The Lawfare Podcast - The Lawfare Institute

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Ass’t Treasury Secretary Paul Rosen on the CFIUS Process Jul 06, 2023

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The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS, is one of the most important national security offices that you have probably never heard of. Responsible for reviewing foreign investment in the United States for possible national security threats, its jurisdiction and scope of work has expanded dramatically in recent years—and may be on the verge of expanding once again, as the Biden administration considers installing similar measures for outbound U.S. investment.

To discuss, Lawfare Contributing Editor Brandon Van Grack and Lawfare Senior Editor Scott R. Anderson sat down with Assistant Treasury Secretary for Investment Security Paul Rosen, whose office oversees the CFIUS process, for the first of what we are calling “The Regulators”: a special series Lawfare is co-sponsoring with our friends at the law firm Morrison Foerster, where Brandon is a partner, featuring one-on-one discussions with the senior officials that are implementing our new era of economic statecraft. They discussed how the CFIUS process works in practice, how it’s changed, and what challenges sit on the horizon, both for U.S. policymakers and the businesses they interact with.

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The Legal Arguments Behind Mike Pence’s January 6 Grand Jury Testimony Jul 05, 2023

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In April, former Vice President Mike Pence testified before a federal grand jury under subpoena as part of the special counsel’s investigation into January 6. The testimony came after the district court rejected Pence’s challenge to the validity of the subpoena under the Speech or Debate Clause of the Constitution. And now, months later, Chief Judge James Boasberg has unsealed his ruling on the matter, along with other documents related to Pence’s challenge.

When news of the subpoena first broke, Lawfare Senior Editors Molly Reynolds and Quinta Jurecic sat down with Mike Stern and Eric Columbus on the Lawfare Podcast to talk through the issues raised. Now that we have more details about just what took place, Molly and Quinta invited Mike and Eric back to discuss what they made of Pence’s argument and the court’s decision, and what this episode adds to our understanding of the Jan. 6 investigation more broadly.

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Lawfare Archive: Nate Persily and Alex Stamos on Securing American Elections Jul 04, 2023

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From June 11, 2019: More than two years after the 2016 presidential election, new information continues to seep into the public about the extent of Russia's sweeping and systematic efforts to interfere in the U.S. democratic process. With the 2020 presidential election on the horizon, last week, Stanford's Cyber Policy Center published a report on securing American elections, including recommendations on how the U.S. can protect elections and election infrastructure from foreign actors.

On Monday, Susan Hennessey spoke with two of the report's authors: Alex Stamos, director of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center's Internet Observatory and former Chief Security Officer of Facebook, and Nate Persily, Stanford law professor and expert on election administration. They talked about what happened in 2016, and the enormously complex landscape of defending not just election infrastructure but also preserving the integrity of the information ecosystems in which Americans make their decisions about how to vote, including the possible consequences of regulating foreign media.

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Tim Wu on AI Regulation Jul 03, 2023

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Until this year, Tim Wu was Special Assistant to President Biden for competition and tech policy. One of the leading thinkers in progressive approach to antitrust, Tim has since returned to Columbia Law School, where he is the Julius Silver Professor of Law, Science and Technology. Since leaving government, Tim has been offering his thoughts on how the government should regulate artificial intelligence.

Alan Rozenshtein, Associate Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota and Senior Editor at Lawfare, spoke with Tim about his experience in government, whether he's concerned about AI's existential risks, and what his priorities would be for making sure that AI serves society's, and not just the private sector's, interests.

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Rational Security: The “Mutiny in the Kitchen” Edition Jul 02, 2023

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This week on Rational Security, Alan, Quinta, and Scott were joined by their colleague and think-tank neighbor, Russia/Ukraine expert Eric Ciaramella, to talk over the week's big news, including:

“Going All (Prigozh)in.” Yevgeny Prighozin, leader of the mercenary Wagner Group, went all in this past week, marching his troops into Russia and halfway to Moscow for the stated purpose of removing Russia’s military leadership, only to abruptly halt and accept exile in Belarus instead. What does this mean for the conflict in Ukraine—and future of the Putin regime?
“Lost at Sea.” In a busy week of news, one story has gotten surprisingly little attention: the tragic sinking of an overcrowded smugglers’ boat off the coast of Greece that claimed the lives of hundreds of migrants. What does this incident tell us about the dynamics of the migrant crisis in the Mediterranean—and how the world views it?
“Moore, Moore, Moore! (How do YOU like it?)” The Supreme Court issued decisions in three major cases this past week, including addressing the much-discussed Independent State Legislature Doctrine in Moore v. Harper. What did the Court decide, and what will these decisions mean?

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Lawfare Archive: Foreign Interference... It's Happening Jul 01, 2023

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From October 23, 2020: It's been a wild couple of days of disinformation in the electoral context. Intelligence community officials are warning about Russian and Iranian efforts to influence the U.S. presidential election—and claiming that Iran is responsible for sending threatening emails from fake Proud Boys to Democratic voters. What exactly is going on here? To talk through the developments and the questions that linger, Benjamin Wittes sat down with Scott R. Anderson, Susan Hennessey and Quinta Jurecic.

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Nosmot Gbadamosi on South Africa’s ‘Putin Problem’ Jun 30, 2023

Show notes

On Thursday, South Africa’s Department of International Relations confirmed it would host the 15th BRICS Summit in August. Normally, this wouldn’t make the news. But because South Africa is a signatory to the International Criminal Court, the country is obligated under international law to arrest one of the summit’s invitees—Russian President Vladimir Putin—the moment he sets foot in Johannesburg.

This presents South Africa with what Nosmot Gbadamosi has dubbed a “Putin problem.”

Lawfare Managing Editor Tyler McBrien sat down with Nosmot, a multimedia journalist and the writer of Foreign Policy’s weekly Africa Brief, to discuss this diplomatic dilemma, why U.S.-South Africa relations have withered in recent months, and the incoherent Russia-Ukraine “peace mission” led by President Cyril Ramaphosa just weeks ago. They also discussed what the late Eusebius McKaiser has called South Africa’s “nonsensical nonalignment” since the Russian invasion of Ukraine last year and what nonaligment even means in light of the war.

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Chatter: Hacker Movies with Scott Shapiro Jun 29, 2023

Show notes

This week, Shane sits down with law professor and hacker historian Scott Shapiro to rant, and rave, about hacker movies. From War Games to the Die Hard franchise to TV’s “Mr. Robot,” Hollywood has portrayed hackers as heroes and villains. Sometimes filmmakers get the art and culture of hacking right. Sometimes they get basic technology very wrong. But the results are almost always entertaining.

Scott is a professor at Yale Law School and the author of the new book Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks.

Here’s a list of movies Shane and Scott discussed:

War Games

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086567/fullcredits/?ref_=tt_cl_sm

Sneakers

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105435/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

Live Free or Die Hard, aka Die Hard 4

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0337978/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

Snowden

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3774114/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

Mr. Robot

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4158110/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_7_nm_1_q_mr%2520robot

Hackers

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113243/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

The Net

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113957/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

Die Hard 2

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099423/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_8_nm_0_q_die%2520hard%25202

Scott’s book, Fancy Bear Goes Phishing

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374601188/fancybeargoesphishing

Scott on Twitter

https://twitter.com/scottjshapiro?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor

Scott’s interview on the Lawfare podcast about his book

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-dark-history-of-the-information-age/id498897343?i=1000614119459

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Talking Transparency With Meta’s Nick Clegg Jun 29, 2023

Show notes

How much transparency do big technology companies owe to their users? The question has become pointed in recent years as users, researchers, and politicians voice discontent about the absence of public information available about how platforms moderate and amplify content.

Today, Meta’s President of Global Affairs, Nick Clegg, announced a new initiative to provide more information about how the company’s ranking algorithms work on Facebook and Instagram. On this episode of Arbiters of Truth, Lawfare’s occasional series on the information ecosystem, Lawfare Senior Editors Quinta Jurecic and Alan Rozenshtein talked with Clegg about how Meta has approached transparency for both users and researchers. They also discussed Clegg’s controversial 2021 essay on how Meta’s algorithms interact with user preferences.

Meta provides support for Lawfare’s Digital Social Contract paper series. This podcast episode is not part of that series, and Meta does not have any editorial role in Lawfare.

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Ambition, Anxiety, and the Rise of the American Colossus Jun 28, 2023

Show notes

The United States in the early 21st century has been involved in a so-called “forever” war involving military threats, interventions, occupations, counterinsurgencies, and the like. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the United States engaged in an at least superficially analogous many-decades series of interventions in the Western Hemisphere with the aim of achieving regional hegemony.

This earlier period is the topic of a new book by Sean Mirski, an attorney at Arnold & Porter and a visiting scholar at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. The book is called “We May Dominate the World: Ambition, Anxiety, and the Rise of the American Colossus.” Jack Goldsmith sat down with Sean to discuss what he describes as the United States’ “regional rampage of staggering scope and scale” in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the aims and consequences of these military adventures, and the lessons they hold for today, both for U.S. foreign policy and for understanding the aims of rising powers like China.

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