The Lawfare Podcast - The Lawfare Institute

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Rational Security: The “Five Dollar Footlong-Gate” Edition Jul 23, 2023

Show notes

This week on Rational Security, Alan, Quinta, and Scott got together to NOT talk about that ONE big story that's not quite ripe yet. (You know the one. It involves sandwiches.) But they did chat through some of the week's other big national security news, including:

“Against the Grain.” Russia backed out of the Turkey-facilitated Black Sea Grain Initiative this past week, which had allowed much needed Ukrainian grain to arrive in markets, largely in the developing world. Now not only is that avenue cut off, but Russian forces are attacking grain facilities in Odessa, threatening the global food supply. How does this brutal act fit into Russia’s global strategy? And how should the United States and its allies respond?
“It’s a War on War.” The culture war is now taking on actual war, as House Republicans have passed a National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) laden with provisions that target Defense Department policies relating to abortion, DEI, and LGBTQ+ issues—measures that are certain not to make it through the Democrat-controlled Senate and may end up putting the annual bill at risk of not being passed at all. How big is the risk of such an impasse? What could it mean for U.S. national security?
“Coups are Like Pancakes.” Earlier this week, the New York Timespublished a report about how former officials in the Trump administration are declaring the first Trump administration a mulligan and outlining plans to dramatically expand presidential power and purge the executive branch if and when Trump returns to the White House for a second time. How seriously should we take these proposals? And what would they mean for democracy if implemented?

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Lawfare Archive: Is Trump Creating a Deep State? Jul 22, 2023

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From November 18, 2020: In the waning days of his administration, the president has attempted to install a political loyalist as General Counsel of the National Security Agency, a position that is traditionally a merits position, not a political position. He has also issued an executive order that gives the executive branch greater control over the civil service, making it easier to hire and fire people in agencies. It all raises the question: Is Donald Trump attempting to create the very deep state that he has spent the last four years denouncing? To talk over this question in its various permutations, Benjamin Wittes sat down with Susan Hennessey, who recently wrote an article about the NSA General Counsel appointment; Scott Anderson, Lawfare senior editor; and Rudy Mehrbani, senior advisor at Democracy Fund Voice, senior fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice, former assistant to the president and director of presidential personnel and former associate White House counsel in the Obama administration.

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Asaf Lubin on Cyber Espionage and International Law Jul 21, 2023

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On June 16, the U.S. State Department discovered unauthorized access to its Exchange Online email services and reported it to Microsoft. Almost a month later, on July 11, Microsoft disclosed the attack, and attributed it to a China-based threat actor, which they call Storm-0558. The intrusion granted the hackers access to email accounts at the Commerce and State Departments, including Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, among other targets. Although no classified information was compromised, the cyber espionage campaign comes at a time of tension between the U.S. and China.

To discuss the significance of the latest cyber espionage campaign, Lawfare’s Fellow in Technology Policy and Law, Eugenia Lostri, sat down with Asaf Lubin, Associate Professor of Law at Indiana University Maurer School of Law and a Visiting Professor at Columbia Law School. They talked about what different types of espionage campaigns tell us about tightening U.S.-China competition, how international law can address cyber espionage, and the options available for governments to respond to these type of incidents.

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Chatter: National Security Insights from Board Games with Volko Ruhnke Jul 20, 2023

Show notes

Gaming might seem far removed from national security, but Volko Ruhnke's experience proves otherwise. During his career as an intelligence analyst and manager, he designed and published many commercially successful historical board games that, in turn, informed his work. Additionally, he applied his skills in gaming to training intelligence officers.

David Priess hosted Volko for a deep dive about board games that included discussion of various game types, the value of in-person vs. virtual gaming, Volko's intelligence career, his many published games, the use of cards in gameplay, the importance of honoring historicity while avoiding forced recreation of exact historical timelines, similarities between game design and intelligence questions, the collaborative nature of historical boardgaming, why military wargaming matters, complexity in intelligence analysis, games ranging from political coalition management to Polynesian exploration and from the suffrage movement in the early 1900s to the manipulation of public perceptions about the functionality of Machu Picchu, and much more.

Among the works mentioned in this episode:

Volko Ruhnke's page at GMT Games

The Kevin McPartland-designed game Conquest of Paradise

The Alison Collins-designed game Wiñay Kawsay

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

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Congress Investigates January 6 ... Again Jul 20, 2023

Show notes

Last month, the majority staff of the Senate Rules and Governmental Affairs Committee released a report entitled “Planned in Plain Sight: A Review of the Intelligence Failures in Advance of January 6th, 2021,” which explores one of the biggest remaining questions about that day: Why didn’t the government see this coming?

Molly Reynolds, Senior Fellow at Brookings and Senior Editor of Lawfare, sat down with Quinta Jurecic, Senior Editor of Lawfare and Fellow at Brookings, and Ryan Reilly, Justice Reporter at NBC News, to discuss the report’s findings, how it fits in with other investigations about the insurrection, and where we go from here. You can also find Molly and Quinta’s article on the report on Lawfare.

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A Big Day in Trump Accountability Jul 19, 2023

Show notes

It was a big day in the legal travails of Donald Trump. We awoke this morning to news from the former president himself that he had received another target letter from special counsel Jack Smith, this time from the Jan. 6 grand jury. An indictment seems to be imminent. Incoming Lawfare Legal Fellow Anna Bower spent the day in federal court in Fort Pierce, where Judge Aileen Cannon was hearing the first major status conference of the Mar-a-Lago case. And just as Anna was coming out of court, the Attorney General of Michigan announced that she had brought cases against several fake electors from the 2020 election in that state.

Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Anna and with Lawfare Senior Editor Roger Parloff for a live taping of The Lawfare Podcast to go over it all. What do we know about the apparently forthcoming new case against Donald Trump? What do we know about the fake electors case in Michigan? And what happened in the courtroom when Judge Cannon faced her first hearing as the presiding judge in the Mar-a-Lago case?

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Ukrainians Hit the Kerch Bridge ... Again Jul 18, 2023

Show notes

It was a busy weekend in the waters off of Ukraine and Russia. The Ukrainians hit—for the second time—the Kerch Bridge, which connects the Russian mainland with occupied Crimea. The Russians, meanwhile, announced that they are not renewing the Black Sea Grain Initiative, the complex agreement by which Ukraine has managed to export grain through the port of Odessa.

What do we know about what happened on the Kerch Bridge? How big a deal is it? Is it connected to the Russian withdrawal from the grain initiative? And what does the scotching of the Black Sea Grain Initiative mean for the Ukrainian economy? To chew it all over, Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Dmitri Alperovitch of Silverado Policy Accelerator and the Geopolitics Decanted podcast, and Mykhailo Soldatenko, a visiting researcher at the Harvard Law School and an international lawyer who has written for Lawfare about the Black Sea Grain Initiative.

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Show notes

The only thing more impressive than the performance of generative AI systems like GPT-4 and Stable Diffusion is the sheer volume of training data that went into these systems. GPT was reportedly trained on, essentially, the entire Internet, while Stable Diffusion and other image-generation models rely on hundred of millions if not billions of existing pieces of artwork. Of course, much of this content is copyrighted, and the authors and artists whose work is being used to train these models and, potentially, threaten their own livelihoods are paying attention. A number of high-profile lawsuits are making their way through the courts, and the outcome of these cases could hugely shape, and potentially even stop, progress in machine learning.

To explore these issues, Alan Rozenshtein, Associate Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota and Senior Editor at Lawfare, spoke with Pam Samuelson, the Richard M. Sherman Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of California at Berkeley and one of the pioneers in the study of digital copyright law. She's just published a new piece in the journal Science titled "Generative AI meets copyright,” in which she analyzes the current litigation around generative AI and where it might lead.

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Rational Security: The “Long Middle Finger of Europe” Edition Jul 16, 2023

Show notes

This week, Alan, Quinta, and Scott were joined by Ravi Agrawal, Editor in Chief of Foreign Policy Magazine, to talk through the week’s big natsec news, including:

“Pledge Week.” In a sign of strength, NATO held its annual summit in the capital of Vilnius this week, just kilometers from Lithuania’s border with Belarus. But those hoping to join the club have gotten mixed receptions, with NATO members securing a clear path for Sweden to join the alliance without presenting a clear way forward for embattled Ukraine. What did we learn about the state of the alliance from this week’s historic meeting?
“Cluster Ruck(us).” Late last week, the Biden administration made the controversial decision to provide U.S. cluster munitions—a type of weapon that many U.S. allies have banned by treaty, due to concerns about civilian casualties—to its ally Ukraine. Is it the right move? And what might it mean on the battlefield—and after the war is over?
“Needling and Threads.” Mark Zuckerberg appears to have finally gotten under the skin of tech billionaire Elon Musk, as his recently launched competitor to Musk’s beleaguered Twitter, Threads, launched last week and soon secured over 100 million users. Has Twitter finally met its match? And what will Threads and other competitors mean for the future of the information (and disinformation) economy?

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Lawfare Archive: Kyle Langvardt on Platform Speech and the First Amendment Jul 15, 2023

Show notes

From December 8, 2020: On Monday, Lawfare released the first paper in its "The Digital Social Contract" paper series. For each paper, Alan Rozenshtein will be doing a podcast interview with the author, and the first guest is law professor Kyle Langvardt of the University of Nebraska College of Law. His paper, "Platform Speech Governance and the First Amendment: A User-Centered Approach," examines how the First Amendment should and should not apply to the content moderation decisions of major internet platforms. Plus, Alan and Benjamin Wittes have a brief discussion to introduce the paper series as a whole.

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