a leading expert in election law. They discussed the ordinance of the act, a recent congressional report outlining possible reforms and what limits the Constitution may put on what reform can accomplish.
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From April 4, 2015: With a tenuous ceasefire holding in Ukraine, we asked Fiona Hill onto the show to discuss the man behind the unrest: Vladimir Putin. Hill is the co-author of Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin, and aSenior Fellow and Director of the Center on the United States and Europe at Brookings. On the Lawfare Podcast, she tackles the hard questions about Putin. Who exactly is he? What does he want? Is he an unhinged madman obsessed with personal appearances or a shrewd realist with a nuanced understanding of the geopolitical challenges his country faces? And how should the West respond to Russian aggression based on what we know about its leader?
It's an important look at an often caricatured but rarely understood man.
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From August 6, 2019: Over the years, presidents have used different language to describe the withholding of information from Congress. To discuss the concept of "executive privilege," Margaret Taylor sat down with Mark Rozell, the Dean of the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University, and the author of "Executive Privilege: Presidential Power, Secrecy and Accountability," which chronicles the history of executive privilege in its many forms since the founding of the United States. They talked about what executive privilege is, what is new in the Trump administration's handling of congressional demands for information, and what it all means for the separation of powers in our constitutional democracy.
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On Wednesday, the Supreme Court handed down a decision in the case Trump v. Thompson, denying Donald Trump's motion to block the National Archives from producing his documents to the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol attack. To drill down, Natalie Orpett talked with Lawfare editor-in-chief Benjamin Wittes, Lawfare senior editor Scott R. Anderson and Professor Jonathan Shaub of the University of Kentucky College of Law. They discussed the dispute between Trump and the committee, the central issue of executive privilege and what it all means for the committee’s investigation.
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In December 2020, ten state attorneys general sued Google, alleging that the tech giant had created an illegal monopoly over online advertising. The lawsuit is ongoing, and just this January, new allegations in the states’ complaint were freshly unsealed: the states have accused Google of tinkering with its ad auctions to mislead publishers and advertisers and expand its own power in the marketplace. (Google told the Wall Street Journal that the complaint was “full of inaccuracies and lacks legal merit.”)
The complaint touches on a crucial debate about the online advertising industry: does it, well, work? This week on Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Tim Hwang, Substack’s general counsel and the author of the book “Subprime Attention Crisis: Advertising and the Time Bomb at the Heart of the Internet.” Tim argues that online advertising, which underpins the structure of the internet as we know it today, is a house of cards—that advertisers aren’t nearly as good as they claim at monetizing our attention, even as they keep marketing it anyway. So how worried should we be about this structure collapsing? If ads can’t convince us to buy things, what does that mean about our understanding of the internet? And what other possibilities are there for designing a better online space?
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Bryce Klehm sat down with Hal Brands, the Henry A. Kissinger Distinguished Professor of Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Professor Brands is the author of the new book, “The Twilight Struggle: What the Cold War Teaches Us about Great-Power Rivalry Today.” He is also the author of a new article in Foreign Affairs, “The Overstretched Superpower,” which argues that the United States might have more rivals than it can handle. They covered a range of topics, including the origins of containment, the rise of Sovietology in academia and what the Biden administration could learn from the Cold War.
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A crucial component of the story of Jan. 6 involves what members of Congress were doing on that day. What kinds of conversations did Republican lawmakers have with President Trump? To what extent did any members of Congress play a role in engineering the riot itself? These are some of the questions that the House committee on Jan. 6 is investigating—and it’s seeking information directly from members of Congress, including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy. So far, McCarthy and the other lawmakers who have received requests from the committee have vowed not to cooperate.
So will the committee subpoena fellow members of the House? What obstacles might it run into if it did? And what does it say that the committee is taking this step? Quinta Jurecic spoke with Mike Stern, a former senior counsel to the House of Representatives, and Lawfare senior editor and Brookings senior fellow Molly Reynolds about the questions of law and norms raised by the latest turns in the Jan. 6 committee’s investigation.
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From February 25, 2017: Under the oversight of Paul Lewis, the Department of Defense’s Special Envoy for Guantanamo Closure under the Obama administration, the detainee population at Guantanamo Bay went from 164 to 41. But Guantanamo remains open, and the Trump administration has promised not only to halt any further transfers or releases of detainees, but also to possibly bring in more detainees in the future. And that's aside from the fact that recent news reports indicate that a former Guantanamo detainee was responsible for an ISIS suicide bombing in Mosul.
With this in mind, Benjamin Wittes sat down with Paul to discuss his time as special envoy, President Obama's failure to close the detention center, and what’s next for Gitmo under President Trump.
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From August 14, 2020: On July 30, former President Barack Obama, speaking at the funeral of Congressman John Lewis, threw his weight behind ending the Senate filibuster if necessary to pursue a voting rights agenda. His comments brought to the forefront a debate that has been simmering for years within the Democratic party. Margaret Taylor spoke with Adam Jentleson, who served as deputy chief of staff to Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid during the Obama administration, and Brookings senior fellow Molly Reynolds, about the history of the filibuster, how it actually works and what the consequences could be if a Democratic-controlled Senate actually got rid of it.
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From October 15, 2019: A couple of weeks ago, Lawfare and the Strauss Center for International Security and Law sponsored a series of panels at the Texas Tribune Festival. For this episode, we bring you the audio of our Tribfest event on domestic terrorism—what it is, how we define it, how we outlaw it, and what more we can do about it.
David Priess sat down with Bobby Chesney, Lawfare co-founder and professor at the University of Texas School of Law, and former U.S. government officials Lisa Monaco, Mary McCord, and Nick Rasmussen.
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There's a lot going on in Russia's near-abroad, the countries on the periphery of the Russian Federation. There’s a war brewing in Ukraine, with talks in Geneva between Russia and the West seeming to fail this week. There are also Russian troops in Kazakhstan, there at the invitation of the autocratic Kazakh government in response to protests over fuel prices.
To check in on the situation, Benjamin Wittes sat down on Lawfare Live with Alina Polyakova of the Center for European Policy Analysis; Alex Vindman, the Pritzker Military Fellow at Lawfare; Ambassador William Courtney, who served as ambassador to Kazakhstan; and Dmitri Alperovitch, the founder of the Silverado Policy Accelerator. They talked about what's going on in Kazakhstan, the failure of the diplomatic process in Geneva, and the war that seems to be coming in Ukraine.
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Valerie Wirtschafter and Chris Meserole, our friends at the Brookings Institution, recently published an analysis of how popular podcasters on the American right used their shows to spread the “big lie” that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. These are the same issues that led tech platforms to crack down on misinformation in the runup to the election—and yet, the question of whether podcast apps have a responsibility to moderate audio content on their platforms has largely flown under the radar.
Why is that? This week on Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic talked through this puzzle with Valerie and Chris. They discussed their findings about podcasts and the “big lie,” why it’s so hard to detect misinformation in podcasting, and what we should expect when it comes to content moderation in podcasts going forward.
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On Monday, January 10, a federal district court in DC heard oral argument in Trump v. Thompson. The case considers civil claims against Donald Trump and others for their roles in the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection. It raises a number of complicated legal issues, including whether Trump is immune from these kinds of claims, whether it's possible to establish a conspiracy among the perpetrators of the attack and how the First Amendment factors into all of this.
Natalie Orpett sat down with Lawfare editor-in-chief Benjamin Wittes and Lawfare senior editor Alan Rozenshtein to discuss the state of the law, the main challenges for each side and what we can garner from Monday’s five-hour proceedings.
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On December 21, Harvard University chemist Dr. Charles Lieber was convicted of making false statements and other tax offenses in connection with his participation in the Chinese Thousand Talents program. Lieber’s case got a lot of attention, both because of his profile as a well known researcher at Harvard University, and because of the case’s connection with the U.S. government's occasionally controversial three-year-old program called the China Initiative. The program was unveiled in 2018 by then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and has been used by the Justice Department to investigate and charge a variety of wrongdoings connected with the Chinese government, economic espionage, research security, and other issues.
To talk through the Lieber case and the China Initiative generally, Jacob Schulz sat down with Emily Weinstein, a research analyst at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, and Margaret Lewis, a professor at Seton Hall Law School. Emily and Margaret have written extensively about the China Initiative and provide thoughts on the Lieber case, as well as what to make of the initiative as a whole.
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Last week marked one year since the Jan. 6 attack on Capitol Hill, in which a mob of Trump supporters attacked Congress in an effort to stop the certification of Joe Biden's election as president of the United States. On Thursday, the anniversary itself, Lawfare editors appeared in a Brookings event titled, “The January 6 insurrection: One year later.” Lawfare’s editor-in-chief Benjamin Wittes moderated a panel that included Lawfare senior editor Quinta Jurecic, Lawfare senior editor Roger Parloff, Seamus Hughes of the George Washington University's Program on Extremism, and Katie Benner, a New York Times reporter who covers the Department of Justice. On today's episode of The Lawfare Podcast, we’re bringing you a lightly edited audio recording of that event, which features discussion of the role of the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, Attorney General Garland's recent remarks about the Jan. 6 prosecutions, and what happened with the Capitol Police.
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From January 3, 2020: The American drone strike last night that killed Qassem Soleimani, the commander of the Iranian Quds Force, is a seismic event in U.S.-Iranian relations—and for the broader Middle East. We put together an emergency podcast, drawing on the resources of both Lawfare and the Brookings Institution and reflecting the depth of the remarkable collaboration between the two. Iran scholar Suzanne Maloney, terrorism and Middle East scholar Daniel Byman, Middle East scholar and former State Department official Tamara Cofman Wittes and former State Department lawyer and Baghdad embassy official Scott Anderson—who is also a Lawfare senior editor—came together the morning after the strike for a diverse discussion of the reasons for the operation, the vast repercussions of it, the legality of the strike and the role Soleimani played in the Iranian regime.
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We're bringing you the first episode of Lawfare’s new narrative series, The Aftermath, which we released this past Thursday on the one-year anniversary of the Jan. 6 insurrection. Hosted by Lawfare’s executive editor, Natalie Orpett, and produced in partnership with Goat Rodeo, The Aftermath is a multipart series that focuses on what our democracy has been doing over the last year to confront, respond to, and deliver accountability for Jan. 6. The series explores the many questions that have arisen in the aftermath of the insurrection and how our democratic institutions are trying to answer those questions.
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Lawfare senior editor Roger Parloff has a piece out on Lawfare, entitled “The Conspirators: The Proud Boys and Oath Keepers on Jan. 6.” It is an examination of the major conspiracy indictments flowing from the January 6 investigation. Both sets of indictments focus on far right militia organizations that participated in the attack—one set on the group called the Oath Keepers; the other on a group called the Proud Boys. In the article, Parloff argues that the Proud Boys in particular played a pivotal role in the insurrection of January 6, being the first to commit violence, the first to actually breach the Capitol barricades, and the first to destroy property. He sat down with Benjamin Wittes to talk about the indictments, why these cases are significant, what they suggest about the dynamics of January 6, and why there are so few people charged with conspiracy among the hundreds who are charged in connection with the day's events.
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One year ago, a violent mob broke into the U.S. Capitol during the certification of the electoral vote, aiming to overturn Joe Biden’s victory and keep Donald Trump in power as the president of the United States. The internet played a central role in the insurrection: Trump used Twitter to broadcast his falsehoods about the integrity of the election and gin up excitement over January 6, and rioters coordinated ahead of time on social media and posted pictures afterwards of the violence. In the wake of the riot, a crackdown by major social media platforms ended with Trump suspended or banned from Facebook, Twitter and other outlets.
So how have platforms been dealing with content moderation issues in the shadow of the insurrection? This week on Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic sat down for a discussion with Lawfare managing editor Jacob Schulz. To frame their conversation, they looked to the recent Twitter ban and Facebook suspension of Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene—which took place almost exactly a year after Trump’s ban.
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Two years ago this week, the head of the Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, Qassem Soleimani, was killed in an American strike. At the time, we convened a group of Brookings and Lawfare experts to talk about the potential benefits and risks of the strike, and two years later, we got the gang back together. Benjamin Wittes sat down with Suzanne Maloney, the head of Foreign Policy program at Brookings and an Iran specialist; Dan Byman, terrorism expert, Middle East scholar and Lawfare’s foreign policy editor; and Scott R. Anderson, Lawfare senior editor and Brookings fellow, to talk about what two years has wrought. They discussed whether the threat of terrorism and escalation in response to the strike was overstated, if U.S. interests were harmed in Iraq as a result of the strike, and what may have kept the Iranian regime from taking stronger action than it eventually took.
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Government secrecy is pervasive when it comes to national security and foreign affairs, and it’s becoming more and more common for state and even local governments to invoke government secrecy rationales that in the past, only the president of the United States and the national intelligence community were able to claim. While some of the secrecy is no doubt necessary to ensure that police investigations aren't compromised and state and local officials are getting candid advice from their staff, government secrecy directly threatens government transparency and thus democratic accountability. Alan Rozenshtein spoke about these issues with Christina Koningisor, a law professor at the University of Utah and the author of “Secrecy Creep” a recently published article in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, along with the Lawfare post summarizing her work.
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As is our annual tradition, we're bringing you the Lawfare “Ask Us Anything” episode. You, the listeners, sent over your questions, and we, the Lawfare staff and Lawfare contributors, have got answers. Julian Ku, Alan Rozenshtein, Benjamin Wittes, Natalie Orpett, Scott R. Anderson and David Priess tackle questions about the South China Sea, Jan. 6, and an interesting collection of questions about elected officials, the executive branch and constitutional issues.
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From February 11, 2020: Afshon Ostovar is the associate chair for research and an assistant professor of national security affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School. He is also the author of "Vanguard of the Imam: Religion, Politics, and Iran's Revolutionary Guards." The IRGC has been in the news of late because of the killing of the head of the Quds Force of the Revolutionary Guard Corps, Qassem Soleimani. Benjamin Wittes spoke with Ostovar about the fallout from the Soleimani killing, how it is all playing in Iran, and why things are so quiet. They talked about whether people made a mountain out of a molehill at the time the killing happened, or whether the blowback just hasn't happened yet.
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From April 22, 2017: Over the past year, Lawfare has expended a great deal of ink on the problem of sextortion, a form of online sexual assault in which perpetrators obtain explicit images or video of their victims and use those images to extort further explicit content. We even brought Mona Sedky, a Justice Department prosecutor who focuses on sextortion cases, onto the podcast to discuss her work. Now, we’re pleased to feature Mona on the podcast once again with audio of her talk at the George Washington University Law School on prosecuting sextortion.
If you’re interested in reading our Brookings Institution reports on sextortion, you can find them here and here.
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From March 3, 2012: Missy Cummings, Director of the Humans and Automation Laboratory and a professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT, sat down with Ritika Singh for the fifth episode of the Lawfare Podcast to talk about robots on our battlefields.
Cummings is a bit of a force of nature. In addition to designing unmanned weapons systems, she was one of the Navy's first female fighter pilots—an experience she chronicles in her book “Hornet's Nest.”
There are currently around 20,000 robots deployed in U.S. theaters of operation. These robots, which are getting cheaper and easier to make, are characterized by increasing capability and increasing miniaturization. Missy and Ritika discussed the many issues to which these developments give rise, as well as where the science and engineering in weapons systems is likely to go in the future.
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The Lawfare Podcast isn't Lawfare’s only podcast offering. Each week, Scott R. Anderson, Quinta Jurecic, Alan Rozenshtein and a special guest sit down on the podcast Rational Security to have a more casual and freewheeling conversation about national security stories in the news. Today, we thought we'd share one of our favorite Rational Security episodes from the past year, originally released on October 13. This episode features Washington Post reporter Shane Harris, himself a former co-host of the earlier iteration of Rational Security and current cohost of Lawfare’s newest podcast offering: the long-form interview show Chatter. They talked about spies, peanut butter, what spies do with peanut butter, and how the Queen feels about nicking bent coppers.
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We're giving you something a bit different for today's Lawfare Podcast. It's an episode of Lawfare’s new podcast, Chatter, in which Shane Harris or David Priess, or occasionally both of them, have extended, one-on-one conversations with fascinating people working at the creative edges of national security.
In this episode, Shane talks with Noah Shachtman, the editor-in-chief of Rolling Stone, who got there in part from his work as a national security journalist.
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Despite being isolated from much of the rest of the international community, North Korea has emerged as an unexpected powerhouse in the realm of cybercrime, with affiliated hackers pulling off some of the most daring heists in cyberattacks of the past decade.
Scott R. Anderson sat down with journalists Jean Lee and Geoff White, who have put together a podcast series entitled “The Lazarus Heist” for the BBC that explores how North Korea came to play this role. Through the lens of the podcast, they discussed the origins of North Korea's interest in both conventional and cybercrime, what they tell us about North Korea's role in the world, and the ways in which they have been used as part of North Korea's broader international agenda.
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This past weekend marked the 30th anniversary of the collapse of the Soviet Union. To discuss the collapse and its implications, Bryce Klehm sat down with Vladislav Zubok, professor of international history at the London School of Economics and author of the new book, “Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union.” They covered a range of topics, including Mikhail Gorbachev’s economic and political reforms, Professor Zubok’s experience reading Solzhenitsyn for the first time, and the Russian military’s recent buildup along Ukraine's borders.
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From October 17, 2015: Last week, the Center for Strategic and International Studies hosted Ben, along with Laura Donohue of Georgetown Law School, former NSA Director Michael Hayden, and Robin Simcox of the Henry Jackson Society, to discuss the future of surveillance reform in a post-Snowden world. What have we learned about NSA surveillance activities and its oversight mechanisms since June 2013? In what way should U.S. intelligence operations be informed by their potential impact on U.S. on economic interests? What privacy interests do non-Americans have in U.S. surveillance? And domestically, has the third-party doctrine outlived its applicability? Tom Karako of CSIS moderated the panel.
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From July 28, 2019: In the 1950s and 1960s, the Central Intelligence Agency had a major problem. The streets of Moscow were a virtually impossible operating environment due to heavy KGB surveillance and other operational difficulties. Through a series of trial and error, and a whole lot of ingenuity, along came the "Moscow rules," a series of technical advancements in the area of disguise and communications technology, and some different operating tradecraft that allowed CIA case officers to get the information they needed from Soviet sources to help the Cold War stay cold.
Jonna Mendez is a former CIA Chief of Disguise, who is also a specialist in clandestine photography. Her 27-year career, for which she earned the CIA's Intelligence Commendation Medal, included operational disguise responsibilities in the most hostile theaters of the Cold War, including Moscow, and also took her into the Oval Office. She is the co-author, with her late husband Tony Mendez, of "The Moscow Rules: The Secret CIA Tactics that Helped America Win the Cold War." David Priess spoke with Jonna about the experiences that she and her husband had at CIA, evolving the Moscow Rules, and applying these new disguises and technologies in the service of national security.
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From August 23, 2014: News broke yesterday that the Russian military has moved artillery units inside of Ukraine and that Russian troops are actively using them against Ukranian forces---a move with dramatic escalatory potential. At the same time, Ukraine appears to be closing in on the last Russian-backed rebel strongholds. As the crisis unfolds and the United States seeks to isolate Russia using a network of sanctions, important questions have arisen about Russia's future role in the region and its relationship with the West. What is Russian President Vladimir Putin's ultimate goal? Why, after so much effort to integrate into the global economy, is Putin choosing another path? Is Russia actually attempting to free itself of the Western dominated world order?
Earlier this week, the Brookings Institution hosted a panel discussion on the future of Russia’s place in the international order in the light of recent more aggressive turns in its foreign policy. Thomas Wright, fellow with the Project on International Order and Strategy (IOS), moderated the conversation with Brookings President Strobe Talbott, Senior Fellow Clifford Gaddy of Brookings’s Center on the United States and Europe (CUSE) and Susan Glasser, editor at Politico Magazine. They describe Putin's worldview and subsequent strategy, and lay out the potential consequences of continued tensions for the global economy, coordinated counter-terrorism efforts, and the increasingly stressed non-proliferation regime.
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In 2018, a group of academics and free expression advocates convened in Santa Clara, California, for a workshop. They emerged with the Santa Clara Principles on Transparency and Accountability in Content Moderation—a high level list of procedural steps that social media companies should take when making decisions about the content on their services. The principles quickly became influential, earning the endorsement of a number of major technology companies like Facebook.
Three years later, a second, more detailed edition of the principles has just been released—the product of a broader consultation process. So what’s changed? This week on Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with David Greene, senior staff attorney and civil liberties director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. At EFF, he’s been centrally involved in the creation of version 2.0 of the principles. They talked about what motivated the effort to put together a new edition and what role he sees the principles playing in the conversation around content moderation. And they discussed amicus briefs that EFF has filed in the ongoing litigation over social media regulation laws passed by Texas and Florida.
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President Biden recently authorized the release of almost 1,500 documents related to the JFK assassination. But ten times that number still have had their release deferred. What might be in them? What's holding them back from release? And how did we get here?
David Priess spoke with journalist and bestselling author Gerald Posner, who wrote the Pulitzer finalist “Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy,” and attorney Mark Zaid, who apart from representing government whistleblowers and representing current and former U.S. government officials trying to publish their stories or remediate illegal employment actions, has also been very active in the JFK assassination documents area for some 30 years. They talked about the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act, the work of the review board that the legislation set up, what is in these new documents and what comes next.
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Merrick Garland has been getting a lot of criticism these days, and a lot of it is less than entirely fair, or at least it's premature. But Andrew Kent, Quinta Jurecic and Benjamin Wittes argue in a Lawfare piece published today that there is at least one matter on which Garland's decision-making is ripe for criticism: He is not speaking enough.
Garland has modeled himself after Attorney General Ed Levi, the first post-Watergate attorney general, and in their article entitled, “Merrick Garland Needs To Speak Up,” Kent, Jurecic and Wittes argue that Levi actually used public speaking as a big part of his strategy to rejuvenate confidence in the Justice Department. Garland, by contrast, has been very quiet. Kent, Jurecic and Wittes hold the two up against one another and argue that Garland should make more of a case for what he's doing than he has so far. This episode is a reading of that article.
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In 2006, al-Qaeda-trained operatives planned and nearly executed an operation to destroy passenger aircraft over the Atlantic Ocean. Because it was discovered and stopped, it did not accomplish its purpose: killing thousands of people in the air and possibly hundreds or thousands on the ground.
Aki Peritz is a former CIA intelligence officer and current adjunct professor at American University who has researched and written all about this transatlantic airliner plot. He has recently published a new book about it all called, “Disruption: Inside the Largest Counterterrorism Investigation in History.” David Priess sat down with Aki to talk about the conspiracy and the heroic efforts by the intelligence services of the United States, Great Britain and even Pakistan to uncover and crush it.
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From May 21, 2016: Four years ago, Anwar al Awlaki—an American citizen—was killed in an American drone strike in Yemen, marking the first targeted killing of a U.S. citizen by the U.S. government. While the attack occurred almost four years ago, the legality, morality and prudential nature of the strike, and others like it that occur nearly daily in a scattershot of countries around the world, remain a subject of much debate.
Last week, Jefferson Powell joined Lawfare’s Jack Goldsmith at the May Hoover Book Soiree for a discussion of Targeting Americans: The Constitutionality of U.S. Drone War, a new book that takes a deep look into the constitutionality of the program. Powell is a Professor of Law at Duke University, and over the hour, he argues that the killing of Anwar al Awlaki under the 2001 AUMF was constitutional, but that the Obama administration’s broader claims of authority are not. He also asserts that American citizens acting as combatants in al Qaeda are not entitled to due process protections. Yet constitutional claims should not be confused with what is moral, or indeed, what is legal under international norms. Those answers, Powell suggests, must be examined through means other than constitutional law.
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From September 18, 2018: Security technologist Bruce Schneier's latest book, "Click Here to Kill Everybody: Security and Survival in a Hyper-connected World," argues that it won't be long before everything modern society relies on will be computerized and on the internet. This drastic expansion of the so-called 'internet of things,' Schneier contends, vastly increases the risk of cyberattack. To help figure out just how concerned you should be, last Thursday, Benjamin Wittes sat down with Schneier. They talked about what it would mean to live in a world where everything, including Ben's shirt, was a computer, and how Schneier's latest work adds to his decades of advocacy for principled government regulation and oversight of 'smart devices.'
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On November 2, the Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai publicly accused on social media a former vice-premier of China of sexual assault. Chinese authorities responded by taking down her posts and engaging in a mass campaign of censorship on Chinese social media. Later on, Peng disappeared from public view, prompting many tennis stars, athletes and others to demand answers about where she was. It's a long saga that ended with the Women's Tennis Association suspending all tournaments in China in a major move that cut against the trend of Western companies ignoring abuses committed at the hands of the Chinese government. Jacob Schulz sat down with Julian Ku, the Maurice A. Deane Distinguished Professor in Constitutional Law and Professor of Law at Hofstra University, and Katrina Northrop, a reporter at The Wire China, to talk through what's happened to Peng Shuai and what to make of it.
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On this show, we’ve discussed no end of proposals for how to regulate online platforms. But there’s something many of those proposals are missing: data about how the platforms actually work. Now, there’s legislation in Congress that aims to change that. The Platform Accountability and Transparency Act, sponsored by Senators Chris Coons, Rob Portman and Amy Klobuchar, would create a process through which academic researchers could gain access to information about the operation of these platforms—peering under the hood to see what’s actually happening in our online ecosystems, and perhaps how they could be improved.
This week on Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with the man who drafted the original version of this legislation—Nate Persily, the James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford Law School. He’s been hard at work on the draft bill, which he finally published this October. And he collaborated with Coons, Portman and Klobuchar to work his ideas into the Platform Accountability and Transparency Act. They talked about how Nate’s proposal would work, why researcher access to data is so important and what the prospects are for lasting reforms like this out of Congress.
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The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals last week issued a surprisingly under-discussed opinion in the case of Trump v. Thompson, which involves the production of the executive branch and White House records to the January 6 committee. The opinion of a three-judge panel is a decisive rejection of Trump's assertions of executive privilege after leaving office. It also has potential implications for the witnesses who are refusing to testify before the committee. To chew it all over, Benjamin Wittes sat down with Lawfare congressional guru Molly Reynolds, Lawfare contributor and University of Kentucky College of Law professor Jonathan Shaub, and Lawfare senior editor Scott R. Anderson. They talked about the opinion itself, what it holds and what it means, what it means for the witnesses who were holding out, whether it will stand, and how the committee is doing in general.
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Syria’s decade-long civil war has left the state and economy shells of their former selves. But a new industry is stepping in to fill the void: the manufacture and export of illicit drugs, specifically Captagon, a type of amphetamine that has a growing global market. To better understand Syria’s emerging role in the global Captagon trade, Scott R. Anderson sat down with Caroline Rose of the Newlines Institute, who has been tracking this industry's development for several years and is preparing to release a major report on the topic. They discussed the origins of Captagon, how it came to Syria, and how it is being used by the Assad regime, its allies and their proxies across the region.
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Barton Gellman is a long-time national security reporter for the Washington Post, for The Atlantic and elsewhere. His latest article and Atlantic cover story is entitled, “Trump's Next Coup has Already Begun.” He joined Benjamin Wittes on Lawfare Live to talk about the article; about what the Republican party is doing to position itself to overturn, if necessary, the results of an adverse election in 2024; about why Trump is oddly better positioned to do this now than in 2020 when he held the powers of the presidency; and about what, if anything, can be done to stop it.
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From May 15, 2018: In her new book, "Habeas Corpus in Wartime: From the Tower of London to Guantanamo Bay," Amanda Tyler presents a comprehensive account of the legal and political history of habeas corpus in wartime in the Anglo-American legal tradition. On Monday, Benjamin Wittes sat down with Tyler at the Hoover Book Soiree for a wide-ranging discussion of the history of habeas corpus, where its origins really lie in English law, and how it has changed over the years in the United States, from the Founding to modern cases of counterterrorism.
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From June 3, 2017: With the impending sunset of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in December 2017, debate is heating up over how the crucial intelligence-gathering provision will be reauthorized by Congress—and even if it will be reauthorized at all. At the Hoover Institution, Benjamin Wittes sat down with former Director of the National Counterterrorism Center Matt Olsen to talk about the intelligence community's perspective on 702 and what lies ahead for it in these turbulent times.
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On March 18, 2019, the U.S. conducted an airstrike in Baghuz, Syria, as part of its battle against the Islamic State. Two bombs were dropped killing dozens of people, as many as 80 according to U.S. Central Command, the majority of whom seem to have been civilians. But the American public had never heard of the strike until last month when a New York Times investigation revealed not only the fact of the strike, but also the troubling government response that led to its being concealed from public view for more than two years.
Natalie Orpett sat down with Dave Philipps, co-author of the Times article and a veteran national security reporter, and Luke Hartig, a fellow in New America's International Security Program and executive editor at Just Security. They talked about what we know and don't know about the incident itself, the legal and policy framework around airstrikes, allegations of war crimes, and what's been happening within the U.S. government in the years since the strike.
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We talk a lot about how content moderation involves a lot of hard decisions and trade-offs—but at the end of the day, someone has to make a decision about what stays on a platform and what comes down. This week on Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with “The Decider”—Nicole Wong, who earned that tongue-in-cheek nickname during her time at Google in the 2000s. As the company’s deputy general counsel, Nicole was in charge of decisionmaking over what content Google should remove or keep up in response to complaints from users and governments alike. Since then, she moved on to roles as Twitter’s legal director of products and the deputy chief technology officer of the United States under the Obama administration. In that time, the role of social media platforms in shaping society has grown enormously, but how much have content moderation debates really changed? Quinta and Evelyn spoke with Nicole about her time as the Decider, what’s new and what’s stayed the same since the early days of content moderation, and how her thinking about the danger and promise of the internet has changed over the years.
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For the past year, the country of Ethiopia has been embroiled in a brutal civil war. At the center of it is Tigray, a region that has played a prominent role in the evolution of Ethiopia's modern ethnofederalist state. Just weeks ago, rebels seemed to be on the verge of seizing the capital city of Addis Ababa, leading foreign governments to urge their nationals to evacuate the country as soon as possible. Today, the city remains in government hands, and rebel forces appear to be on the retreat, though how long they will stay that way is anyone's guess. To put this dynamic conflict in context and give us a sense of where it may be headed, Scott R. Anderson spoke with Professor Michael Woldemariam of the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University and Professor Hilary Matfess of the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver. They discussed the origins of Ethiopia's ongoing civil war, what it's meant for civilians living there and how it might shape the country's future.
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COVID-19 has shown us all that pandemics aren’t just a public health issue, but a national security one as well. Are America’s national security institutions prepared to address this threat? And what role should the intelligence community play in addressing pandemics?
To address these questions, Lawfare’s David Priess moderated a live recording of the Lawfare Podcast featuring a discussion with Congressman Eric Swalwell, who represents California’s 15th congressional district and sits on the House Intelligence Committee; Dr. Julie Gerberding, who served as director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from 2002 to 2009 and now is a senior leader at the pharmaceutical company Merck; and Matt Berrett, a former CIA assistant director and head of its Global Issues Mission Center, and now cofounder of the Center for Anticipatory Intelligence at Utah State University. The event was held in conjunction with two programs at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy & Government: the biodefense program and the Michael V. Hayden Center for Intelligence, Policy, and International Security.
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It's a scary time along the Ukrainian-Russian border these days. Russian troops are amassing in alarming numbers, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky declared recently that there had been a coup planned against him by Russian-aligned forces. How bad is it? Is it going to be another war? Is an incursion imminent? To go over all the questions, Benjamin Wittes sat down on Lawfare Live with Lt. Col. (ret.) Alexander Vindman, the Pritzker Military Fellow at Lawfare, and Dominic Cruz Bustillos, research assistant to Lt. Col. (ret.) Vindman at Lawfare. They talked about the Russian military buildup, the purported coup attempt and what, if anything, the United States can do to head off a coming disaster.
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From May 27, 2017: Amidst the hurricane of news coming out of the White House in recent weeks, one question has surfaced again and again: why isn't White House Counsel Don McGahn stopping Donald Trump from doing all this? This week on the podcast, Benjamin Wittes sat down with Bob Bauer, former White House Counsel for Barack Obama, to talk about the Office of the White House Counsel and how President Trump can and can't be restrained.
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From May 6, 2017: Three months into the Trump presidency, where does the relationship between the President and the intelligence community stand? Donald Trump is no longer quite so regularly combative in his tweets and public comments about the various intelligence agencies, but the White House-intelligence community relationship is still far from normal under this very unusual presidency. Here to ponder the question are former NSA and CIA director General Michael Hayden, former acting and deputy director of CIA John McLaughlin, and former deputy national security advisor for combating terrorism Juan Zarate, who spoke with the Washington Post’s David Ignatius in a recent event at the Aspen Institute.
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Late last month, Apple sued the Israeli technology firm NSO Group under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. That's the federal law that criminalizes computer hacking and provides a civil cause of action for hacking victims. NSO Group is primarily known for its Pegasus spyware software, which it provides to many governments for their law enforcement and national security investigations. Apple is suing NSO Group because many of the devices that Pegasus is used against are Apple iOS devices. Apple's lawsuit is just the latest in what has been several bad years for NSO Group, which has come under increasing scrutiny, most notably for the use of its software in the killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi by the Saudi government, and for allegations that its products are used to commit a wide range of human rights abuses by authoritarian governments around the world.
To talk through the merits of Apple's lawsuit, as well as its implications for the spyware industry and cybersecurity norms more generally, Alan Rozenshtein spoke with Orin Kerr, professor of law at the UC Berkeley School of Law, and Asaf Lubin associate professor of law at the Indiana University Maurer School of Law.
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This week on Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with some of the people behind the app that, by this point in the pandemic, you’re probably sick of: Zoom. Quinta and Evelyn sat down with Josh Kallmer, Zoom’s head of global public policy and government relations, and Josh Parecki, Zoom’s associate general counsel and head of trust and safety.
Most of us have used Zoom regularly over the last few years thanks to COVID-19, but while you’re likely familiar with the platform as a mechanism for work meetings and virtual happy hours, you may not have thought about it in the context of content moderation. Josh and Josh explained the kinds of content moderation issues they grapple with in their roles at Zoom, how their moderation and user appeals process works, and why Zoom doesn’t think of itself like a phone line or a mail carrier, services that are almost entirely hands-off when it comes to the content they carry.
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The CIA has opened a window into former president Donald Trump's always interesting and frequently contentious relationship with the intelligence community. A newly published history confirms a lot of what we already knew about Trump's preferences—like that he didn't actually read his daily top secret briefing—but it also shows Trump as privately more appreciative of career intelligence professionals than his public broadsides against their deep-state bosses might suggest.
Shane Harris sat down with Lawfare’s David Priess, the man who wrote the book about the President's Daily Brief, to chew over a new chapter in the “Getting to Know the President” series by John L. Helgerson, a retired CIA officer and former inspector general. The understated title, “Donald J. Trump—A Unique Challenge,” gives you a hint that as with all things Trump, his relationship to the intelligence community was anything but business as usual.
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Cybersecurity is the responsibility of everyone. A cyber attack is no longer confined to the digital realm and can have real impact on various industries like food, gas and medicine. But despite these challenges, there is an opportunity for a new whole-of-society approach to defend against the mounting cyber threats emanating from places like Russia, China and North Korea. One approach advocates that the United States already has a non-governmental model for citizen involvement to adopt for cyberspace.
Alvaro Marañon sat down with Mark Grzegorzewski and Margaret Smith, who, along with Barnett Koven, are the authors of “Cyber Privateering: A New Model for Cyber Civic Engagement,” a paper they presented at the 2021 Cybersecurity Law and Policy Scholars Conference. They discussed the details around the Estonian model that inspired this paper, the role for Civil Air Patrol and the impact a local civil cyber organization could play in the community.
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Dominic Cruz Bustillos sat down with Timothy Frye, the Marshall D. Shulman Professor of Post-Soviet Foreign Policy within the Department of Political Science at Columbia University, editor of “Post-Soviet Affairs” and co-director of the International Center for the Study of Institutions and Development at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. Professor Frye is the author of the new book, “Weak Strongman: The Limits of Power in Putin's Russia,” which draws on cutting-edge social science research to emphasize Russia's similarities to other autocracies and highlight the difficult trade-offs that confront the Kremlin. They discussed Frye’s challenges to the conventional wisdom on Putin's Russia, Russia's handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, the European energy crisis, the recent State Duma elections, U.S.-Russia relations and more.
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From February 28, 2015: On Thursday of this week, Lawfare’s Benjamin Wittes and Bobby Chesney, along with General Jack Keane, appeared before the House Armed Services Committee to provide “Outside Perspectives on the President’s Proposed Authorization for the Use of Military Force Against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.”
The hearing grappled with a number of difficult and vitally necessary questions: What exactly does "enduring ground combat operations" mean? Should the AUMF sunset after three years? And, does a new AUMF accomplish anything if it is not tied to the existing authorities present in the 2001 AUMF? The discussion delved deeply into the President’s proposed AUMF, its merits and its flaws, and how those failings can be addressed.
Note: The Podcast has been edited for length and content; only the most relevant parts of the discussion are included.
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From April 2, 2016: This week, Adam Segal of the Council on Foreign Relations joinsJack Goldsmith at a Hoover Book Soiree for a discussion of his new book, “The Hacked World Order: How Nations Fight, Trade, Maneuver, and Manipulate in the Digital Age.” Segal begins at what he calls “year Zero”—sometime between June 2012 and June 2013—explaining that the events in that year ushered in a new era of geopolitical maneuvering in cyberspace, with great implications for security, privacy and the international system. These changes, he suggests, have the potential to produce unintended and unimaginable problems for anyone with an internet connection.
In March, George Washington University's Henry Farrell reviewed “The Hacked World Order” for the Lawfare Book Review.
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Last month marked the 75th anniversary of the end of the Nuremberg Trials. To better understand the trials and their legacy, Bryce Klehm sat down with Francine Hirsch, Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Hirsch is the author of the book, “Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg: A New History of the International Military Tribunal after World War II.” They covered a range of topics, including the Nuremberg Trials from the Soviet perspective and the trials’ legacy 75 years later.
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For Thanksgiving, we’re bringing you something a little different—an episode of Rational Security, our light, conversational show about national security and related topics. This week, Alan, Quinta and Scott were joined by special guest, Quinta's co-host of the Arbiters of Truth series on the Lawfare podcast feed Evelyn Douek! They sat down to discuss:
—“Getting Rittenhoused”: A jury recently acquitted 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse of murder charges for shooting two men in what he claimed was self-defense during last summer’s unrest. What does his trial and its aftermath tell us about the intersection of politics with our criminal justice system?
— “Now That’s a Power Serve”: A global pressure campaign by professional tennis players has forced Chinese officials to disclose the location of Chinese tennis player Peng Shuai, who disappeared after publicly accusing a former senior official of sexual assault. Is this a new model for dealing with Chinese human rights abuses?
— “Duck Say Quack and Fish Go Blub—But What Did Fox Say?”: Two prominent conservative commentators have resigned from Fox News over its release of a Tucker Carlson film that they say spreads misinformation and promotes violence. Will this be enough to force the network to curb its behavior?
For object lessons, Quinta endorsed her favorite pie dough recipe. Alan in turn made an unorthodox recommendation of what to put in that dough: sweet potato pie. Scott encouraged listeners to follow up that big meal with a cup of coffee, made on his beloved Aeropress with a Prismo filter attachment. And if that doesn't work, Evelyn suggested folks tuck in for a nap with her favorite weighted blanket from Bearaby.
Be sure to visit our show page at www.lawfareblog.com and to follow us on Twitter at @RatlSecurity.
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On November 3, the Commerce Department added four foreign companies to what is often referred to as the “Entity List,” for engaging in activities that are contrary to the national security or foreign policy interests of the United States. One of those additions was the Israeli company NSO Group, which sells software—often called spyware—that once remotely installed on a phone can steal things like passwords, photos, communications and web searches. It can also activate cameras and microphones without the knowledge of the user. Companies placed on the Entity List are subject to U.S. government licensing and sanctions requirements. The NSO Group was added to the list based on evidence that it developed and supplied spyware to foreign governments that use these tools to target government officials, journalists, activists, academics and embassy workers.
To talk about the global spyware problem, Stephanie Pell sat down with David Kaye, a professor of law at the University of California, Irvine, and the former United Nations Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression. In this former role, he produced a report that called for a moratorium on the sale and transfer of spyware. They discussed the nature of the global spyware problem, what might be done to address it and the important role both civil society groups and journalists have played in exposing it.
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Jack Goldsmith sat down with Noah Feldman, the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard University, to discuss his new book,”The Broken Constitution: Lincoln, Slavery, and the Refounding of America.” They discussed the evolution of Lincoln's constitutional thought on slavery, compromise and war, from the time he was a young man through his most difficult of presidencies. Was Lincoln a great constitutional thinker? If so, why? They also discussed the moral standing of the Constitution at different times in American history, whether constitutional compromise is good or bad, and what these issues teach about current constitutional controversies.
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Alexander Vindman sat down with Dr. Mary Sarotte, the author of the new book, “Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate,” to discuss the 1990s and NATO expansion. They discussed how respective decisions by America, Russia and the European Union impacted NATO expansion and today’s geopolitical environment.
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From May 28, 2019: From the Washington Post’s February report that U.S. Cyber Command took a Russian disinformation operation offline on the day of the 2018 midterms to fight election interference, to the Pentagon’s announcement last year that it would take more active measures to challenge adversaries in cyberspace, recent news about cyber operations suggests they are playing an increasingly important role in geopolitics. So how should the public understand how the United States deploys its cyber tools to achieve its goals?
To help answer that question, at the 2019 Verify Conference, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation hosted a panel discussion featuring former CIA Deputy Director Avril Haines, former Pentagon chief of staff Eric Rosenbach, and New York Times national security correspondent David Sanger. They talked about how the U.S. projects power in cyberspace, the difficulties of developing norms to govern state behavior in that domain, and more.
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From August 9, 2014: Washington was abuzz this week as more than 50 African leaders were in town for the first U.S.-Africa Summit. On August 8, Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, the President of Somalia, spoke at Brookings on the future of his country. In his talk, President Mohamud addresses the challenges to democracy that Somalia faces, and how Somalia, the African Union, and other international partners can work together to ensure security, foster development, and promote stable state-building in the country. President Mohamud also addresses the challenges his state faces in its ongoing battle against Al-Shabab militants—a mission that the U.S. has contributed more than half a billion dollars to since 2007. President Mohamud provides a realistic assessment of that threat, while highlighting the efforts his country is taking to bring democracy to Somalia. Michael E. O’Hanlon, Senior Fellow in Foreign Policy at Brookings, provides introductory remarks and moderates the conversation.
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Alexander Vindman sat down with Dr. Fiona Hill, the Robert Bosch senior fellow in the Center on the United States and Europe in the Foreign Policy program at Brookings, and the author of the new book, “There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century.” They talked about Russia's military buildup along Ukraine, immigration and opportunities in the 21st century.
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It’s been roughly a year since the Facebook Oversight Board opened its doors for business—and while you may mostly remember the board from its decision on Donald Trump’s suspension from Facebook, but there’s been a lot going on since then. So we thought it was a good time to check in on how this experiment in platform governance is faring. In October, the Board released its first transparency report, and Facebook—now Meta—has published its own update on how it’s been responding to the Board’s decisions and recommendations. Meanwhile, Lawfare is keeping track of developments on our Facebook Oversight Board Blog, run by the inimitable Tia Sewell.
On this episode of Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic talked about what the data shows about what cases the Board is taking, how the Board’s role seems to be evolving, and, of course, whether we’re going to have to start calling this the Meta Oversight Board, thanks to Facebook’s name change.
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Hannah Bloch-Wehba is an associate professor of law at the Texas A&M School of Law. She’s also the author of a recent Lawfare post, entitled “Alternative Channels for Police Transparency.” She sat down with Jacob Schulz to talk about her Lawfare piece, the law review article that inspired it, trends in police transparency and what to do about it. What are the different sources that inhibit public access to police practice? And what trends in the second half of the 20th century left police transparency in the state that it’s in today?
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Lawfare has a new podcast: Chatter! Hosted by none other than David Priess, publisher of Lawfare and the Lawfare Institute's chief operating officer, and Shane Harris, intelligence reporter from the Washington Post, Chatter focuses on culture, science and national security issues through long-form interviews with cool people. They joined Benjamin Wittes to talk about what they're doing with the show, what they're planning to do with the show and what sort of people they're going to bring on it.
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Roger Parloff is a senior editor at Lawfare and the author of the recent article, “What Do—and Will—the Criminal Prosecutions of the Jan. 6 Capitol Rioters Tell Us?” It is a deep dive on the demographics, the charges and the adjudications of the Capitol riot cases so far. Roger sat down with Benjamin Wittes on Lawfare Live to talk about who the Capitol rioters were, why some of them have been allowed to plead out to misdemeanors, what characterizes the misdemeanor pleas and who is left among the bigger fish.
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From February 20, 2012: Joel Brenner, who served as inspector general of the National Security Agency and as the national counterintelligence executive in the DNI's office, joined Jack Goldsmith to discuss his new book, America the Vulnerable: Inside the New Threat Matrix of Digital Espionage, Crime, and Warfare. Benjamin Wittes reviewed the book here.
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From November 22, 2014: Earlier this month, the ABA Standing Committee on Law and National Security held its “24th Annual Review of the Field of National Security Law CLE Conference.” As part of the conference, the group held a particularly strong panel discussion on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act—featuring Bob Litt, general counsel to the DNI, Jameel Jaffer of the ACLU, and Bill Banks of Syracuse University law school. The discussion was moderated by Laura Donohue of Georgetown law.
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Majid Khan pled guilty in a military commission at Guantanamo eight years ago, but he has been back in the news of late. At a sentencing hearing at Guantanamo recently, he gave graphic testimony about his torture and treatment at the hands of the CIA and the military. He also took responsibility and showed remorse for his own conduct. His speech in the military commission was sufficiently moving that several members of the jury wrote a letter to the convening authority asking for clemency for Majid Khan.
To talk about the dramatic events, the history of the case, and the CIA program’s treatment of Majid Khan, Benjamin Wittes sat down with Michel Paradis, an appellate lawyer for the Office of Military Commissions Defense Counsel. They talked about what Majid Khan did, his history in al-Qaeda after a childhood in Baltimore, what was done to him, and whether with all this water under the bridge, something like justice could ever come from a trial.
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Content moderation in video games turns out to be just as much of a bummer as content moderation everywhere else, perhaps even more so. This week on Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Daniel Kelley, the director of strategy and operations for the Anti-Defamation League’s Center for Technology and Society. He studies how companies deal with the many moderation issues that pop up in gaming, from harassment to digital recreations of violent hate crimes and white nationalist propaganda. And his team at the Anti-Defamation League has a new report out on how players experience abuse—but also joy and connection—while gaming. Quinta and Evelyn asked Daniel to make the case for why everyone, gamers and non-gamers alike, should care about games, why harassment in gaming seems particularly bad compared to non-gaming platforms, and where the gaming industry stands when it comes to investing in content moderation.
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The “going dark” debate, which concerns how society and the technology industry should address the challenges that law enforcement faces in investigating crime due to the increasing use of encryption on mobile devices and by communication platforms and services, was in the news again because of Apple's recent proposal to engage in client-side scanning. Apple planned to scan iPhones for child sexual abuse material, or CSAM, before such images were uploaded to iCloud. Prior to Apple's announcement, however, a distinguished group of computer scientists and engineers were already working on a paper to explain the security and privacy risks of client-side scanning. The paper, which they have now released, is called “Bugs in our Pockets: The Risks of Client-Side Scanning.”
To talk about this most recent development in the going dark debate, Stephanie Pell sat down with two of the paper’s authors: Susan Landau, Bridge Professor of Cybersecurity and Policy in The Fletcher School and at the School of Engineering, Department of Computer Science, at Tufts University; and Ross Anderson, professor of security engineering at the University of Cambridge and at the University of Edinburgh. They discussed some of the most significant privacy and security risks client-side scanning creates, why client-side scanning requires a different analysis from other aspects of the discussion about government access to encrypted data, and why the authors of the paper consider client-side scanning to be a dangerous technology.
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Jack Goldsmith sat down with John Mearsheimer, the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor in the Political Science department at the University of Chicago, to discuss his recent article in Foreign Affairs, called “The Inevitable Rivalry: America, China, and the Tragedy of Great-Power Politics.” In that essay, Mearsheimer argues that America's engagement with China following the Cold War, and its fostering of the rise of China's economic and thus military power, was the worst strategic blunder any country has made in recent history. They discussed why he thinks this, why he believes we currently are in a cold war with China that is more dangerous than the one with the Soviet Union, and what concretely the U.S. government should do now to check China's power.
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The complicated relationship between Iraq and the United States is once again approaching a crossroads. Parliamentary elections held in Iraq last month promise a new government featuring a new cast of political forces with their own difficult histories with the United States. The United States, meanwhile, is approaching the self-imposed deadline by which it has promised to withdraw U.S. combat troops from the country, even as its diplomatic and military presences in the country have continued to come under attack by Iran-backed militias. To discuss these developments, Scott R. Anderson sat down on Lawfare Live with Ambassador Doug Silliman, who served as the U.S. ambassador to Iraq from 2016 to 2019 and was previously the deputy chief of mission and political counselor there. They talked about the Sadrist block that appears to have won the recent elections, what other challenges are facing the Iraqi state and what they all mean for the future of our bilateral relationship.
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From June 7, 2012: We don't review our own books here on Lawfare—not even if we happen to be Lawfare's book review editor. But Benjamin Wittes sat down the other day with Ken Anderson to discuss his wonderful new book, Living With the UN: American Responsibilities and International Order. It's a terrific read, full of insights about the U.S.-U.N. relationship, the U.N. as an institution, and the international governance movement more broadly.
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From June 14, 2014: At the 2014 Computers, Freedom and Privacy Conference, a panel of experts debated the pros and cons of adding outside lawyers to litigation before two tribunals at the heart of the NSA surveillance controversy: the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ("FISC") and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review ("FISCR"). As is well known, proceedings at those courts generally are held in secret and ex parte, with only the government arguing its position. But, in the wake of the Snowden revelations, many have called for reform, and for greater participation by non-government attorneys.
The group was comprised of panelists Marc Zwillinger, an attorney with experience in surveillance matters; Alex Abdo of the American Civil Liberties Union; and Amie Stepanovich, of Access. Lawfare's Steve Vladeck moderated the discussion, which closely examined the question of whether, and how, to add more adversarial process to FISC and FISCR proceedings.
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Only twice in history have two women who served as CIA officers been elected to Congress. The first time was 2018, and the second was 2020—both of them featuring Abigail Spanberger and Elissa Slotkin. David Priess hosted an event for the Michael V. Hayden Center at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government, speaking with both of them about their careers, both in the intelligence community and in Congress. Abigail Spanberger represents Virginia's 7th congressional district and was a CIA operations officer from 2006 to 2014. Elissa Slotkin represents Michigan's 8th congressional district. She served as a CIA analyst, as well as a National Security Council staffer and Acting Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs. They talked about joining CIA, their experiences there, leaving the intel world, how their CIA experiences help them as legislators, and a few pressing national security issues.
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There’s been a lot of news recently about Facebook, and a lot of that news has focused on the frustration of employees assigned to the platform’s civic integrity team or other corners of the company focused on ensuring user trust and safety. If you read reporting on the documents leaked by Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, you’ll see again and again how these Facebook employees raised concerns about the platform and proposed solutions only to be shot down by executives.
That’s why it’s an interesting time to talk to two former Facebook employees who both worked on the platform’s civic integrity team. This week on Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Sahar Massachi and Jeff Allen, who recently unveiled a new project, the Integrity Institute, aimed at building better social media. The goal is to bring the expertise of current and former tech employees to inform the ongoing discussion around if and how to regulate big social media platforms. They dug into the details of what they feel the Institute can add to the conversation, the nitty-gritty of some of the proposals around transparency and algorithms that the Institute has already set out, and what the mood is among people who work in platform integrity right now.
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Last week, Facebook unveiled its new corporate brand—Meta—and its corresponding vision for a new immersive world called the metaverse. The rebrand announcement attracted plenty of consternation from tech journalists, but there are also plenty of interesting issues about the metaverse itself. What type of content moderation problems does virtual reality pose? How might we think about the challenges of platform governance in this new age? What aspects of the metaverse are most worth paying attention to? Jacob Schulz sat down with Lawfare’s Alan Rozenshtein and Quinta Jurecic to talk it all through.
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The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has issued a declassified assessment of the origins of the coronavirus, and it’s a bit of a muddle. Was it a lab leak? They don't really know. Was it naturally occurring? They're not quite sure.
They do know a few things. It wasn't a bioweapon, and we're not going to find out any real answers until China starts cooperating. To chew over the ODNI’s report, Benjamin Wittes sat down with Shane Harris of the Washington Post, who wrote a story about the assessment last week. They talked about what the Intelligence Community could agree on, what it couldn't agree on, why the people with the minority opinion were more confident than the people with the majority opinion, and what we can and can't say about the coronavirus.
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Last week, the Department of Defense, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Department of Homeland Security and National Security Council each released their own reports addressing the issue of climate change as a national security threat. To unpack what's in the reports and what it all means, Natalie Orpett sat down on Lawfare Live with Mark Nevitt, associate professor of law at Syracuse University College of Law, and Erin Sikorsky, director of the Center for Climate and Security and director of the International Military Council on Climate and Security.
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From March 27, 2019: From 1989 to early 2017, Sue Biniaz was the lead climate lawyer and a climate negotiator at the State Department. She was also a key architect of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, a UN-negotiated agreement designed to mitigate global warming, which went into effect in November 2016. In June 2017, President Trump announced his intention to withdraw the United States from the agreement.
Sue sat down with Lawfare's Jack Goldsmith to talk about the early days of U.S. and international climate action, how the Paris Agreement came into force and the predecessor agreements that gave rise to it, how it was supposed to operate, and what impacts Trump's actions have had on international climate policy.
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From January 5, 2019: The murder of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville in 2017 and other recent events have drawn in the public discourse to the fact that domestic terrorism is not a federal crime in and of itself. Earlier this week, Benjamin Wittes sat down with two experts on domestic terrorism to talk about ways that it might be incorporated into our criminal statutes.
Mary McCord is a professor of practice at Georgetown Law School, a senior litigator at the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown Law School, and the former acting assistant attorney general for national security at the U.S. Department of Justice. Jason Blazakis is a former State Department official in charge of the office that designates foreign terrorist organizations and a professor of practice at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies. Both have proposed ideas in recent months to recognize domestic terrorism in U.S. law. They joined Ben to talk about their very different proposals for how domestic terrorism might become a crime. They talked about why domestic terrorism is currently left out of the criminal code, their two proposals for how it might be incorporated and how those proposals differ, and the First Amendment consequences of their competing proposals.
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There's a presidential election coming up in France in April 2022. In a surprise to many, recent polls show that the occupant of second place behind the incumbent president is a man who has never run for office before: Éric Zemmour. He's a veteran journalist, a provocateur and a virulent Islamophobe. Jacob Schulz sat down with Yasmeen Serhan, a staff writer at The Atlantic to talk about Zemmour’s rise. Who is he? How did he come to be so popular? Is he even going to run for president? And what about all that's happened so far in France has shades of Donald Trump?
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This week on Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, we’re talking about a subject that doesn’t come up much on the Lawfare Podcast: the Securities and Exchange Commission. Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen has made waves with her congressional testimony and the many damaging news stories being reported about Facebook based on the documents she released. But before these documents became the Facebook Papers, Haugen also handed them to the SEC as part of a whistleblower complaint against the company. So, we thought we should dig into what that actually means.
What is the likelihood that Haugen’s SEC filings turn into an investigation into the company? Should Facebook be worried? Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic discussed these questions with Jacob Frenkel, who spent years at the SEC and is now the chair of government investigations and securities enforcement at the law firm Dickinson Wright. He explained how to understand the SEC’s role in cases like these, why whistleblowers like Haugen file complaints with the SEC, and why he thinks it’s unlikely that the agency will investigate Facebook based on Haugen’s disclosures.
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In November 2020, a raid against terrorists in Somalia led to the death of an American working for the CIA Special Activities Center. This, after the Trump administration had eased combat rules and airstrikes in Somalia surged. Now the Biden administration seems to be reviewing its policy toward Somalia and the al-Shabab terrorists there.
David Priess talked about it with Julian Barnes, a national security reporter for the New York Times focusing on the intelligence agencies, and coauthor of a recent article in the Times that uses the story of the hunt for an elusive al-Shabab bomb maker to shine a light on the group's continuing strength and the challenges for U.S. policy. Joining them was former CIA senior analyst Emilia Columbo, now a senior associate to the Africa Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, as well as senior security risk analyst at VoxCroft Analytics.
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Evergrande is a massive Chinese real estate company that has found itself with more than $300 billion in liability and no real idea of how to get out of debt. Its financial problems have come to a head in recent months, and concerns have grown about the potential of Evergrande’s debt problems to threaten the Chinese economy. It's a financial story, but one with real implications for China's broader economic picture in great power competition between the U.S. and China. To break it all down, Jacob Schulz spoke with Katrina Northrop. a reporter for The Wire China and the author of a recent profile of Evergrande and its highly mercurial CEO.
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Pete Strzok is a former counter-intelligence official at the FBI. He is the author most recently of an article in Lawfare entitled, “The Sussmann Indictment, Human Source Handling, and the FBI’s Declining FISA Numbers.” It's an article that makes an interesting connection between a sentence in the indictment of Democratic lawyer Michael Sussmann and some data on FISA applications released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. They may seem unconnected, but Strzok argues that there may be a deep connection between the two, and he sat down with Benjamin Wittes to discuss it. They talked about the anomaly of the Sussmann indictment; about how it was the tip of a very large iceberg of investigations of officials, agents and analysts who worked on the Crossfire Hurricane investigation; and about the shocking decrease in the number of FISA orders issued over the length of the Trump presidency.
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From March 25, 2017: Between leading the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence's first open hearing on Russian election interference on Monday, and sparring with HPSCI Chairman Rep. Devin Nunes over Nunes's odd escapades regarding possible incidental collection of communications of Trump associates, HPSCI Ranking Member Rep. Adam Schiff has had a busy week. On Tuesday, Lawfare and the Brookings Institution were pleased to host Rep. Schiff for an address on "The Role of Congress in Protecting Liberal Democracy." In conversation with Lawfare's Benjamin Wittes and Susan Hennessey, Rep. Schiff spelled out an ambitious legislative program and a vision for revitalizing the power of Congress under the Trump presidency.
If you're interested in reading Rep. Schiff's remarks, Lawfare has published them here in article form.
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From February 25, 2017: Under the oversight of Paul Lewis, the Department of Defense’s Special Envoy for Guantanamo Closure under the Obama administration, the detainee population at Guantanamo Bay went from 164 to 41. But Guantanamo remains open, and the Trump administration has promised not only to halt any further transfers or releases of detainees, but also to possibly bring in more detainees in the future. And that's aside from the fact that recent news reports indicate that a former Guantanamo detainee was responsible for an ISIS suicide bombing in Mosul.
With this in mind, Benjamin Wittes sat down with Paul to discuss his time as special envoy, President Obama's failure to close the detention center, and what’s next for Gitmo under President Trump.
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Ports in many countries are experiencing congestion. For weeks now, there have been reports that there will be delays in many common products, and people are wondering what is causing this and how it can end. David Priess sat down with Gregg Easterbrook, a former fellow in economics and in governance studies at the Brookings Institution. He was a staff writer, national correspondent or contributing editor at The Atlantic for nearly 40 years, and more recently, he is the author of “The Blue Age: How the US Navy Created Global Prosperity—And Why We're in Danger of Losing It.” They talked about everything from the U.S. Navy's dominance of global oceans, to the shipping trade, to the economics of COVID and supply chains.
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On this week’s episode of Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Nick Pickles, the director of global public policy strategy at Twitter. They discussed a new paper just released by Twitter, “Protecting the Open Internet: Regulatory Principles for Policy Makers”—which sketches out, in broad strokes, the company’s vision for what global technology policy should look like. The paper discusses a range of issues, from transparency to everyone’s favorite new topic, algorithms.
As a platform that’s often mentioned in the same breath as Google and Facebook, but is far smaller—with hundreds of millions of users rather than billions—Twitter stands at an interesting place in the social media landscape. How does Twitter define the “open internet,” exactly? How much guidance is the company actually giving to policymakers? And, what does the director of global public policy strategy do all day?
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Jonathan David Shaub is an assistant professor of law at the University of Kentucky. He is a former OLC attorney and the author of a series of recent Lawfare posts on executive privilege, witnesses, documents and the Jan. 6 committee. He sat down with Benjamin Wittes to talk about Steve Bannon, the former president's suit against the National Archives, all of the privilege claims that are floating around, the misinformation about them that's proliferating on Twitter, and how the Justice Department will think about actually handling the cases that are now presenting themselves to it.
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Around a hundred people have already pleaded guilty to crimes in connection with the Jan. 6 attempted insurrection on the Capitol. What should we make of the plea deals thus far? Are they overly lenient? Are they what we might expect? To talk through the Jan. 6 plea deals, Jacob Schulz sat down on Lawfare Live with Carissa Byrne Hessick, the Anne Shea Ransdell and William Garland "Buck" Ransdell, Jr. Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of North Carolina School of Law. They talked through her reaction to the deals, her recent Lawfare article on the deals and about plea bargaining in general, which is the subject of her new book, “Punishment Without Trial: Why Plea Bargaining Is a Bad Deal.”
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It has been a decade since the Supreme Court decided on a case involving the state secrets privilege, a common law rule that allows the government to block the release of state secrets in civil litigation. In this term, the justices will hear two cases involving the privilege: United States v. Abu Zubaydah and Federal Bureau of Investigation v. Fazaga.
To talk about the two cases before the Supreme Court and the state secrets privilege more broadly, Rohini Kurup sat down with Liza Goitein, co-director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, and Bob Loeb, partner in Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe’s Supreme Court and Appellate Litigation practice, and former acting deputy director of the Civil Division Appellate Staff at the Department of Justice. They talked about how the state secrets privilege works, the controversy surrounding its use and what we can expect in the two Supreme Court cases.
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From April 25, 2020: We've covered this novel coronavirus from many angles, focusing on the disaster response issues that make up part of national security. For this episode of the Lawfare Podcast, we have something a bit different: a case study of how pandemic control measures intersect with federalism issues and supply chain continuity and security. With a focus on what's happening in Illinois, David Priess spoke with Rob Karr, the president and CEO of the Illinois Retail Merchants Association, representing the industry employing one out of every five people in Illinois, and with Mark Denzler, the co-chair of the state's Essential Equipment Task Force and the president and CEO of the Illinois Manufacturers' Association, representing companies that employ almost 600,000 Illinoisans.
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From December 24, 2016: Whatever the President-elect might say on the matter, the question of Russian interference in the presidential election is not going away: calls continue in the Senate for an investigation into the Kremlin's meddling, and the security firm Crowdstrike recently released new information linking one of the two entities responsible for the DNC hack with Russia's military intelligence agency. So how should the United States respond?
In War on the Rocks, Evan Perkoski and Michael Poznansky recently reviewed the possibilities in their piece, "An Eye for an Eye: Deterring Russian Cyber Intrusions." They've also written on this issue before in a previous piece titled "Attribution and Secrecy in Cyber Intrusions." We brought them on the podcast to talk about what deterrence of Russian interference would look like and why it's necessary.
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The January 6 investigating committee in the House is busily issuing subpoenas, collecting documents and negotiating with witnesses for depositions. It is also being defied by certain witnesses, and the former president is threatening to try to stop the National Archives from turning over material related to his activities and communications during and leading up to the January 6 insurrection.
To chew over the entire spectrum of issues the committee is facing, Benjamin Wittes sat down with Brookings congressional guru and Lawfare senior editor Molly Reynolds, and Quinta Jurecic, also a senior editor at Lawfare and a Brookings fellow focusing on post-Trump accountability issues. They are the authors together of a recent piece on Lawfare on the hurdles the January 6 investigation may face. They talked about executive privilege claims involving witnesses; about executive privilege claims involving documents; about who controls the privilege, the current president or the past president; and about whether this is all just a complex scheme to run out the clock.
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Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen’s recent testimony before Congress has set in motion a renewed cycle of outrage over the company’s practices—and a renewed round of discussion around what, if anything, Congress should do to rein Facebook in. But how workable are these proposals, really?
This week on Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Jeff Kosseff, an associate professor of cybersecurity law at the United States Naval Academy, and the guy that has literally written not just the book on this, but two of them. He is the author of “The Twenty-Six Words That Created the Internet,” a book about Section 230, and he has another book coming out next year about First Amendment protections for anonymous speech, titled “The United States of Anonymous.” So Jeff is very well positioned to evaluate recent suggestions that Facebook should, for example, limit the ability of young people to create what users call Finstas, a second, secret Instagram account for a close circle of friends—or Haugen’s suggestion that the government should regulate how Facebook amplifies certain content through its algorithms. Jeff discussed the importance of online anonymity, the danger of skipping past the First Amendment when proposing tech reforms, and why he thinks that Section 230 reform has become unavoidable … even if that reform might not make any legal or policy sense.
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Bryce Klehm sat down with Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and Lawfare senior editor Scott R. Anderson, to discuss the current situation in Afghanistan. They covered a range of issues, including the Taliban government's formation since the U.S. withdrawal, the current humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan and the international community's response.
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Last week, CIA director William Burns issued a statement with a number of organizational changes and other initiatives regarding the CIA. Most media attention was drawn to the creation of a new China Mission Center, but there were several new initiatives on the technology front that also warrant attention. He talked about a new Technology Fellows program, a new Transnational and Technology Mission Center, a new chief technology officer, and a corporate board devoted to technology issues.
To talk through these initiatives, David Priess sat down with Martijn Rasser, who used to serve as a senior intelligence officer and analyst at CIA on emerging technology and tech innovation issues. He also served as a senior advisor in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, as a director at a venture-backed A.I. startup in Silicon Valley, and he is now at the Center for a New American Security as a senior fellow and director of the Technology and National Security Program.
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Two weeks ago, the Department of Justice's Office of Inspector General released a report on the FBI's mishandling of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act applications. It's the latest in a string of Inspector General reports and other documents to talk about the process. To go through the latest report, why the process is so important and what it all means, Jacob Schulz sat down on Lawfare Live with Lawfare editor-in-chief Benjamin Wittes, and Adam Klein, the former chairman of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, who is now at the University of Texas at Austin’s Strauss Center as director of the program on Technology, Security, and Global Affairs. They discussed what's in the latest report, what to make of it and how to think about reforms to the process in general.
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From October 15, 2020: On this episode of Lawfare's Arbiters of Truth series on disinformation, Evelyn Douek spoke with Maria Ressa, a Filipino-American journalist and co-founder of Rappler, an online news site based in Manila. Maria was included in Time's Person of the Year in 2018 for her work combating fake news, and is currently fighting a conviction for “cyberlibel” in the Philippines for her role at Rappler. Maria and her fight are the subject of the film, “A Thousand Cuts,” released in virtual cinemas this summer and to be broadcast on PBS Frontline in early next year.
As a country where Facebook is the internet, the Philippines was in a lot of ways ground zero for many of the same dynamics and exploitations of social media that are currently playing out around the world. What is the warning we need to take from Maria’s experience and the experience of Philippine democracy? Why is the global south both the beta test and an afterthought for companies like Facebook? And how is it possible that Maria is still, somehow, optimistic?
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The majority staff of the Senate Judiciary Committee has issued an interim report, entitled “Subverting Justice: How the Former President and His Allies Pressured DOJ to Overturn the 2020 Election.” A lot of it covers ground we knew about previously, but it contains a raft of new details about the president's pressure on the Justice Department to support his election fraud claims, the resignation of a U.S. attorney in Georgia, and the bizarre attempt to install as acting attorney general a Justice Department official who might actually support the president's ambitions.
To go over it all, Benjamin Wittes sat down with Lawfare senior editors Alan Rozenshtein and Quinta Jurecic, and Lawfare associate editor Bryce Klehm, who has been reading all of the depositions in the matter. They talked about what the committee found, what aspects of it are new and what we might do about this dramatic turn of events.
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It's been almost a year since Trump lost the presidency and over nine months since a new administration and a new congressional majority took power. We’re moving further and further away from Trump's controversial use of presidential authorities, and it seems like we've lost momentum in the push for systemic changes to prevent future abuses. Fortunately, some people are still pushing. Natalie Orpett sat down with Bob Bauer, former White House counsel to President Obama, and Jack Goldsmith, former assistant attorney general in President Bush’s Office of Legal Counsel. Together, they are the authors of the book, “After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency,” which was published in fall 2020. They've now joined together again to start a new organization, the Presidential Reform Project, which proposes a bipartisan blueprint for reconstructing the presidency. They talked about their recommendations for reform, including a few that they've added to their list since writing their book; about what's going on in Congress and the executive branch right now; and they explained why they believe that it really is still possible to implement some of their reforms.
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In the last few weeks, the Russian government has been turning up the heat on tech platforms in an escalation of its long-standing efforts to bring the internet under its control. First, Russia forced Apple and Google to remove an app from their app stores that would have helped voters select non-Kremlin-backed candidates in the country’s recent parliamentary elections. Then, the government threatened to block YouTube within Russia if the platform refused to reinstate two German-language channels run by the state-backed outlet RT. And after we recorded this podcast, the Russian government announced that it would fine Facebook for not being quick enough in removing content that Russia identified as illegal.
What’s driving this latest offensive, and what does it mean for the future of the Russian internet? This week on Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Alina Polyakova, the president and CEO of the Center for European Policy Analysis, and Anastasiia Zlobina, the coordinator for Europe and Central Asia at Human Rights Watch. They explained what this crackdown means for social media platforms whose Russian employees might soon be at risk, the legal structures behind the Russian government’s actions and what’s motivating the Kremlin to extend its control over the internet.
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Jessica Davis is the author of a new book on terrorism financing called, “Illicit Money: Financing Terrorism in the Twenty-First Century.” She's also the president and principal consultant at Insight Threat Intelligence, the president of the Canadian Association for Security and Intelligence Studies, and associate fellow at the Centre for Financial Crime and Security Studies. She sat down with Jacob Schulz to talk about her new book and about terrorism financing more broadly. They discussed the value of focusing on the financial side of things as opposed to the motivations that drive people to terrorism, the parts of the terrorism financing ecosystem that often get overlooked and much more.
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Over the weekend, news broke about U.S. prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia indicting Mohammed Khalifa, a Canadian who traveled to Syria in 2013 and later joined the Islamic state where he became the English language voice for a series of Islamic State propaganda videos. The indictment is a big deal, both because of the person it implicates and because it's a U.S. court trying a Canadian man for crimes committed in Iraq and Syria.
To break it all down, Jacob Schulz spoke with Leah West of Carleton University in Canada, and with Amarnath Amarasingam of Queen’s University in Canada. The two are experts on Canadian foreign fighters leaving Canada to go join the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, and they're also in the unique position of having interviewed Khalifa at a Syrian Democratic Forces prison.
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Bryce Klehm sat down with David Philipps, a New York Times correspondent and the author of “Alpha: Eddie Gallagher and the War for the Soul of the Navy SEALs.” They talked about the saga of Eddie Gallagher, the Navy SEAL acquitted of stabbing an ISIS prisoner.
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From August 5, 2017: The growing threat from North Korea has intensified during the past few weeks after a series of missile tests demonstrated that the Kim regime may soon be able to strike the continental United States. This week, Benjamin Wittes spoke with Mira Rapp-Hooper, an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, and Stephan Haggard, a distinguished professor of political science at the University of California, San Diego, to discuss recent events and the path forward for the United States and the international community. They addressed the diplomatic and military options for addressing the North Korean threat, the likelihood that the Kim regime will respond to traditional deterrence strategies, and how a new administration in the U.S. changes the dynamics in the region.
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From October 9, 2018: It's easy to spend all our time focusing on American domestic politics these days, but the rest of the world is not going away. Take the European Union, for example—our neighbors from across the pond, and one of the US's most valuable economic and security relationships. There's a lot going on over there, and some of it even involves us. How is that relationship faring in the age of tariffs, presidential blusters, Brexit, and tensions over Iran sanctions?
To figure that out, Shannon Togawa Mercer and Benjamin Wittes spoke to David O'Sullivan, the EU Ambassador to the United States. They talked about the US-EU trade relationship, Iran and Russia sanctions, Privacy Shield, the rule of law in deconsolidating democracies in the EU, and more.
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Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer of Huawei, is free, having been put on a flight from Canada back to her native China. Moments later, two Canadians held in China were also freed and put on flights back to Canada in what many are describing as hostage diplomacy by the People's Republic of China. The United States had indicted Wanzhou and Huawei for bank fraud but dropped the indictment against her at least, having reached a deferred prosecution agreement with her in which she gave statements that may be used against Huawei. To go over all of the angles, Benjamin Wittes sat down with Pete Strzok, former deputy head of counterintelligence at the FBI; Julian Ku, a professor of law at Hofstra University School of Law; and Leah West of Carleton University in Canada.
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Just two days ago, on September 28, CNN announced that it was turning off access to its Facebook pages in Australia. Why would the network cut off Facebook users Down Under?
It’s not a protest of Facebook or… Australians. CNN’s move was prompted by a recent ruling by the High Court of Australia in Fairfax Media and Voller, which held that media companies can be held liable for defamatory statements made by third parties in the comments on their public pages, even if they didn’t know about them. This is a pretty extraordinary expansion of potential liability for organizations that run public pages with a lot of engagement.
On this week’s episode of Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with David Rolph, a professor at the University of Sydney Law School and an expert on media law, to understand the ruling and its potential impact. What exactly does Voller mean for media companies with some kind of connection to Australia? What does it mean for you, if someone writes a nasty comment under your Facebook post or your tweet? Why did the court rule the way it did? And why is Australia known as the defamation capital of the world?
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Ronan Bergman is a reporter for the New York Times and the author of the book, “Rise and Kill First,” a history of Israeli targeted killings. Most recently with Farnaz Fassihi, he is the author of a lengthy New York Times investigative report entitled, “The Scientist and the A.I.-Assisted, Remote-Control Killing Machine,” which is the story of the use of a ground-based robotic machine gun to kill an Iranian nuclear scientist. He joined Benjamin Wittes from Tel-Aviv to talk about the assassination of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the operation and the machine through which it was conducted, the larger policy of Israeli assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists, and the legal bases on which these are done.
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Over the weekend, Germany held elections to see who will succeed Angela Merkel as Germany's chancellor. The results are in, but there's still a lot of coalition building to go. To break it all down, Jacob Schulz sat down with Constanze Stelzenmüller, the Fritz Stern Chair on Germany and trans-Atlantic Relations and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and Yascha Mounk, an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced and International Studies, both of whom are experts in German politics. They talked about the election, how to make sense of the results, and what everything means for the bigger picture of European politics, Germany's role in the world and more.
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France is mad. More specifically, France is mad about Australia reneging on a deal for French submarines and opting to go instead with an American contract. It's all part of AUKUS, a new trilateral security pact between Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States that was announced two weeks ago. France recalled its ambassador to the U.S. and otherwise expressed dismay at the development.
Jacob Schulz sat down with Benjamin Haddad, the senior director of the Europe Center at the Atlantic Council, who is an expert in European politics and transatlantic relations. They talked through the French reaction, what might have caused it, and what it all means for the future of transatlantic relations and U.S. strategy.
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From January 23, 2016: The fourth Hoover Book Soiree, held this week in Hoover's beautiful Washington, D.C. offices, featured Gayle Tzemach Lemmon on her newest book, Ashley’s War: The Untold Story of a Team of Women Soldiers on the Special Ops Battlefield. At the event, Lemmon, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and Lawfare’s editor-in-chief Benjamin Wittes discussed the growing role of women soldiers in special operations and beyond, examining the story of a cultural support team of women hand-picked from the Army in 2011 to serve in Afghanistan alongside Army Rangers and Navy SEALs. Their conversation dives into how the program developed, the lessons learned in the process, and why its success may provide critical insights for future force integration. Former Marine and current Lawfare contributor Zoe Bedell, who served in a similar capacity in Afghanistan, joined them on the panel to discuss her own experiences.
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From October 11, 2014: On his recent trip to the United States, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi emphasized India's desire to take up a greater role on the world stage. With India's renewed ambition, it is increasingly important for policymakers to understand what that role may look like, how it is envisioned from the Indian perspective, and how the country views international developments. Great opportunity exists for improved bilateral relations that bring stability, increased trade, and future defense, intelligence, and counterterrorism cooperation in the region.
This week, Ambassador Shivshankar Menon, former national security adviser and former foreign secretary to the government of India, gave a speech at Brookings entitled, “India’s Role in the World.” In his address, Ambassador Menon discusses the new optimism in U.S.-India bilateral relations on the heels of newly elected Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent visit and how leaders can capitalize on this new momentum. Ambassador Menon also delves into India’s relations with Pakistan, Bangladesh, and other countries in the region, its evolving outlook on China, and what role, if any, India can play in countering violent extremism found in groups like transnational terrorist organizations like ISIS and al Qaeda.
Strobe Talbott, president of The Brookings Institution, introduced Ambassador Menon and moderated the discussion.
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The Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, more commonly known as the Quad, brings together the United States, Australia, Japan and India in strategic dialogue on everything from disaster relief, to military readiness, to technology and supply chains. Today, the leaders of those four countries will meet for the first-ever summit, a gathering which would have been difficult to imagine just a few years ago.
To understand what led up to this point and what could develop from it, David Priess sat down with three experts who look at the Quad from different perspectives. Lavina Lee is a senior lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. Last year, she was appointed by the Australian minister of defense as director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute Council. Tanvi Madan is a senior fellow at and director of The India Project at the Brookings Institution, and she focuses in particular on India's foreign and security policies. And Sheila Smith is a senior fellow for Asia Pacific studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and a renowned expert on Japanese politics and foreign policy.
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Today, we’re bringing you another episode of Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem. We’ll be talking about “The Facebook Files”—a series of stories by the Wall Street Journal about Facebook’s failures to mitigate harms on its platform. There’s a lot of critical reporting about Facebook out there, but what makes the Journal’s series different is that it’s based on documents from within the company itself—memos from Facebook researchers, identifying problems based on hard data, proposing solutions that Facebook leadership then fails or refuses to implement and contradicts in public statements. One memo literally says, “We are not actually doing what we say we do publicly.”
To discuss the Journal’s reporting, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Jeff Horwitz, a technology reporter at the paper who obtained the leaked documents and led the team reporting the Facebook Files. What was it like working on the series? What's his response to Facebook's pushback? And why is there so much discontent within the company?
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Congress, which has been on recess for the month of August, has a lot on its plate. The January 6 committee is starting to receive information, and it has gone into stealth mode. If Congress doesn't get its act together, the government is going to shut down and we're going to default on the federal debt. And there's actually been some oversight hearings recently. We decided to check in on it all with Molly Reynolds and Quinta Jurecic, both of the Brookings Institution and both senior editors at Lawfare. They joined Benjamin Wittes to talk about what Congress has been doing, what's coming down the pike and if we are headed toward disaster.
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A new book by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa contains reporting about several controversial actions by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley in late 2000 and early 2021, regarding conversations with his Chinese counterparts, his discussion with senior military officers about following standard nuclear procedures (if need be), and reaching out to others like the CIA and NSA directors to remind them to watch everything closely. Were each of these reported actions proper for a Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and why? And what about all of this coming out in books?
To talk through it all, David Priess sat down with an A-team on civil-military relations. Peter Feaver is a civil-military relations expert at Duke University and director of the Triangle Institute for Security Studies. He served in National Security Council staff positions in both the Bill Clinton and the George W. Bush administrations. Kori Schake is the director of foreign and defense policy at the American Enterprise Institute who has worked in the Joint Staff J5, in the Office of the Secretary of Defense and in the National Security Council’s staff, as well as the State Department's policy planning staff during Bush 43’s administration. She has also researched and written extensively on civil-military relations. And Alex Vindman is Lawfare’s Pritzker Military Fellow and a visiting fellow at Perry World House. His government experience includes multiple U.S. Army assignments, time inside the office of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and in the National Security Council staff.
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On January 6, a mob of pro-Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol during the certification of the Electoral College vote. As lawmakers were being evacuated by Capitol police, Ashli Babbitt, a 35-year-old Air Force veteran, tried to climb through a shattered window in a barricaded door. Capitol Police Lt. Michael Byrd shot Babbitt as she was climbing through the window and Babbitt died later that day. In the polarized debate over January 6, the death of Ashli Babbitt has become a focal point and one of unusual political valence. Many on the right view her as a martyred hero and the police officer that shot her as an example of excessive force. Those on the left, who have traditionally been outspoken about police killings, have largely stayed quiet. To the extent they've commented, it's been to emphasize the unique circumstances of the Capitol insurrection as justification for the use of lethal force. The Department of Justice, having reviewed the incident, determined that there was insufficient evidence to charge Officer Byrd with violating Babbitt's civil rights, although DOJ did not conclude one way or the other, whether the shooting was justified under the Fourth Amendment.
To work through the legal issues around the shooting of Ashli Babbitt, Alan Rozenshtein spoke with Seth Stoughton, associate professor of law at the University of South Carolina and the coauthor of a recent Lawfare post on the shooting. Stoughton is a nationally recognized expert on police use of force. A former police officer himself, he was a key witness for the murder prosecution of Derek Chauvin, the police officer who killed George Floyd. Alan spoke with Stoughton about the murky factual records surrounding the Babbitt shooting, the complex constitutional and statutory issues that it raises and what its political effects say about the broader prospects for police reform.
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A discussion at the Berkman Center: In the wake of the disclosures about government surveillance and the rise of corporate-run applications and protocols, is the idea of an “unowned” Internet still a credible one? The Berkman Center’s Jonathan Zittrain moderates a panel, incluing Yochai Benkler (Harvard Law School), Ebele Okobi (Yahoo!), Bruce Schneier (CO3 Systames), and Benjamin Wittes (Brookings Institution) to explore surveillance, and the potential for reforms in policy, technology, and corporate and consumer behavior.
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Lawfare's editor in chief, Benjamin Wittes, gives a talk at the Palace of Westminster--sponsored by the Henry Jackson Society--on whether drones are becoming the new Guantanamo.
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It’s Lawfare No Bull” with: “For today’s episode of the Lawfare Podcast, we are bringing you a preview of a new podcast Lawfare is launching: Lawfare ‘No Bull,’ which brings you a curated feed of the most essential speeches, testimony, and other found audio relating to national security. Subscribe to the separate Lawfare ‘No Bull’ podcast feed to receive future episodes!
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Today, we’re bringing you another episode of Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem.
In a 2018 Senate hearing, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg responded to a question about how his company makes money with a line that quickly became famous: “Senator, we sell ads.” And indeed, when you open up your Facebook page—or most other pages on the internet—you’ll find advertisements of all sorts following you around. Sometimes they’re things you might really be interested in buying, even if you’ve never heard of them before—tailored to your interests with spooky accuracy. Other times, they’re redundant or just … weird. Like the aid for a pair of strange plaid pajamas with a onesie-style flap on the bottom that briefly took over the internet in December 2020.
Shoshana Wodinsky, a staff reporter at Gizmodo, wrote a great piece explaining how exactly those onesie pajamas made their way to so many people’s screens. She’s one of very few reporters covering the business of online advertisements outside industry publications—so Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke to her this week about what it’s like reporting on ads. How exactly does ad technology work? Why is it that the ad ecosystem gets so little public attention, even as it undergirds the internet as we know it? And what’s the connection between online ads and content moderation?
It’s the Lawfare Podcast, September 16: The Broken Rube Goldberg Machine of Online Advertising
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Lawfare Editor-In-Chief Benjamin Wittes sits down with Bruce Reidel of the Brookings Institution to discuss a pair of new articles in Lawfare on his first hand accounts of events in the wake of 9/11.
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More than 11 years ago. Bobby Chesney, Jack Goldsmith and Ben started a national security law blog called Lawfare. Focused, almost exclusively on issues related to the US government's reaction to 9/11 and the reactions to those government policies and the legal justifications for them in its early days, Lawfare was largely unknown to the general public outside of national security lawyers inside the U S government Lawfare didn't even have a podcast.
Jack and Ben joined me to talk through these origins of Lawfare, it's intimate connection to 9/11 and its aftermath, and the importance of analyzing these issues at the intersection of national security, law, and policy.
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Lawfare's Alan Rozenshtein interviews University of Toronto Professor Kent Roach about his new book, The 9/11 Effect: Comparative Counter-Terrorism.
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Marc Polymeropoulos served for 26 years in the CIA. He joined the agency working on Afghanistan in the 1990s and moved on to operational roles across the Middle East, recruiting spies and hunting terrorists. Later, he became a senior officer responsible for operations in Russia, which as you'll hear, led to a fateful trip to Moscow that altered the course of his career and his life. Marc has chronicled all of this and more in a new book, “Clarity in Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the CIA.” It's part memoir, part management handbook. Shane Harris sat down with Marc to talk about his career and to look back at the past 20 years since the 9/11 attacks. Marc talked about what the CIA got right, what it did wrong and how he has come to peace with an unexpected sense of betrayal after he developed symptoms of Havana Syndrome, a mysterious and debilitating brain injury.
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Let’s say you’re a freedom-loving American fed up with Big Tech’s effort to censor your posts. Where can you take your business? One option is Parler—the social media platform that became notorious for its use by the Capitol rioters. Another is Gettr—a new site started by former Trump aide Jason Miller.
Unfortunately, both platforms have problems. They don’t work very well. They might leak your personal data. They’re full of spam. And they seem less than concerned about hosting some of the internet’s worst illegal content. Can it be that some content moderation is necessary after all?
Today, we’re bringing you another episode of our Arbiters of Truth series on the online information ecosystem. Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with David Thiel, the big data architect and chief technical officer of the Stanford Internet Observatory. With his colleagues at Stanford, David has put together reports on the inner workings of both Parler and Gettr. They talked about how these websites work (and don’t), the strange contours of what both platforms are and aren’t willing to moderate, and what we should expect from the odd world of “alt-tech.”
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Jack Goldsmith sat down with Samuel Moyn, Henry R. Luce Professor of Jurisprudence at Yale Law School and a professor of history at Yale University. The two discussed Professor Moyn’s latest book, “Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War.” The conversation touched on the changing nature of war, the decoupling of conflict from our national conversations and even Tolstoy.
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This year marks the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party. To get more insight into the workings of the CCP, Bryce Klehm sat down with Tony Saich, the director of the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation and Daewoo Professor of International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School. Professor Saich is the author of the new book, “From Rebel to Ruler: One Hundred Years of the Chinese Communist Party.” They talked about a range of subjects, from tracing the thirteen original leaders of the CCP to President Xi Jinping's current policies.
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From December 12, 2019: Live from the #NatSecGirlSquad Conference in Washington, DC, on December 12, 2019, Benjamin Wittes sat down with Danielle Citron, professor of law at Boston University, VP of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, and MacArthur Genius Grant Fellow. Ben and Danielle talked about technology, sexual privacy, sextortion, and the previously unexplored intersections of feminism and cybersecurity.
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From February 20, 2018: The military has been not been a refuge from the Trump administration's norm-defying nature. Jack Goldsmith speaks to Phil Carter, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, about the history of civil-military relations, episodes that highlight the Trump administration's departure from that tradition, and what that may mean for the future.
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From January 29, 2012: Our subject in the podcast's inaugural episode is a remarkable article by journalist Shane Harris entitled "Out of the Loop: The Human-Free Future of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles."
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Many questions involving intelligence and Afghanistan have come up in the past few weeks. Did intelligence prepare policymakers for the rapid collapse of the Afghan forces and the Taliban’s taking of the capital? How unusual is it for a CIA director to visit a de facto war zone—in this case, Bill Burns to travel to Kabul to meet with Taliban leaders? What's the context for intelligence sharing with the Taliban? To tackle these issues, David Priess sat down with Sue Gordon, who for two years during the Trump administration was the principal deputy director of national intelligence after decades of service at the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and John McLaughlin, who served as the acting director of central intelligence and the deputy director during the George W. Bush presidency, after a career as an analyst, manager and executive in the CIA.
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This week on our Arbiters of Truth series on our online information ecosystem, we’re going to be talking about … disinformation! What else? It’s everywhere. It’s ruining society. It’s the subject of endless academic articles, news reports, opinion columns, and, well, podcasts.
Welcome to what BuzzFeed News reporter Joe Bernstein has termed “Big Disinformation.” In a provocative essay in the September issue of Harper’s Magazine, he argues that anxiety over bad information has become a cultural juggernaut that draws in far more attention and funding than the problem really merits—and that the intellectual foundations of that juggernaut are, to a large extent, built on sand.
Joe joined Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic to discuss his article and the response to it among researchers and reporters who work in the field. Joe explained his argument and described what it feels like to be unexpectedly cited by Facebook PR. What led him to essentially drop a bomb into an entire discipline? What does his critique mean for how we think about the role of platforms in American society right now? And … is he right?
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A privacy and national security threat that goes under-discussed is data brokers, the secretive industry of companies buying, aggregating, selling, licensing and otherwise sharing consumer data. Justin Sherman is a fellow at Duke University's Technology Policy Lab, where he directs the project on data brokers. He also recently wrote a piece for Lawfare about data brokers advertising data on U.S. military personnel. Jacob Schulz sat down with Justin to talk about data brokers and the national security threat that they pose.
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Jack Goldsmith sat down with national security reporter Spencer Ackerman, the author of the new book, “Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump.” The two discussed the book and the consequences of twenty years of the War on Terror. With the recent developments in Afghanistan, the conversation touches on the complicated history of the United States and the Middle East, a conflict that has now spanned four presidencies, Ackerman argues that America's response to 9/11 paved the way for the rise of political figures like Donald Trump.
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Since January, talk about reforming the nearly 20-year-old 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, or AUMF, that provides the legal basis for most overseas U.S. counterterrorism activities, has once again been on the rise. While past efforts have generally failed to yield results, the combination of growing bi-partisan disenchantment with the status quo and a seemingly supportive Biden administration had led some to believe that this is the moment in which reform might finally happen. But now, the collapse in Afghanistan has some wondering whether the Biden administration will still have an appetite for the type of risk that AUMF reform is likely to entail, especially given that President Biden appears to have doubled down on global counterterrorism efforts in recent public remarks.
Scott R. Anderson sat down with two leading experts in war powers: Professor Oona Hathaway of Yale Law School and Professor Matt Waxman of Columbia Law School. They discussed where the impetus for reform comes from, what AUMF reforms may be on the table and what recent events mean for the future of reform efforts.
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From October 7, 2017: Last month, Lawfare and Foreign Policy hosted an event on lawyering for the Trump presidency. Susan Hennessey spoke with former White House Counsels Bob Bauer, who served in the Obama administration from 2010 to 2011, and A.B. Culvahouse, who served in the Reagan administration from 1987 to 1989, in a lively discussion on providing legal support when your client is the president. They talked about the distinction between a president’s personal counsel and White House counsel, the challenges of defending a president during an investigation, and the quotidian aspects of the role of the White House Counsel.
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From April 16, 2019: Since November, Lawfare Contributor Michelle Melton has run a series on our website about Climate Change and National Security, examining the implication of the threat as well as U.S. and international responses to climate change. Melton is a student a Harvard Law school. Prior to that she was an associate fellow in the Energy and National Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, where she focused on climate policy.
She and Benjamin Wittes sat down to discuss the series. They talked about why we should think about climate change as a national security threat, the challenges of viewing climate change through this paradigm, the long-standing relationship between climate change and the U.S. national security apparatus, and how climate change may affect global migration.
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Much of the world has been watching the rapidly developing situation in Afghanistan with a mix of shock and anguish. Bryce Klehm spoke with five experts to get a sense of how the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan is being perceived around the world. You’ll hear from Madiha Afzal, the David M. Rubenstein Fellow in the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution, on Pakistan; Suzanne Maloney, the vice president and director of the Foreign Policy program at Brookings, on Iran; Yun Sun, the director of the China Program at the Stimson Center, on China; Joy Neumeyer, a writer and historian of Russia and the Soviet Union who has also worked as a journalist in Moscow, on Russia; and Constanze Stelzenmüller, the Fritz Stern Chair on Germany and trans-Atlantic Relations and a senior fellow in the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution, on Germany.
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When the Taliban seized power following the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan this month, major platforms like Facebook and Twitter faced a quandary. What should they do with accounts and content belonging to the fundamentalist insurgency that was suddenly running a country? Should they treat the Taliban as the Afghan government and let them post, or should they remove Taliban content under U.S. sanctions law?
If you’re coming at this from the tech sphere, you may have been seeing conversation in recent weeks about how this has raised new and difficult issues for platforms thrust into the center of geopolitics by questions of what to do about Taliban accounts. But, how new are these problems, really? On this week’s episode of our Arbiters of Truth series on our online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Scott R. Anderson, a senior editor at Lawfare and a fellow at the Brookings Institution, whom you might have heard on some other Lawfare podcasts about Afghanistan in recent weeks. They talked about the problems of recognition and sanctions law that platforms are now running into—and they debated whether or not the platforms are navigating uncharted territory, or whether they’re dealing with the same problems that other institutions, like banks, have long grappled with.
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Jack Goldsmith sat down with John Arquilla, an analyst with the RAND Corporation and professor emeritus with the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School. He's the author of the new book, “Bitskrieg: The New Challenge of Cyberwarfare.” The two discussed the challenges posed by cyber warfare, which John argues have been neither met nor mastered. He offers solutions for protecting against enemies that are often anonymous, unpredictable, and capable of projecting force and influence vastly disproportionate to their size, strength or wealth.
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Bryce Klehm spoke with Geoffrey Cain, an investigative journalist and the author of the new book, “The Perfect Police State: An Undercover Odyssey into China's Terrifying Surveillance Dystopia of the Future.” They had a wide-ranging discussion about the Chinese government's use of surveillance technology to suppress its Uyghur population, the history of Xinjiang since 9/11, the development of China's tech industry and much more.
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All across the world, citizens of liberal democracies are justifying their rejection of democratic norms and traditions as a protest against a cast of elite villains. It comes in different flavors around the world, but the underlying trend seems to be the same.
While most observers are focusing on the impact of globalization or the activities of these very elites, Tom Nichols is placing responsibility somewhere else: the citizens themselves. Tom Nichols is professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College and the author of “The Death of Expertise,” and most recently, “Our Own Worst Enemy: The Assault from within on Modern Democracy.” He's also a five-time undefeated Jeopardy champion and has over half a million followers on Twitter, where he rages about everything from rock music, to Indian food, to national security. He sat down with David Priess for a wide-ranging conversation about democratic decline, its causes and effects, the tough process of looking in the mirror and related issues, from civil military affairs to the current Afghan crisis.
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From March 7, 2020: We ask a lot of questions about foreign policy on this podcast. Why do certain countries make certain decisions? What are the interests of the players in question? What are the consequences and, of course, the legality of foreign policy choices. In a new book, Joseph Nye, professor emeritus and former dean of the Harvard Kennedy School, asks another question about foreign policy. Do morals matter? Jack Goldsmith sat down with Nye to discuss his new book, 'Do Morals Matter?: Presidents and Foreign Policy from FDR to Trump.' They discussed the ethical and theoretical factors by which Nye judged each president before going through many of the cases he focuses on in the book.
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From February 2, 2016: Barak Mendelsohn comes on the Jihadology Podcast to discuss his new book, “The al-Qaeda Franchise: The Expansion of al-Qaeda and Its Consequences.” Some of the topics covered include:
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The city of Kabul’s international airport has become the unlikely focal point of an unprecedented humanitarian effort as U.S. soldiers and diplomats seek to maintain control of their airport facility while facilitating the evacuation of thousands of Americans and foreign nationals, as well as at least some vulnerable Afghans. Meanwhile, on the outside, an improvised network of veterans, former diplomats, humanitarian workers and civil society groups has been desperately working to help vulnerable Afghans evade the Taliban, get into the airport and onto a flight to safety before it is too late.
Scott R. Anderson sat down with three people who have been closely involved in this latter effort: Susannah Cunningham of the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, Camille Mackler of the Truman Center for National Policy and the Immigrant Advocates Response Collaborative, and Chris Purdy of Human Rights First. They discussed what's happening on the ground at Kabul airport, what’s likely to come next for those who make it through and what the Biden administration needs to do to save more lives while there's still time.
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In October 2020, Facebook sent a cease and desist letter to two New York University researchers collecting data on the ads Facebook hosts on its platform, arguing that the researchers were breaching the company’s terms of service. The researchers disagreed and kept up with their work. On August 3, after months of failed negotiations, Facebook shut off access to their accounts—an aggressive move that journalists and scholars denounced as an effort by the company to shield itself from transparency.
For this week’s episode of our Arbiters of Truth series on our online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Alex Abdo, the litigation director at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University (where, full disclosure, Evelyn will soon join as a senior research fellow). The Knight Institute is providing legal representation to the two NYU researchers, Laura Edelson and Damon McCoy—and Alex walked us through what exactly is happening here. Why did Facebook ban Edelson and McCoy’s accounts, and what does their research tool, Ad Observer, do? What’s the state of the law, and is there any merit to Facebook’s claims that its hands are tied? And what does this mean for the future of research and journalism on Facebook?
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Earlier this month, Tucker Carlson, whose nightly news show on Fox has become the most popular show in U.S. cable news history, traveled to Budapest to record a special version of his show. The centerpiece of his visit was an interview with Hungary's authoritarian leader, Viktor Orbán. But far from criticizing Orbán or questioning him on Hungary's increasing move away from liberal democracy, Carlson was all compliments, praising the fence that Hungary has built along its border and allowing Orbán to lash out against his critics at home and abroad.
Carlson is not the only one with kind words for Hungary's would-be strongman. In the past months, an increasing number of conservative media and intellectual elites have praised Hungary, as well as earlier models like Portugal under the post-World War II right-wing dictator António Salazar, for what they view as its willingness to use state power to fight for conservative social, cultural and religious values.
To discuss what this embrace of foreign authoritarianism means for the American conservative movement, Alan Rozenshtein spoke with Zack Beauchamp, a senior correspondent at Vox, who has written about the right’s embrace of Orbánism and what it means for the future of American democracy.
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This past Sunday, Americans woke up to a new reality in the country of Afghanistan—the Afghan government that the United States and its allies have supported for the last two decades is gone. In its place is a resurgent Taliban, now firmly in control of nearly the entire country. Meanwhile, the U.S. presence has been reduced to Kabul’s international airport where soldiers and diplomats are working 24-7 to safely evacuate U.S. and allied personnel, U.S. and foreign civilians, and at least some vulnerable Afghans and their families, even as the rest of the country sits and waits to find out what life will be like under the new Taliban regime.
To discuss these unprecedented events, Scott R. Anderson sat down with Afghanistan policy experts Madiha Afzal of the Brookings Institution, Laurel Miller of the International Crisis Group and Jonathan Schroden of CNA. They discussed the state of play in Afghanistan, how we got here and what we should expect next.
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The United States government has been wrestling with what to do about a particular type of cyber threat—ransomware—that holds a victim's data and computer systems hostage until they pay, usually in the form of cryptocurrency, to an anonymous recipient. Recent ransomware attacks have threatened everything from hospitals to the media industry, with payment being the main way that most companies are choosing to get back online. But what does giving into such demands mean for broader U.S. efforts to prevent and deter ransomware attacks? Scott R. Anderson sat down on Lawfare Live with Lawfare editor-in-chief Benjamin Wittes and Lawfare fellow in cybersecurity law Alvaro Marañon, who together recently authored a piece for Lawfare entitled, “Ransomware Payments and the Law.” They argue that stemming the flow of payments is essential to deterring ransomware attacks and argue that the United States should adopt a policy banning such payments in all but the most serious cases. They discussed the threat that ransomware poses to the U.S. economy, how payments should be dealt with, and what Congress and the Biden administration seem to be doing about it.
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From August 4, 2018: Technologies that distort representations of reality, like audio, photo and video editing software, are nothing new, but what happens when these technologies are paired with artificial intelligence to produce hyper-realistic media of things that never happened? This new phenomenon, called "deep fakes," poses significant problems for lawyers, policymakers, and technologists.
On July 19, Klon Kitchen, senior fellow for technology and national security at the Heritage Foundation, moderated a panel with Bobby Chesney of the University of Texas at Austin Law School, Danielle Citron of the University of Maryland Carey School of Law, and Chris Bregler, a senior computer scientist and AI manager at Google. They talked about how deep fakes work, why they don't fit into the current legal and policy thinking, and about how policy, technology and the law can begin to combat them.
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From April 19, 2014: Benjamin Wittes had meant to have a book review of former CIA lawyer John Rizzo's new book, Company Man: Thirty Years of Controversy and Crisis in the CIA, ready to run along with this episode of the podcast. But he was still working on the review, which will be up shortly, and he didn't want to hold up the podcast while he finished it.
Ben caught up with Rizzo at a recent conference at Pepperdine University Law School. They talked about the book, some of its major themes, the persistence of the interrogation controversies and their latest manifestations. They also talked about the growth of lawyering at the CIA and why all the lawyers in the world can't seem to keep the agency out of trouble. And they talked about a career that, in many ways, tells the story of the modern CIA and the effort to do intelligence and covert action under law—from the Church Committee to the post 9/11 scandals.
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Two of the biggest controversies in tech are how to stop the spread of child pornography and other exploitation material, and whether encryption prevents legitimate law enforcement investigations. In an announcement last week, Apple dropped a bomb into both of these debates.
Apple announced that future versions of its iPhone operating system would scan photos its users post to the cloud and automatically detect if those photos contain child exploitation material. If so, Apple would notify the government. While many in law enforcement and in organizations devoted to child safety have hailed Apple's announcement, it has proven hugely controversial among many technologists, security researchers and digital civil society advocates. They worry that Apple’s system will harm privacy and civil rights, especially if governments demand that it be used to scan for content other than child exploitation. To help make sense of all of this, Alan Rozenshtein sat down with Mayank Varia, a cryptographer at Boston University, and Riana Pfefferkorn, a research scholar at the Stanford Internet Observatory.
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We live in the Disinformation Age. The internet has revolutionized our information ecosystem and caused disruption totally unprecedented in human history, and democracy may not survive. ... Just like it didn’t survive the television, radio, telegram and printing press before it. Right?
When it comes to talking about the internet, all too often history is either completely ignored with bold claims about how nothing like this has ever happened before—or it’s invoked with simple analogies to historical events without acknowledging their very different contexts. As usual, the real answer is more complicated: talking about history can inform our understanding of the dilemmas we face today, but it rarely provides a clear answer one way or another to contemporary problems. This week on our Arbiters of Truth series on our online information ecosystem, Quinta Jurecic spoke with Heidi Tworek, an associate professor at the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs and History at the University of British Columbia. In a recent essay, she made the case for how a nuanced view of history can better inform ongoing conversations around how to approach disinformation and misinformation. So how do current discussions around disinformation leave out or misinterpret history? What’s the difference between a useful historical comparison and a bad one? And why should policymakers care?
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You've probably heard about the craziness around the Biden administration’s new eviction moratorium. They consulted outside law professors instead of the Justice Department. Or did they? The president said he didn't have the authority to do it, and then he did it anyway. Lawfare has published two big articles on the subject in the last couple of days—one of them by Lawfare senior editor Alan Rozenshtein, and the other by Lawfare founding editor Jack Goldsmith. They both joined Benjamin Wittes to talk it all through. What exactly did the Biden administration say? What exactly did it do? Where was the Justice Department? And did any of this violate the law?
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The spread of misinformation is one of the biggest challenges facing social media platforms. A standard approach is to label suspicious posts or links so as to warn users that what they're engaging with is not reputable, but warnings, despite their wide use, haven't proven to be particularly successful. So what's a social media platform to do?
Two Princeton University computer scientists, Ben Kaiser, a PhD student, and Professor Jonathan Mayer, think they've found a better way. Instead of warning users about misinformation, they propose putting roadblocks between users and the misinformation they're tempted to click on. Alan Rozenshtein spoke with Ben and Jonathan about their research and about a piece they and Dr. J. Nathan Matias wrote recently for Lawfare entitled, "Warnings that Work: Combating Misinformation Without Deplatforming."
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The Olympics ended yesterday after more than two weeks of exciting international competition in Tokyo. On this episode of the podcast, we're taking a look back at some of the security and international affairs issues that you might have noticed in this year's games and in Olympic history. Rohini Kurup sat down with author Roy Tomizawa to talk about the last time that Japan hosted the Summer Olympics in 1964 and the similarities with this year's games. Bryce Klehm spoke with Libby Lange, a former speech writer for Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen, about the tense relations between China and Taiwan on display at the Olympics. Jacob Schulz spoke with Ethan Scheiner, a professor at UC Davis, about the history of violence at the Olympics. And Bryce talked with Claire Collins, an Olympic rower and a member of the U.S. national team, about participating in this year's games and some of the security challenges that followed.
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From March 9, 2019: For the past year, Matthew Waxman has been writing a series of vignettes on Lawfare about interesting—and usually overlooked—historical episodes of American constitutional war powers in action, and relating them to modern debates. These include the stories of St. Claire’s Defeat and the Whiskey Rebellion during the Washington administration, congressional war powers and the surprisingly late termination of World War I, the proposed Ludlow Amendment during the interwar years, and Dwight Eisenhower’s surprisingly broad Taiwan force authorization.
Benjamin Wittes invited Matt on the podcast to talk about these episodes and how they fit together into the book broader project from which they sprung. It's a great discussion, very different from the usual war powers debates. Even if you think you know a lot about constitutional war powers, you’ll learn a lot.
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From the April 18, 2015: Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Brookings for a public address on the current priorities and future prospects for U.S. engagement in Central Asia. With the draw-down in Afghanistan on the horizon, Mr. Blinken makes clear that the United States is not relinquishing its interests in the region. Blinken stresses that the security of the United States is enhanced by a more secure Central Asia, and a stable Central Asia is most likely if the nations there are sovereign and independent countries, connected with one another, and fully capable of defending their own borders. He concludes that investing in connectivity can spur commerce from Istanbul to Shanghai while serving as a stabilizing force for Afghanistan's transition.
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It's been a busy few weeks at the Justice Department. There was a major indictment of the chair of the former president's inaugural committee. There have been new policies promulgated on subpoenas to media organizations and on Justice Department White House contacts. There's been a decision not to defend a member of Congress for his role in the Jan. 6 uprising, and there are questions about what positions the Justice Department is going to take as the Jan. 6 committee begins its work. To talk about it all, Lawfare executive editor Scott R. Anderson sat down with Lawfare editor-in-chief Benjamin Wittes, former Justice Department official Carrie Cordero, now with the Center for a New American Security, and Chuck Rosenberg, who served at both DOJ and FBI.
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There have been a thousand hot takes about the Facebook Oversight Board, the Supreme Court-like thing Facebook set up to oversee its content moderation. The Board generated so much press coverage when it handed down its decision on Donald Trump’s account that Kaitlyn Tiffany at The Atlantic called the whole circus “like Shark Week, but less scenic.” Everyone weighed in, from Board Members, to lawmakers, academics, critics and even Lawfare podcast hosts. But there’s a group we haven’t heard much from: the people at Facebook who are actually responsible for sending cases to the Board and responding to the Board’s policy recommendations. Everyone focuses on the Board Members, but the people at Facebook are the ones that can make the Board experiment actually translate into change—or not. So this week for our Arbiters of Truth series on our online information environment, in light of Facebook’s first quarterly update on the Board, Evelyn Douek talked with Jennifer Broxmeyer and Rachel Lambert, both of whom work at Facebook on Facebook’s side of the Oversight Board experiment. What do they think of the first six or so months of the Oversight Board’s work? How do they grade their own efforts? Why is their mark different from Evelyn’s? And, will the Oversight Board get jurisdiction over the metaverse?
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The U.S. raid on the compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, that brought Osama bin Laden to ultimate justice also recovered nearly half a million files. In 2017, these files were publicly released, but few people have the expertise, the experience and the time to go through those materials, as well as interview family members of bin Laden and former associates to try to paint a full picture of the man. One person who fits that description is Peter Bergen, the author or editor of eight books, including "Holy War, Inc.," the definitive early study of bin Laden and al-Qaeda. Peter is also a vice president at New America and a national security analyst for CNN. Most recently, he is author of "The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden," a cradle-to-grave biography that takes advantage of a lot of this new material.
David Priess sat down with Peter to talk about bin Laden's evolution from a shy, humble, religious young man to the leader of a global terrorist network bent on killing thousands of civilians. They talked about the development of al-Qaeda as an organization and the U.S. response to al-Qaeda attacks, but they focused especially on what Peter learned from the 470,000+ files and his interviews that made him change his mind about a few things regarding al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden.
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Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman is the Pritzker Military Fellow at the Lawfare Institute, a former NSC staffer, and of course, an impeachment witness in the first impeachment of Donald J. Trump. He is also the author of the new book, "Here, Right Matters: An American Story." He joined Benjamin Wittes to talk about the book and the ground it covers—from Vindman's immigration as a small child, to his departure from the Army, the decision he made to report what he heard Donald Trump say to President Zelensky of Ukraine and the fallout, positive and negative.
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The president's interactions with intelligence and public comments about intelligence are dramatically different in the first six months of the Biden administration than they were during the last presidency. To talk about those differences and why they matter for intelligence and national security, David Priess sat down with Sue Gordon and John McLaughlin. Sue Gordon, for two years during the Trump administration, was the principal deputy director of national intelligence, after decades of service at CIA and at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, or NGA. John McLaughlin served as the acting director of central intelligence during the Bush 43 administration, after a career as an analyst, manager and executive in the CIA.
They talked about the differences between the Trump administration and the Biden administration when it comes to intelligence focused on the presidents themselves. And they talked about President Biden's recent comments at Liberty Crossing in McLean, Virginia, the home of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the National Counterterrorism Center, what he said and what he didn't say, and what it all reveals about intelligence and policymaking in the Biden years.
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From August 6, 2019: Over the years, presidents have used different language to describe the withholding of information from Congress. To discuss the concept of "executive privilege," Margaret Taylor sat down with Mark Rozell, the Dean of the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University, and the author of "Executive Privilege: Presidential Power, Secrecy and Accountability," which chronicles the history of executive privilege in its many forms since the founding of the United States. They talked about what executive privilege is, what is new in the Trump administration's handling of congressional demands for information, and what it all means for the separation of powers in our constitutional democracy.
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From August 12, 2017: The new Netflix documentary Icarus may seem at first glance off the beaten path for Lawfare. It's a film about doping in international sports, not national security law or policy. But as Benjamin Wittes explained when he reviewed it here, it's really about much more than that:
Icarus is not about L’Affaire Russe or Russian interference with the 2016 election. But if you want to understand L’Affaire Russe, you should watch it. Because Icarus is the story of the Russian government’s corruption of the integrity of supposedly neutral international processes and its use of covert action to tamper with those processes. If that sounds a little familiar, it should. It is easy to substitute in one’s mind as one watches this film a foreign country’s electoral system for the elaborate anti-doping testing regime whose systematic circumvention and undermining Icarus portrays. The corruption of process is similar. The motivation—the elevation of Russian national pride—significantly overlaps. The lies about it in the face of evidence are indistinguishable. And the result in both cases is a legitimacy crisis, of Olympic medals in one case and of a presidential election in another—a crisis that produces investigation and scandal.
This week, Wittes asked Fogel to come on the podcast and talk about the film and its relationship to the broader concerns about Russia that have dominated public attention of late.
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For the past decade, Tunisia's democracy has stood out as one of the few remaining bright spots of the Arab Spring. But earlier this week, it entered its own crisis as President Kais Saied declared a state of emergency, suspended parliament and stated his intent to move forward with widespread prosecutions as part of a long-promised anti-corruption effort. Some argue that Saied's strong-arm tactics are exactly what's needed to break the stagnation that's been plaguing Tunisia's economic and political systems, but others fear that it may be the beginning of the end for Tunisian democracy as we know it. To discuss these developments, Scott R. Anderson sat down with Sarah Yerkes, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and an expert on Tunisia. They discussed the context for Saied's actions, how other actors in Tunisia and the region have reacted, and what the international community can and should do about it.
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The attempted insurrection on January 6 is back in the headlines. This week, the House select committee investigating the Capitol riot began its work with its very first hearing. So for our Arbiters of Truth series on our online information environment, Evelyn Douek interviewed Quinta Jurecic about social media’s role in warning of the riot. Specifically, they talked about an essay Quinta wrote in Lawfare on the FBI’s failure to examine social media posts announcing plans to storm the Capitol—and how FBI Director Christopher Wray’s explanations don’t hold water.
So why does Quinta think Wray has been misleading in his answers to Congress on why the FBI didn’t review those posts from soon-to-be-rioters? What about the First Amendment issues raised by the U.S. government refreshing your Twitter feed? What role is social media playing in the Jan. 6 prosecutions—and what does that say about how tech companies should preserve online evidence of wrongdoing, rather than just taking it down?
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Yesterday saw the first hearing of the special House Select Committee to investigate the Jan. 6 riots and insurrection. Four law enforcement officers testified before the committee, which consisted of the Democrats along with two renegade Republicans, Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger.
To chew it all over, Benjamin Wittes sat down with Lawfare congressional guru Molly Reynolds, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and Quinta Jurecic, a fellow at the Brookings Institution. They talked about how the first hearing went, what it says about where the committee is headed, the fissures within the Republican party over how to handle this committee and whether the committee will have enough time and focus to get to real accountability.
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The United States is just over a month out from completing its full military withdrawal from Afghanistan, but as U.S. troops have moved on, the situation on the ground has only gotten more challenging, with the Taliban claiming control of a growing portion of the country. In recent days, the United States even reentered the arena with airstrikes on the Taliban intended to reinforce U.S. support for Afghan security forces and dissuade a major Taliban offensive on Kandahar, Afghanistan's second largest city. Whether this will be enough to stave off a broader Afghan civil war, however, remains to be seen.
To get a better sense of the state of things, Scott R. Anderson sat down with Dr. Jonathan Schroden, director of the Countering Threats and Challenges Program at the nonprofit research and analysis organization, CNA. They discussed how the withdrawal has gone so far, the impact it is having on the ground and what it all means for the future of Afghanistan.
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There are some stunning revelations coming out of the new blockbuster book by Carol Leonnig and Phil Rucker, “I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump's Catastrophic Final Year.” If you thought you knew how bad some things during that final year of the Trump presidency were, this book will surprise you with what it tells us about the things that even those of us who watched the presidency closely did not know.
David Priess sat down with Leonnig, a national investigative reporter at the Washington Post and author of “Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service,” and Rucker, the senior White House correspondent at the Washington Post and coauthor with Carol of the book, “A Very Stable Genius,” to talk about what they discovered in their book and their reporting. They discussed not only a few of the headline scoops, but also some lesser reported stories in their book, ranging from Trump's briefing before the U.S. strike that killed Iran’s Qasem Soleimani, to Trump's attitude toward potential 2024 running mates, to what we've learned about the behavior of people around the president near the end of the administration, like Mark Milley, Bill Barr, Mark Meadows and Mike Pompeo.
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From August 10, 2019: The United Kingdom has a new Prime Minister. It also has a looming cliff it is careening toward and about to leap off of on Halloween of this year. This week, Benjamin Wittes sat down with his Brookings colleague Amanda Sloat to talk about all things Brexit. They talked about the new British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, his views on Brexit, the deadlock between Britain and the European Union, and the way the Brexit debate plays out in American politics.
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From November 24, 2018: John Carlin served as assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s National Security Division from April 2014 to October 2016. In his new book with Garrett Graff, called “Dawn of the Code War: America's Battle Against Russia, China, and the Rising Global Cyber Threat," Carlin explains the cyber conflicts the U.S. faces and how the government fights back. Benjamin Wittes sat down with Carlin last week to talk about the book. They talked about about the FBI and Justice Department’s fight against cyber espionage, about how the Justice Department attributes cyberattacks to the responsible actors, and about Carlin’s experience as FBI director Robert Mueller’s chief of staff.
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It's been a busy couple of weeks at Guantanamo Bay, a place that has not had a busy couple of weeks in a while. There was a transfer, there was a resumption of military commissions, and the chief prosecutor of military commissions resigned abruptly.
To go over these events, Benjamin Wittes sat down with Steve Vladeck, a Lawfare contributing editor and a professor at the University of Texas, and Latif Nasser, a co-host of the show Radiolab from New York Public Radio, where he did an extended series about a Guantanamo Bay detainee, who just happens to be the one who was transferred this week. They talked about who the transferee was and why he was held so long, about the resumption of military commissions and why they are stagnated even when resumed, about the resignation of General Martins, and about the DC Circuit's latest forays into Guantanamo Bay.
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This week we're bringing you the breakdown of the heavyweight bout of the century—a battle over vaccine misinformation. In the left corner we have the White House. Known for its impressive arsenal and bully pulpit, this week it asked for the fight and came out swinging with claims that Facebook is a killer—and not in a good way. In the right corner we have Facebook, known for its ability to just keep taking punches while continuing to grace our screens and rake in the cash. The company has hit back with gusto, saying that Facebook has actually helped people learn the facts on vaccines. Period. Will either of them land a knockout blow? Is this just the first round of many match ups?
On this episode of our Arbiters of Truth series on our online information ecosystem, we devote the conversation to the latest slugfest between Facebook and the White House. Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Renee DiResta, the research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, and Brendan Nyhan, professor of government at Dartmouth University, both of whom have been working on questions of online health misinformation. Let’s get ready to rumble.
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Yemen remains a mess. Many years of warfare have left it politically fractured, economically shattered and with a true humanitarian crisis of multiple dimensions. And yet there are some small signs of hope, with the Biden administration increasing its engagement to achieve progress and the United Nations resetting its efforts with a new special envoy to the country.
To talk through it, David Priess sat down with Elisabeth Kendall, a senior research fellow at Pembroke College of Oxford University, who has spent significant time on the ground, especially in Eastern Yemen, and Alexandra Stark, a senior researcher at New America and the author of the recent article on Lawfare, "Giving Diplomacy a Chance in Yemen."
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It was quite a week in cybersecurity. The Israeli firm NSO Group was outed by a consortium of newspapers and media entities for its snooping software Pegasus, which seems to have gathered data from the phones of a shockingly large number of people. Then, starting Sunday evening and into Monday morning, the Biden administration announced a multi-lateral response to China's Microsoft Exchange Server hack. There were indictments, there was a toughly worded statement, but there were no sanctions. Was it enough?
Benjamin Wittes sat down with Matt Tait, AKA @pwnallthethings, the chief operating officer of Corellium, and Dmitri Alperovitch, the founder of the Silverado Policy Accelerator and the co-founder of CrowdStrike. They talked about the Biden administration's response on China; the disclosure of Pegasus and what that means for iPhone security, for Apple and for the Israeli government; and they talked about mobile device security. Is it hopeless?
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U.S. troops are pulling out of Afghanistan, the withdrawal is almost done and U.S. forces turned over the Bagram Airfield to Afghan forces the other day. Scott Anderson knows something about withdrawals. He served at U.S. Embassy Baghdad shortly after the United States withdrew from Iraq. He joined Benjamin Wittes on Lawfare Live to talk about the Afghan withdrawal, his memories of the Iraq withdrawal and why these things sometimes go better and sometimes go worse. What has the Biden administration learned from the Iraq withdrawal experience? What is it doing right this time, and what is it doing wrong?
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From February 16, 2013: Fawzia Koofi (website, Twitter) is an Afghan Member of Parliament and Vice President of the Afghan National Assembly. She is also running for President of Afghanistan in the planned April 2014 elections, and would be the first female president in Afghan history. She has a remarkable backstory: Born as the nineteenth of her father's twenty-three children, Koofi was left to die from exposure as a baby girl. She survived and witnessed during her childhood father's and brother's deaths from political unrest. She was forced to leave medical school when the Taliban took over Afghanistan in 1996 and banned the education of women and girls, and, soon after her own daughters were born, her husband died from tuberculosis he contracted while a political prisoner in a Taliban jail. After the new Afghan government was formed after the 2001 U.S.-led invasion, Koofi ran for and won a seat in the Afghan parliament. She currently represents the Badakshan region in northeastern Afghanistan and is a leading advocate for the rights of women and girls. Koofi has also written a recently published memoir, The Favored Daughter, about her life and her journey into politics.
Koofi delivered the closing remarks at the Harvard Women's Law Association's annual conference. (Special thanks to the association's president and conference organizer, Stephanie Davidson, for arranging the interview.) Alan Rozenshtein spoke with Koofi at her snowed-in hotel about the current state of Afghanistan and the challenges facing her country.
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From April 9, 2016: This week on the podcast, we welcome Eric Schwartz, the Dean of the Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota. Schwartz previously served as U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Population, Refugees, and Migration. In his conversation with Benjamin Wittes, he sketches the key aspects of U.S. refugee policy, explaining how it both protects the security of the United States and at times undermines its ability to accept refugees. Schwartz, who believes the United States has an interest in alleviating the Syrian refugee crisis, outlines what a coherent refugee policy would look like, and argues that the reforms must go beyond simply accepting more refugees.
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National security attention rarely focuses for long on Sub-Saharan Africa, and when it does, it's largely on the most populous countries like Nigeria, Ethiopia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Former intelligence community and National Security Council official Judd Devermont, now director of the Africa Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, wants to change that. Along with Nicole Wilett, who used to cover Africa for the State Department, the National Security Council and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Judd has created and co-hosts the new podcast called "49," now available everywhere. This podcast jumps head-first into the past, present and future of U.S. policy toward each of Sub-Saharan Africa's 49 countries. David Priess sat down with Judd to discuss a few of these countries, the new podcast and the opportunities for the incoming Biden administration to make real inroads in relations with countries across the continent.
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On May 24, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed into law a bill designed to limit how social media platforms can moderate content. Technology companies, predictably, sued—and on June 30, Judge Robert Hinkle of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida granted a preliminary injunction against the law.
The legislation, which purported to end “censorship” online by “big tech,” received a lot of commentary and a great deal of mockery from academics and journalists. Among other things, it included an exemption for companies that operate theme parks. But Alan Rozenshtein argues in a piece for Lawfarethat though the law may be poorly written, the issues raised by the litigation are worth taking seriously. This week on our Arbiters of Truth miniseries on our online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Alan—an associate professor of law at the University of Minnesota Law School and a senior editor at Lawfare—about the Florida legislation.
What exactly would the law have done, anyway? Why does Alan think the judge underplays the potential First Amendment considerations raised by private companies exerting control over huge swaths of the online public sphere? And what’s with the theme park stuff?
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Jack Goldsmith is feeling a little bit grouchy. In a piece on Lawfare entitled, "Empty Threats and Warnings on Cyber," he blasts the Biden administration and its predecessors for "publicly pledging to impose 'consequences' on Russia for its cyber actions for at least five years—usually, as here, following a hand-wringing government deliberation in the face of a devastating cyber incident." Goldsmith catalogs the recent history of administrations promising big action against Russia, yet seeming to take none, and he asks why we would do this. Why would we thus erode our deterrent capability?
He joined Benjamin Wittes to discuss the latest of these statements, the history of them and the question of why the United States keeps speaking loudly and carrying such a small stick.
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Last week, the country of Haiti was rocked by the assassination of its controversial president, Jovenel Moïse, who was killed in a bizarre plot, the details of which are still being uncovered. Moïse's death is yet another shock for a Haitian political system that was already in a state of crisis and has some calling for foreign intervention, a controversial proposal with which Haiti has a long and difficult history.
To discuss these developments, Scott R. Anderson sat down with Professor Robert Fatton, Jr. of the University of Virginia, a native of Haiti and a widely published expert on Haitian politics. They discussed what we know about the assassination plot and what it may mean for the country and region moving forward.
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Dmitri Alperovitch sat down with Anne Neuberger, Deputy National Security Advisor for Cyber and Emerging Technology, to discuss the Biden administration's cybersecurity strategy. The conversation was originally recorded at a Silverado Policy Accelerator event on June 29, 2021.
They discussed the latest executive order that the president signed on cybersecurity, the administration's strategy to combat ransomware and the division of responsibilities between Neuberger's office at the National Security Council and the newly created National Cyber Director office to be led by Chris Inglis. They also got into the strategy for securing our semiconductor supply chain.
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From August 25, 2020: Jack Goldsmith spoke with Harold Holzer, director of the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College, about his new book, "The Presidents vs. the Press: The Endless Battle Between the White House and the Media from the Founding Fathers to Fake News." They discussed the long and interesting history of the contentious relationship between presidents and the press, and how President Trump's relationship with journalists has many precedents and is not the low point in president-press relations. They also discussed the likely arc of the battle between the White House and the media after Trump leaves office.
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From July 11, 2014: As the election crisis in Afghanistan comes to a head, all eyes are once again on the future of Afghan democracy. But, America’s history in the region extends back much further than its nation-building efforts since September 2001. On Tuesday, at a Brookings launch of his newest book entitled, “What We Won: America’s Secret War in Afghanistan, 1979-1989,” Bruce Riedel, Senior Fellow and Director of the Intelligence Project at the Brookings Institution, discussed lessons the United States can learn from its successful efforts in the 1970s and 1980s in Afghanistan. In his talk, Riedel discusses the why the American intelligence operation in Afghanistan in the 1980s was so successful, and what, if any lessons, the United States can apply to its ongoing operations in the country. Riedel also explored the complex personalities and individuals who shaped the war, and explains how their influence still affects the region today. Brookings Institution President Strobe Talbott provided introductory remarks and moderated the conversation.
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For many Americans, the events of the past several years—from the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, to the January 6 assault on the Capitol building—have driven home a disturbing conclusion: that the problems of extremism, violence and terrorism are not just overseas phenomena, but have taken root here in the United States.
One of President Biden's first actions upon assuming the presidency was to direct his staff to produce a strategy for addressing this challenge. One hundred days later, they did so, putting forward the first ever "National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism." To discuss this strategy, Scott R. Anderson sat down with White House official Joshua Gelzter, who is currently serving as a special advisor to the Homeland Security advisor and who oversaw the development of the national strategy. They talked about the logic behind it, the challenges and obstacles its authors encountered, and what it means for U.S. national security policy through the Biden administration and beyond.
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The news business in America is in crisis. Between 2008 and 2019, newspapers in the U.S. lost half of their newsroom employees. Journalism jobs cut during the pandemic number in the tens of thousands. Local news is suffering the most, with cutbacks across the country and many communities left without a reliable source of information for what’s going on in their area.
Why is this a crisis not just for journalists, but also for democracy?
In today’s episode of our Arbiters of Truth series on the online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic turn to that question with Martha Minow, the 300th Anniversary University Professor at Harvard Law School. She’s written a new book, titled “Saving the News: Why the Constitution Calls for Government Action to Protect Freedom of Speech.” How should we understand the crisis facing American newsrooms? How has the U.S. government historically used its power to create a hospitable environment for news--and how should that history shape our understanding of what interventions are possible today? And what role does the First Amendment play in all this?
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The United States Secret Service has many important missions, the most public of which is protecting the president of the United States. And in this mission, its motto is "Zero Fail." There is no window for them to let their guard down when it comes to protecting the commander-in-chief.
And yet, the past several decades of the Secret Service's protection have seen gaps, mistakes and exposures of some fundamental problems within the Secret Service itself. Carol Leonnig is a Pulitzer Prize-winning national investigative reporter at the Washington Post known for her reporting on the Secret Service, as well as the Trump presidency and many other topics. She is also the author of the new book, "Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service." She sat down with David Priess to talk about the United States Secret Service, its mission, its challenges and potential reforms to get over some of its most fundamental flaws.
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Probably best known as the Twitter handle @pwnallthethings, Matt Tait is the chief operating officer of Corellium. Previously, he was a hacker for GCHQ, the British version of the National Security Agency, he was the CEO of Capital Alpha Security, and he worked at Google Project Zero, among other things.
Most of this podcast was recorded before the news of the Kaseya ransomware attack broke over the weekend (Matt wrote a piece on Lawfare entitled, "The Kaseya Ransomware Attack is a Really Big Deal"). They talked a bit about Kaseya at the beginning of the episode before turning to a more general discussion of ransomware, other current cybersecurity threats and what Matt is worried about as he looks into the future.
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From December 14, 2019: Recently, former CIA officer Jerry Lee was sentenced to 19 years in prison for conspiring to share classified information with the Chinese government. During the time in which Lee was in touch with Chinese intelligence agents, dozens of CIA sources in China were arrested or killed—a catastrophe for CIA operations in the country. What's the connection between this disaster and the Lee case? And what do both mean for Chinese counterintelligence work overall? David Priess sat down with John McLaughlin, practitioner-in-residence at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and former acting director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and Shane Harris, intelligence and national security reporter for The Washington Post whose reporting covered much of the Jerry Lee case. They talked about the case, counterintelligence in China and the impact on the U.S.-China relationship.
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From December 3, 2016: Earlier this week, the New York Times published a story by Charlie Savage, Eric Schmitt, and Mark Mazzetti informing us that the Obama administration had changed its interpretation of the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force to more broadly cover the use of force against al-Shabaab, expanding its previous reading of the AUMF as only authorizing force against members of al-Shabaab individually linked to al-Qaeda. Bobby noted the story on Lawfare and provided a few comments. While the news has been somewhat drowned out amidst the hubbub of the presidential transition, the significance of this change in legal interpretation shouldn't be lost—so we brought Bobby and Charlie Savage on the podcast to talk with Benjamin Wittes about where this change came from and what it might mean.
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From February 27, 2019: On Wednesday, February 27, 2019, Michael Cohen—the former executive vice president of the Trump Organization, former deputy finance chairman of the Republican National Committee, and former personal lawyer to Donald Trump—paid a visit to the House Committee on Oversight and Reform. Cohen accused the president of campaign finance violations after taking office. He alleged that he was present when Roger Stone gave Trump advance notice of the WikiLeaks dump of the hacked DNC emails. And he claimed that the president's statements in a meeting with Jay Sekulow led Cohen to conclude that the president wanted Cohen to make false statements to Congress. So we cut out all of the bickering, all of the procedural obstructions, and all the rest of the frivolity, to bring you just the one hour of testimony you need to hear.
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The Manhattan district attorney and the New York attorney general's office have issued an indictment against the Trump Organization and its chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg. It was, shall we say, not the indictment that many people who imagined accountability for Donald Trump would have prayed for or would have expected. It focuses on under-the-table compensation for senior executives—one senior executive in particular. To discuss it all, Benjamin Wittes spoke with Lawfare senior editor Quinta Jurecic; Daniel Hemel, a tax law expert at the University of Chicago; and Rebecca Roiphe of the New York Law School, who is an expert on prosecutions and politicization and a veteran of the New York office that brought the case.
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This week on Arbiters of Truth, our podcast on our online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic bring you an episode they’ve wanted to record for a while: a conversation with Nathaniel Gleicher, the head of security policy at Facebook. He runs the corner of Facebook that focuses on identifying and tackling threats aimed at the platform, including information operations.
They discussed a new report released by Nathaniel’s team on “The State of Influence Operations 2017-2020.” What kinds of trends is Facebook seeing? What is Nathaniel’s response to reports that Facebook is slower to act in taking down dangerous content outside the U.S.? What about the argument that Facebook is designed to encourage circulation of exactly the kind of incendiary content that Nathaniel is trying to get rid of?
And, of course, they argued over Facebook’s use of the term “coordinated inauthentic behavior” to describe what Nathaniel argues is a particularly troubling type of influence operation. How does Facebook define it? Does it mean what you think it means?
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Early Monday morning, the U.S. carried out airstrikes in Iraq and Syria against two Iranian-backed militia groups. The strikes raise a whole host of diplomatic, legal and policy questions. To break them all down, Jacob Schulz sat down with Scott R. Anderson, Lawfare's executive editor and a senior fellow in the National Security Law Program at Columbia Law School.
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Adam Klein was, until the other day, the chairman of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, known colloquially as the PCLOB. In that capacity, he had the opportunity to do something that no one has ever really done before as an outsider: review a bunch of FISA applications, that is, applications for electronic surveillance under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The result is a white paper that looks behind the FISA curtain that he published before leaving office and about which he wrote a Lawfare post. He joined Benjamin Wittes on Lawfare Live to talk about the applications, the review, the white paper and the Lawfare article, and how the FISA process could stand improvement.
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In this second half of David Kris's two-part discussion with FBI historian John Fox, David and John continue their whirlwind tour of the Bureau, focused on its use of wiretap evidence, SIGINT and other intelligence. In the last episode, they worked their way from the FBI's founding through the era of prohibition and gangsters, World War II and part of the Cold War, including the prosecution of DOJ official Judith Coplon based on information from NSA's Project VENONA. In this episode, they move forward through the FBI's more recent history to cover abuses revealed in the 1970s, the terrorist attacks of 9/11, as well as some present-day issues.
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From the Lawfare Archive, July 18, 2015: While world powers and Iran were embroiled in last minute negotiations last week, Brookings hosted a panel discussion on the meaning of another power’s recent nuclear threats: Russia's. In recent months, Russia has rattled the saber, with Vladimir Putin remarking on his nuclear options during the Crimea crisis and making a mild threat to nuke the Danish navy. Given that Russia maintains enough nuclear muscle to destroy the world---theoretically anyway---how seriously should we take these provocations?
The panel was moderated by Brookings Fellow Jeremy Shapiro and featured Hans Kristensen of the Federation of American Scientists and Brookings scholars Pavel Baev and Steven Pifer. Together, the trio took a deep dive into Russia’s recent nuclear threats during the Crimea crisis, the country’s capabilities—both conventional and nuclear—relative to NATO, and its ongoing modernization program. The three conclude with terrifying thought: The folks surrounding Putin just might not fully understand deterrence.
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From the Lawfare Archive, March 31, 2020: Saudi Arabia continues to be a mainstay of newspaper headlines, whether it be for its oil price war with Russia or for news about Turkish indictments in connection with the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. But making sense of Saudi Arabia’s de facto leader, Mohammed Bin Salman, known widely as MBS, can be a difficult proposition. He has made social reforms—lifting the ban on women driving and taking power away from Saudi Arabia’s infamous religious police—but he has no interest in political reform and has a propensity to take impulsive and remarkably violent action, both in the foreign policy space and toward perceived enemies within Saudi Arabia and beyond. Ben Hubbard, Beirut bureau chief for the New York Times, provides an account of the young prince’s rise and his early years in power in Saudi Arabia. Jacob Schulz talked with Hubbard about MBS's rise to power, his influence on domestic life in Saudi Arabia, his relationship to Jared Kushner and the Trump administration, and about the White House response to Khashoggi’s murder.
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The Apple Daily newspaper in Hong Kong has shut down under pressure from the Chinese and Hong Kong governments. It's the latest political repression in Hong Kong that shows no sign of easing up. Alvin Cheung is a postdoctoral fellow at McGill University and a non-resident affiliated scholar at NYU's U.S.-Asia Law Institute. He joined Benjamin Wittes to talk about the Apple Daily case, the other cases like it, the implementation of Hong Kong's new national security law and what it all means for the Hong Kong constitutional order.
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This week on Arbiters of Truth, our podcast on our online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Camille François, the chief innovation officer at Graphika, about a new report released by her team earlier this month on an apparent Russian influence operation aimed at so-called “alt-tech” platforms, like Gab and Parler. A group linked to the Russian Internet Research Agency “troll farm” has been posting far-right memes and content on these platforms over the last year. But how effective has their effort really been? What does the relatively small scale of the operation tell us about how foreign interference has changed in the last four years? Has the media’s—and the public’s—understanding of information operations caught up to that changing picture?
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This is the latest installment in our ongoing series of historical inquiries with U.S. and Five Eyes intelligence agencies. Earlier episodes have featured CIA, NSA and GCHQ, and today, it's the first of a two-part discussion of FBI, featuring FBI historian John Fox. David Kris sat down with John for a whirlwind tour of the Bureau, from its founding through the era of prohibition and gangsters, World War II, the Cold War, abuses revealed in the 1970s, 9/11 and right up to the present, focusing on the use of wiretap evidence and intelligence.
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Bryce Klehm sat down with Peter Martin, a defense policy and intelligence reporter at Bloomberg. Peter is the author of the new book, "China's Civilian Army: The Making of Wolf Warrior Diplomacy," which traces the history of China's diplomatic corps from the founding of the Chinese Communist Party to the present. They covered a lot of ground, from Zhou Enlai's impact on the Chinese foreign ministry to the Biden administration's first interactions with China's top diplomats.
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NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, was founded in 1949 and quickly became the main way that the United States guaranteed the security of Western Europe, especially against possible invasion by the Soviet Union. But with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the end of the Cold War, NATO has faced a series of identity crises. Should it continue to exist in its current form or change? If it should change, should it shrink or expand? Should it continue focusing on European security or embrace global peacekeeping? What should its relationship with Russia be? And perhaps most importantly, should America continue to serve as the de facto head of NATO and the main guarantor of European security? Last week's NATO summit offers an opportunity to revisit all of these cases.
To discuss it all, Alan Rozenshtein spoke with two experts on U.S. foreign policy: Stephen Wertheim, a historian and director of the Grand Strategy Program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, and Sara Moller, an assistant professor in international security at Seton Hall University. To frame the conversation, they focused on Stephen's recent essay in the New York Times, provocatively titled, "Sorry, Liberals. But You Really Shouldn't Love NATO."
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From the Lawfare Archive, February 19, 2020: Jessica Stern, who served on the National Security Council during the Clinton administration, has a remarkable skill: she interviews really bad people, and she writes about them in really interesting ways. She spent quite a bit of time interviewing Bosnian-Serb war criminal Radovan Karadzic, who is serving a life sentence at the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal in The Hague for genocide in connection with the Bosnian conflict in the 1990s. Their conversations led to the publication of the book, "My War Criminal: Personal Encounters with an Architect of Genocide," which triggered a remarkable outpouring of rage at Jessica Stern. Benjamin Wittes spoke with Jessica recently about the book, the controversy, and her general approach to talking to evil men.
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From the Lawfare Archive, July 17, 2018: U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin met in Helsinki for their first one-on-one summit, where the U.S. president said that he trusted the Russian president's denial of election interference over his own intelligence community. In the United States, furor followed on both sides of the aisle. To break down what happened and what it means, Alina Polyakova sat down with Julia Ioffe, correspondent at GQ and long-time Russia observer, and Ian Bremmer, president of the Eurasia Group, to talk about why nobody else was in the room with Trump and Putin during their over-two-hour, one-on-one meeting; what Russia's kompromat on Trump really might be; and whether this summit actually moved the needle in U.S.-Russia policy. What was gained and what was lost? Was this a win for Putin? An embarrassment for Trump?
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President Biden met with President Putin in Geneva on Wednesday. There was a lot of press and dueling press conferences, with both presidents having testy moments with them, and the whole thing was pretty different from the last time Putin met with a U.S. president.
To talk through the Putin-Biden summit, Benjamin Wittes sat down on Lawfare Live with Fiona Hill and Alex Vindman, both formerly of the National Security Council, Alina Polyakova of the Center for European Policy Analysis, and former Estonian President Toomas Ilves. They discussed whether this was a win for Putin, a win for Biden, an overblown icebreaker or something else, and what it all says about where U.S.-Russia relations are headed.
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TikTok has rapidly become one of the most popular apps for teenagers across the world for dancing, lip-syncing and sharing details about their lives. But if you cast your mind back to last year—specifically, August 2020—you may recall that the app’s future in the United States suddenly fell into doubt. The Trump administration began arguing that the app’s ownership by the Chinese company ByteDance raised problems of national security for the United States. ByteDance was ordered to divest from TikTok, and the app, along with the popular China-based chat app WeChat, faced U.S. sanctions.
But you might have noticed that your teenager is still making TikTok videos. And President Biden issued his own executive order last week revoking Trump’s sanctions. So, what on earth is happening?
On this week’s episode of our Arbiters of Truth series on our online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke to Bobby Chesney, Lawfare co-founder and Charles I. Francis Professor in Law at the University of Texas School of Law, about what’s happened to TikTok over the past year. Bobby brought us up to speed with the Trump administration’s offensive on TikTok, why the app has survived so far and why TikTok shouldn’t breathe easy just yet about Biden’s executive order.
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The United States is quickly approaching its September deadline for a full military withdrawal from Afghanistan. As the U.S. completes its withdrawal, many Afghans who partnered with the U.S., serving as translators and interpreters, face the danger of severe retribution from the Taliban.
Those who partner with the U.S. military can obtain a special immigrant visa, or SIV, through the U.S. State Department, but many lawmakers and veterans' groups are concerned that the U.S. is running out of time to approve SIVs for its Afghan partners. To help make sense of it all, Bryce Klehm sat down with Congressman Seth Moulton and Matt Zeller. Rep. Moulton is a representative from Massachusetts who served as a Marine infantry officer in Iraq and who is also a member of the Honoring Our Promises Working Group, a bipartisan group of lawmakers calling on the Biden administration to protect the U.S.'s Afghan partners. Zeller is a Truman Center fellow and host of the Wartime Allies podcast, who served as a combat advisor with Afghan security forces and who is also the co-founder of No One Left Behind, a veterans' organization that provides services to former Afghan and Iraqi interpreters who resettle in the United States.
They covered a range of issues, including the risks that current and former U.S. partners in Afghanistan face, the obstacles in the SIV process and a potential evacuation of U.S. partners to Guam.
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A spree of stories has emerged over the last week or so that the Justice Department under the prior administration obtained phone and email records of several journalists, several members of Congress and staffers, and even family members. It has provoked a mini scandal, calls for investigation, howls of rage and serious questions. To discuss it all, Benjamin Wittes sat down with Gabe Rottman of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, former FBI agent Pete Strzok, Lawfare senior editor Quinta Jurecic and Berkeley law professor and Lawfare contributing editor Orin Kerr. They talked about what we really know about these stories and what happened in these investigations. Was it all legal? Was it legitimate? How should it be investigated and by whom? And what does it mean that none of the prior attorneys general or deputy attorneys general seem to remember it?
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Public discourse is in bad shape these days. We all yell at and cancel each other on social media and college campuses, and politicians—especially those on the Trumpist right—lie so much that the very notion of truth threatens to lose any meaning. But, Jonathan Rauch is optimistic that this can change for the better. Jonathan is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the author of, most recently, "The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth." Alan Rozenshtein spoke with Jonathan about his book, his diagnosis of our present condition and his hopes for the future.
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Daniel Richman and Sarah Seo are professors at Columbia Law School, and they are co-authors of a recent article on Lawfare entitled, "Toward a New Era for Federal and State Oversight of Local Police." Benjamin Wittes sat down with them to discuss the article, the history of the federal-state relationship in law enforcement, how the feds came to play an oversight role with respect to police departments, the limits of that role inherent in the cooperative relationship that law enforcement agencies engage in for other reasons, the role that the feds might play under new legislation and the role that state governments may play as well.
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If you’ve listened to this show, you've probably read a fair number of news stories—and maybe even listened to some podcast episodes—about the Facebook Oversight Board’s recent ruling on the platform’s decision to ban President Trump’s account. The board temporarily allowed Facebook to keep Trump off the platform, but criticized the slapdash way Facebook made that call and provided a long list of recommendations for Facebook to respond to.
Well, now Facebook has responded—announcing that it will ban Trump from the platform for two years. And though the response hasn’t gotten as much coverage as the initial ruling, it’s arguably more important for what it says about both Facebook and the Facebook Oversight Board’s role in the future of content moderation.
This week on the Lawfare Podcast's Arbiters of Truth series on our online information ecosystem, Quinta Jurecic interviewed Lawfare managing editor Jacob Schulz and Arbiters of Truth co-host Evelyn Douek about Facebook’s response to the board. What did Facebook say in addition to its two-year Trump ban? Why is Evelyn grumpy about it? And what’s next for Facebook, the Oversight Board and Trump himself?
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For years, Congress and the Defense Department have debated how best to handle the pernicious problem of sexual assault in the military. Now, a bipartisan majority in the Senate appears to have settled on a set of reforms that would make unprecedented changes to the military justice system. But do these changes actually get at the root cause of the military sexual assault problem? Or do they simply put at risk the command structure that is often seen as a pillar of military effectiveness? To discuss these issues, Scott R. Anderson sat down on Lawfare Live with legal expert Michel Paradis, who teaches a course on the military and the law at Columbia Law School. They talked about the impetus behind these latest reforms, what the consequences might be for the military justice system and whether they promise to finally provide the protection against sexual assault that those serving in the military need and deserve.
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Alicia Wanless is the director of the Partnership for Countering Influence Operations at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and she has a beef with the current debate over influence operations. Put simply, we don't really know what works in countering them, and the studies of the subject all seem to be case studies using different methodologies and examining different things. Benjamin Wittes spoke with her about how we might improve our knowledge base on this subject, what kind of information we would need to study whether influence operations work and what works to counter them. They talked about transparency reporting requirements for the big tech companies, data sharing between companies and scholars, what a massive effort at research in this space would look like and whether it has any possibility of coming to be.
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It's been more than a year since the first contact tracing and exposure notification apps for the novel coronavirus have appeared, and the apps have not at all lived up to the hype. In fact, they've almost invariably stumbled or not really worked at all. Jacob Schulz sat down with Alan Rozenshtein, associate professor of law at the University of Minnesota School of Law and a senior editor at Lawfare, and Susan Landau, a computer science professor at Tufts and a senior contributor for Lawfare, to talk about digital disease surveillance during the COVID-19 pandemic. What went wrong, and what are the lessons to be learned?
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Bryce Klehm sat down with Ryan Hass, a senior fellow and the Michael H. Armacost Chair in the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution. Ryan is the author of the new book, "Stronger: Adapting America’s China Strategy in an Age of Competitive Interdependence." The book is informed by Hass's experience as a foreign service officer in China and by his time in the Obama administration, where he served as the director for China, Taiwan, and Mongolia at the National Security Council. They had a wide-ranging discussion about the United States's China policy, including about President Biden's relationship with Xi Jinping, forced labor in Xinjiang, China's perception of the United States's withdrawal from Afghanistan and much more.
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Tensions between major social media platforms and the Indian government have reached a new high. In recent months, India has demanded that Twitter remove a range of content critical of the government and has even sent police to Twitter’s offices in New Delhi in what Twitter has called “intimidation tactics”. The government recently instituted new rules that exert strong control over how companies operating in India govern their platforms—rules that have already prompted a legal challenge from Whatsapp in Indian court.
On today’s episode of the Lawfare Podcast's Arbiters of Truth series on our online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Nikhil Pahwa to put these latest clashes between platforms and the Indian government in context. Nikhil is a technology journalist and digital rights activist and the founder of the Indian technology publication MediaNama—and he’s been watching this story closely. Whatever happens, this showdown in the world’s largest democracy will have lasting implications, not only within India but around the globe as well. It’s a geopolitical battle over who gets to assert sovereignty over the internet, and how.
Listeners who want more background on the subject of today’s episode might also be interested in this episode with Chinmayi Arun on the Indian government’s clashes with social media, from February 2021.
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After two years of political tumult and no fewer than four national elections, Israel may finally be on the verge of forming a new government—one that notably excludes current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and would bring an end to the more than 12 consecutive years that he has spent as the country's leader. To discuss these late-breaking developments, Scott R. Anderson sat down with Natan Sachs, a fellow at the Brookings Institution and director of its Center for Middle East Policy. They discussed the new faces that will be leading Israel if and when this new government comes to pass, how Netanyahu is likely to respond and what it all means for the increasingly complicated relationship between Israel and the United States.
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It's been a crazy time for Trump investigations. There is a new one in the Eastern District of New York, a grand jury in Manhattan and ongoing investigations in the Southern District of New York. There's also a big throwback to the Mueller investigation—a smackdown between the current Justice Department and Judge Amy Berman Jackson over whether the Justice Department has to release documents from when Bill Barr was thinking about what to do with the Mueller report.
To talk it all over, Benjamin Wittes spoke with Lawfare senior editor Quinta Jurecic, Lawfare executive editor Scott Anderson and Jack Goldsmith of the Harvard Law School. They talked about what we can responsibly say about these new investigations, where they might be going and what the Justice Department's fight with Judge Jackson says about Bill Barr and his comments about the Mueller investigation.
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It's been a year since the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, and there have been a lot of police reform efforts since then. A lot of them have come to nothing, but some of them have been very productive—at the state level, in certain cities and even, to a certain extent, at the federal level. To discuss the police reform successes and failures of the last year, Benjamin Wittes sat down with Rashawn Ray, a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland and the David M. Rubenstein Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution, who has studied police violence issues extensively and has become a prominent voice on the subject of police reform. They talked about what has worked, how close we are to federal legislation on the subject and what the holdups are, which states have made progress and how, which states haven't moved the ball and what success over the next year might look like.
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Way back at the beginning of the Arbiters of Truth podcast series on our online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic invited David Kaye to talk about international human rights law (IHRL) and content moderation. David is a clinical professor of law at the University of California, Irvine, and when he was first on the show, he was also the United Nations Special Rapporteur on freedom of expression. It’s been a year and a half since then, and in the intervening time, David’s vision of IHRL as a guiding force for content moderation has become mainstream. So Quinta and Evelyn asked him back on to discuss the increasingly important role played by IHRL in content moderation—and what it really means in practice. They also talked about the rise of digital authoritarianism around the world and what international law and leading democracies can do about it.
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The Endless Frontier Act—a piece of legislation that you may have never heard of but is nonetheless very important—is going through Congress, and it is changing as it goes through. It's a complicated piece of legislation intended to boost U.S. research and development and help bolster U.S. competition with China, and what happened to it in Congress is not at all straightforward. To talk through exactly what the Endless Frontier Act is, how it made its way through Congress and what this all reveals about the way that Congress does its business, Jacob Schulz sat down with Jordan Schneider, the host of the ChinaTalk podcast and an analyst with the Rhodium Group, and Molly Reynolds, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a senior editor at Lawfare.
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Over the weekend, an airplane from an Irish airline flying from Athens to Vilnius, Lithuania, was forced down in Belarus so that Belarusian authorities could arrest a dissident. The pretext for the grounding of the plane was a bomb threat from, of all things, Hamas. The incident has produced a major international standoff between the European Union and Belarus, with Russia lurking in the background.
What does it all mean? Can this be defended as a matter of international law? Was this simply a hijacking by the Belarusian government, or was Vladimir Putin really behind it? And what can the United States and the European Union do about it all? To discuss these questions, Benjamin Wittes sat down with Alexander Vindman, the Pritzker Military Fellow at Lawfare; Alina Polyakova of the Center for European Policy Analysis; and Lawfare senior editor Scott R. Anderson.
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President Biden has issued an executive order on cybersecurity. Bobby Chesney, one of the founders of Lawfare and a professor at the University of Texas Law School, and Trey Herr of the Atlantic Council, analyzed the significant document in depth for Lawfare, and they joined Benjamin Wittes on Lawfare Live to discuss the order and take questions from a live audience. They talked about what the executive order covers, what it doesn't cover, what it can be expected to do beyond the realm of government contracting, why it left out all matters related to ransomware and what the president needs Congress's help to do.
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Eighteen years have passed since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq deposed the despotic regime of Saddam Hussein and ushered in a bloody new chapter in that country's history—one that, in many ways, Iraq and the United States are still working their way through today. For its fifth season, the Slate-produced podcast Slow Burn is revisiting the lead-up to that fateful decision to invade. Scott R. Anderson sat down with host Noreen Malone to discuss the season thus far and what lessons that era can teach us for how to approach the challenges of our current moment....
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In March 2019, a shooter carried out two mass killings at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, livestreaming the first shooting on Facebook. Two months later, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and French President Emmanuel Macron convened the Christchurch Call—a commitment joined by both governments and technology companies “to eliminate terrorist and violent extremist content online.”
It’s now been two years since the Christchurch Call. To discuss those years and what comes next, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic of the Arbiters of Truth series of the Lawfare Podcast spoke with Dia Kayyali, who serves as a co-chair of the Advisory Network to the Christchurch Call, a group of civil society organizations that work to ensure that the signatories to the Call consider a more diverse range of expertise and perspectives when implementing its commitments. Dia is a long-time digital rights activist and the associate director for advocacy at Mnemonic, an organization that works to preserve online documentation of human rights abuses. What has their experience been like as a voice for civil society in these conversations around the Call? What should we make of the recent decision by the Biden administration to sign the United States on to the call? And what are the risks of potentially over-aggressive moderation in an effort to take down “terrorist” content?.
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Recent events have shown that Russian intelligence efforts against the United States and the West have continued since the end of the Cold War and have perhaps increased in recent years. In particular, Vladimir Putin appears determined to get even with the U.S. for Russian losses at the end of the Cold War. To discuss the role that intelligence has played in Russia's efforts, David Priess sat down with Jack Devine, who served in many roles over some 30 years at the CIA, including as the associate director of operations and leading the covert action operation, which drove the Russians out of Afghanistan. He's also the author of the recent book, "Spymaster's Prism: The Fight Against Russian Aggression." They talked about Russian aggression and what intelligence can do about it, and they discussed what policies would be most effective against Russia.
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Remember Maria Butina? She was the Russian graduate student at American University and gun enthusiast who was arrested for being an unregistered foreign agent shortly after the Russian electoral interference scandal broke. She eventually pled guilty to a lesser charge, served her time and was deported back to Russia. She is now the subject of a six-part podcast series by Celia Aniskovich called Spy Affair. Benjamin Wittes sat down with Celia and Pete Strzok, the former FBI agent, to discuss Maria Butina, who she is, the investigation of her and how it all fits into Russia's plans in the period around Donald Trump's election.
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In the final episode of “After Trump,” the six-part limited podcast series based on the book, "After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency," by Bob Bauer and Jack Goldsmith, we explore whether and how we can repair the damage that the Trump presidency has done to the Republic.
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On Wednesday, Attorney General Merrick Garland and Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas testified on domestic violent extremism before the Senate Appropriations Committee. They talked about what they consider the most pressing threats and answered senators' questions about what their agencies are doing about them. There were also some questions about other topics such as border security, and their testimony included opening statements and repetition. We took it all out to give you just the questions and answers on domestic violent extremism.
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This week on Arbiters of Truth, the Lawfare Podcast's series on our online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with the journalist Will Oremus, who until recently was a senior writer at the technology publication OneZero and who is one of the most astute observers of online platforms and their relationship to the media. They dug into Will’s reporting on the social media platform Nextdoor. The app is designed to connect neighbors, but Will argues it’s filling the space left by collapsing local news—which may not be the best development when the platform is struggling with many of the common challenges of content moderation. And, of course, they also talked about the inescapable, ever-present elephant in the room—the Facebook Oversight Board’s ruling on Donald Trump’s account.
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The situation in Israel and the Palestinian Territories is growing heated. Protests over the forced dislocation of Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem have escalated into violent confrontations with Israeli police forces, including in the Old City of Jerusalem and on the sacred grounds of the al-Aqsa Mosque, interrupting prayers there during the holy month of Ramadan. Over the past few days, these clashes have in turn triggered rocket attacks into Israel from Hamas-controlled Gaza and reciprocal airstrikes by the Israeli military. Some such rockets have even reached the city of Tel Aviv, leading Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his coalition partner, Alternate Prime Minister Benny Gantz, to promise a new military operation against Hamas in Gaza over the days to come.
To catch up on these fast-moving developments, Scott R. Anderson sat down with Natan Sachs, a fellow at the Brookings Institution and director of the Center for Middle East Policy, and Zaha Hassan, a human rights lawyer and visiting fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. They discussed the origins of this most recent conflict, the unusual Israeli and Palestinian political context in which it is occurring and what it might all mean for the Biden administration's own objectives in the region.
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David Ignatius, a columnist for the Washington Post, recently ran a lengthy column about the machinations of Kash Patel in the executive branch during the presidential transition. Patel, a former staffer for Devin Nunes, held a variety of positions in the months before Donald Trump left office, and Donald Trump considered him for a variety of other positions. It's a remarkable story that raises a whole series of questions that Jack Goldsmith has been asking on Lawfare for some time. Benjamin Wittes sat down with Ignatius and Goldsmith to discuss the article. What was Patel up to in the final days of the Trump administration? What does it say about the way the executive branch functioned under Donald Trump? And what does it say about the activities of the deep state?
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In the fifth episode of "After Trump," the six-part limited podcast series based on the book, "After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency," by Bob Bauer and Jack Goldsmith, we consider whether the Justice Department is really independent of the president.
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Over its first 100 days in office, the Biden administration has faced a difficult set of policy challenges at America's southern border, ranging from new waves of individuals driven to try to cross the border by the effects of the global pandemic, to the often difficult legacy left by some of his predecessor's draconian immigration policies. As a candidate, Biden channeled Democrats' outrage with former President Trump's actions on immigration and pledged to reverse them. But now that he is in office, will Biden find more common ground with his predecessor than expected, or will he turn over a new page on America's immigration policies?
Scott R. Anderson sat down with ProPublica immigration reporter Dara Lind to discuss what drives immigration to the United States, how the Biden administration has responded thus far and what it may all mean for the future of immigration policy in the United States.
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The wait is over. Four months after Facebook indefinitely banned Donald Trump from its platform following the Capitol riot, the Facebook Oversight Board—the platform’s self-appointed quasi-court—has weighed in on whether or not it was permissible for Facebook to do so. And the answer is ... complicated. Mark Zuckerberg can still keep Trump off his platform for now, but the board says that Facebook must review its policies and make a final decision about the former president’s fate within six months.
To discuss the decision, Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes hosted a special episode of Arbiters of Truth, our Lawfare Podcast miniseries on our online information ecosystem. He sat down with Evelyn Douek, Quinta Jurecic and Lawfare Deputy Managing Editor Jacob Schulz for a conversation about the Oversight Board’s ruling. Did the Oversight Board make the right call? What might the mood be like in Facebook headquarters right now? What about Twitter’s? And is this decision really the Oversight Board’s Marbury v. Madison moment?
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Rudy Giuliani played a central role, both in President Trump’s response to the Mueller investigation and in the drama in Ukraine that eventually led to Trump’s first impeachment. Now, a year later, Giuliani is back in the news, thanks to reports of a search of his apartment by federal investigators in the Southern District of New York. What exactly is Giuliani being investigated for, and how does it connect to his role in the first impeachment? What does it mean that the Justice Department reportedly decided not to move ahead with the search under the Trump administration but that Attorney General Merrick Garland gave the thumbs-up? Quinta Jurecic spoke with Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes and Lawfare Deputy Managing Editor Jacob Schulz to catch up on just what is going on in the wild world of Rudy Giuliani.
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2020 was a remarkable year in so many ways, not least of which was the COVID-19 pandemic and its effects. Why did so many countries bungle their responses to it so badly? And what should their leaders have learned from earlier disasters and the pathologies clearly visible in the responses of their predecessors to them?
Niall Ferguson is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and the author of more than a dozen books, including, most recently, "Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe." David Priess sat down with Niall to discuss everything from earthquake zones, to viruses, to world wars, all with a mind to how our political and social structures have or have not adapted to the certainty of continued crises.
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In the fourth episode of “After Trump,” the six-part limited podcast series based on the book, "After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency," by Bob Bauer and Jack Goldsmith, we explore how and when a president is held to account for wild and sometimes criminal behavior.
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When President Biden entered office, he inherited a bilateral relationship with Turkey that was strained to the limits by the growing independent streak in that country's foreign policy—and one that had been pushed in unfamiliar directions by his predecessor's direct and often unpredictable personal relationship with Turkey's longstanding president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. This past week, the Biden administration made its first major move on the U.S.-Turkey relationship by recognizing the atrocities committed against Armenians by Ottoman authorities in the early 20th century as a genocide, a move that prior presidents had avoided for fear of how Turkey might react.
To discuss what these developments may mean for this key bilateral relationship, Scott R. Anderson sat down with Nicholas Danforth of the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy and Asli Aydıntaşbaş of the European Council on Foreign Relations. They discussed how Turkey views its place in the world, what this means for its alliance with the United States and how the Biden administration is likely to respond moving forward.
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Odds are, you probably haven’t heard of the Israeli government’s “Cyber Unit,” but it’s worth paying attention to whether or not you live in Israel and the Palestinian territories. It’s an entity that, among other things, reaches out to major online platforms like Facebook and Twitter with requests that the platforms remove content. It’s one of a number of such agencies around the globe, which are known as Internet Referral Units. Earlier in April, the Israeli Supreme Court gave a green light to the unit’s activities, rejecting a legal challenge that charged the unit with infringing on constitutional rights.
This week on Arbiters of Truth, the Lawfare Podcast’s miniseries on our online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic talked to Fady Khoury and Rabea Eghbariah, who were part of the legal team that challenged the Cyber Unit’s work on behalf of Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab and Minority Rights in Israel. Why do they—and many other human rights activists–find Internet Referral Units so troubling, and why do governments like the units so much? Why did the Israeli Supreme Court disagree with Fady and Rabea’s challenge to the unit’s activities? And what does the Court’s decision say about the developing relationship between countries’ legal systems and platform content moderation systems?
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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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The Russian GRU Unit 29155 is in the news again. Czech authorities pin the blame on it for a series of explosions in 2014 that killed two people, and then they expelled an unusually high number of Russian diplomats, dramatically reducing Russia's diplomatic presence in Czechia and perhaps harming its intelligence efforts across Central Europe.
To talk about it, David Priess sat down with Michael Schwirtz, an investigative reporter with the New York Times based at the United Nations whose most recent reporting has shed important light on the events of this shadowy Russian military intelligence unit, and John Sipher, the co-founder of Spycraft Entertainment and a retired 28-year veteran of the CIA with significant experience against the Russian target. They discussed this Russian military unit's active measures, Putin's motivations and possible miscalculations, and intelligence collection against and cooperation to thwart this unit, along with the bigger picture of Western relations with Russia.
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In the third episode of “After Trump,” the six-part limited podcast series based on the book, "After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency," by Bob Bauer and Jack Goldsmith, we explore the pardon power and what happens when a president abuses it.
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Tim Maurer is a senior counselor for cybersecurity to the Secretary of Homeland Security. Jennifer Daskal serves as deputy general counsel at DHS focused on cybersecurity. And Eric Goldstein serves as the executive assistant director for cybersecurity for CISA, DHS's cybersecurity and infrastructure security agency. They joined Benjamin Wittes to talk about what the Biden administration's priority is in cybersecurity domestically, how DHS is using its new authorities that it has received in the National Defense Authorization Act, how CISA has grown as an agency and what success looks like if the administration pursues its goals effectively.
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This week on Arbiters of Truth, the Lawfare Podcast’s miniseries on our online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic talked to Sean Li, who until recently was the head of Trust and Safety at Discord. Discord is experiencing phenomenal growth and is an established player in a space that is the new hot thing: audio social media. And as the head of Trust and Safety, Sean was responsible for running the team that mitigates all the bad stuff that happens on a platform.
Evelyn and Quinta asked Sean what it’s like to have that kind of power—to be the eponymous “arbiter of truth” of a slice of the internet. They also discussed what makes content moderation of live audio content different from the kind we normally talk about—namely, text-based platforms. As almost every social media platform is trying to get into audio, what should they be prepared for?
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Last week for the Michael V. Hayden Center for Intelligence, Policy, and International Security at George Mason University's Schar School of Policy and Government, David Priess moderated a virtual event called, "Spy Writing in the Real World." The event featured three authors of espionage fiction, two with previous experience working inside the U.S. intelligence community: Brad Thor, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of 21 thrillers; Karen Cleveland, a former CIA analyst and New York Times bestselling author of "Need to Know" and "Keep You Close"; and award-winning author and former NSA and CIA officer Alma Katsu, who had written five novels prior to her first new spy novel, "Red Widow." They talked about the spy thriller genre, their challenges within it, their research and their experience with prepublication classification review.
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Jack Goldsmith sat down with Lee Bollinger, the president of Columbia University, and Geoffrey Stone, the Edward H. Levy Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago Law School, to discuss their new book, "National Security, Leaks and Freedom of the Press: The Pentagon Papers Fifty Years On." They discussed the holding and legacy of the Pentagon Papers case, as well as some of the many challenges of applying the Pentagon Papers regime in the modern digital era that is characterized by massive leaks and a very different press landscape than the one that prevailed in 1971.
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In the second episode of "After Trump," the six-part limited podcast series based on the book, "After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency," by Bob Bauer and Jack Goldsmith, we consider the problem of foreign interventions in American political campaigns—and what to do about it.
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On Wednesday, President Biden announced a full withdrawal of all U.S. military personnel from Afghanistan by September 11, 2021, an announcement that comes as the U.S. and Afghan governments have been trying to reach a power sharing agreement with the Taliban. Prior to the withdrawal announcement, Bryce Klehm spoke with Thomas Gibbons-Neff, a New York Times correspondent based in the Kabul bureau and a former Marine infantryman, who walked us through the situation on the ground in Afghanistan over the last year. Following Biden's announcement, Bryce spoke with Madiha Afzal, the David M. Rubenstein Fellow in the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution, who talked about the broader implications of a U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.
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This week on Arbiters of Truth, the Lawfare Podcast’s miniseries on our online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Jameel Jaffer and Ramya Krishnan of the Knight First Amendment Institute.
What do facial recognition software and President Trump’s erstwhile Twitter habits have in common? They both implicate the First Amendment—and hint at how old doctrines struggle to adapt to new technologies.
Evelyn and Quinta talked to Jameel and Ramya about the long-running lawsuit by the Knight Foundation over whether it violates the First Amendment for the president to block people on Twitter—a lawsuit that the Supreme Court just ended. They also asked Ramya and Jameel about the controversial facial recognition startup Clearview AI, in light of recent reporting showing just how much law enforcement uses that technology. Clearview is now confronting multiple lawsuits on the grounds that the company’s practices violate privacy laws, and its defense is that its activities are protected by the First Amendment. These cases don’t neatly fit into existing First Amendment categories, so Evelyn and Quinta asked Jameel and Ramya about the possible paths the law might take to adjust to the digital age.
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A lot of people are expressing anxiety about white supremacist violent terrorism, yet in a new Brookings paper entitled "Identifying and Exploiting the Weaknesses of the White Supremacist Movement," Daniel Byman, Lawfare's foreign policy editor and a senior fellow at the Brookings Center for Middle East Policy, and Mark Pitcavage, a senior research fellow at the Center on Extremism at the Anti-Defamation League, say that while the threat is real, these movements have weaknesses that other terrorist groups do not. Benjamin Wittes sat down with Byman and Pitcavage to talk about these weaknesses, how white supremacist groups are vulnerable and how law enforcement in the United States can exploit them to reduce the threat.
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From the countless attacks on ethnic and religious minorities that have taken place in recent months to the January 6 riot on Capitol Hill, acts of violence and domestic terrorism are on the rise here in the United States. And a major driver behind many of these actions is a growing hostility toward members of racial and religious minorities among white Americans and a growing willingness to turn to violence as a result.
Last week, the Lawfare team was hosted by the National Security Law Society at the Georgetown University Law Center for a live discussion of what this disturbing trend means for U.S. national security. Lawfare editor-in-chief Benjamin Wittes, Lawfare deputy managing editor Jacob Schulz and Lawfare senior editor Scott R. Anderson joined Elizabeth Neumann, a former senior official in the Department of Homeland Security during the Trump administration, and Ryan Greer, the national security director for the Anti-Defamation League, to discuss how white extremism and domestic terrorism relate to each other, what's driving radicalization among white Americans and steps the Biden administration, among others, can take to combat it.
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