The Lawfare Podcast - The Lawfare Institute

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Marc Polymeropoulos on the CIA, 9/11 and Havana Syndrome Sep 10, 2021

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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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Content Moderation Comes for Parler and Gettr Sep 09, 2021

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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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‘Humane’ with Samuel Moyn Sep 08, 2021

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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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Tony Saich on 100 Years of the CCP Sep 07, 2021

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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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Lawfare Archive: Danielle Citron on Feminism and National Security Sep 06, 2021

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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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Lawfare Archive: Phil Carter on Civil-Military Relations in the Trump Administration Sep 05, 2021

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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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Lawfare Archive: Shane Harris on Drones Sep 04, 2021

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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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Sue Gordon and John McLaughlin on Intelligence and the Afghanistan Withdrawal Sep 03, 2021

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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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The Disinformation Industrial Complex Sep 02, 2021

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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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Data Brokers and National Security Sep 01, 2021

Show notes

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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