The Lawfare Podcast - The Lawfare Institute

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Alina Polyakova on the Protests in Russia Feb 02, 2021

Show notes

It was the second weekend of major protests in Russia, as Russians across the country took to the streets to protest the detention of Alexei Navalny. In a major show of force, the police rounded up a very large number of people and there were a number of beatings. To bring us up to speed on the situation in Russia, Benjamin Wittes sat down with Alina Polyakova, president of the Center for European Policy Analysis. They talked about whether the protests are dwindling or gathering strength, and whether that's really about the Russian security services or the 30-degree-below-0 weather. They talked about Putin's game plan, Navalny's game plan and where this is all heading over the next few months and years.

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DHS Warning: Domestic Violent Extremists! Feb 01, 2021

Show notes

On January 27, the Department of Homeland Security issued an unusual National Terrorism Advisory System bulletin—unusual because it addressed solely the heightened threat environment of violence from domestic violent extremists, with no mention of foreign terrorist organizations or even the word terrorism. It's a striking document both for what it describes and for what it leaves unsaid.

To discuss the bulletin, its context and what comes next, David Priess sat down with Carrie Cordero, former counsel to the National Security Division at the Department of Justice and senior associate general counsel at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence; Andrew McCabe, the former deputy director of the FBI; Elizabeth Neumann, former deputy chief of staff to the Secretary of Homeland Security and assistant secretary for threat prevention and security policy at DHS; and Nick Rasmussen, former director of the National Counterterrorism Center.

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The Least Dangerous Branch … of Facebook Jan 29, 2021

Show notes

Yesterday was a big day—the day that the Facebook Oversight Board released its first decisions. The independent board, an experiment in platform governance set up by Facebook, handed down five rulings weighing in on the company’s decision to remove various posts for violating Facebook’s community guidelines. It may not be Marbury v. Madison, but it’s still a big moment for online speech regulation.

To mark the occasion, Lawfare is setting up a new page collecting and tracking the board’s decisions.

For this episode of the podcast, Quinta Jurecic spoke with Evelyn Douek, cohost of Lawfare’s Arbiters of Truth podcast series on disinformation and a lecturer at Harvard Law School, and Lawfare deputy managing editor Jacob Schulz. They discussed everything you need to know about the Oversight Board, including those most basic but crucial of questions: What exactly is it, anyway? What’s in the decisions? And why should we care?

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Joan Donovan on Disinformation and Social Movements Jan 28, 2021

Show notes

For this episode of Arbiters of Truth, Lawfare’s miniseries on disinformation and misinformation, Kate Klonick and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Joan Donovan, the research director at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. Her work focuses on networked social movements, disinformation and media manipulation—so she’s the perfect person to help untangle the continued fallout not only from the January 6 Capitol riot, but from the last four years more broadly. They talked about Joan’s route from researching Occupy Wall Street to studying far-right disinformation, the importance of understanding networks of communication and coordination in studying social media, and the responses of big social platforms to the violence in the Capitol.

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Project VENONA Jan 27, 2021

Show notes

David Kris sat down with David Hatch, the senior historian at the U.S. National Security Agency. They discussed Project VENONA, an incredibly significant intelligence program involving encrypted Soviet messages that began during World War II and went on for many years thereafter. It's a story full of unusual events and interesting lessons about intelligence and counterintelligence and spy vs. spy. There's also a little review of encryption—specifically, the risks of reusing one-time encryption pads—and a discussion of the declassification process of Project VENONA and why we can talk about the project at all.

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'The President Who Would Not Be King' Jan 26, 2021

Show notes

Jack Goldsmith sat down with Michael McConnell, the Richard and Frances Mallery Professor and director of the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author of the new book, "The President Who Would Not Be King: Executive Power Under the Constitution." They discussed McConnell's textual historical approach to interpreting presidential power under Article II of the U.S. Constitution, the many novel elements of executive power embodied in Article II and the proper understanding of Article II's Vesting Clause. They also talked about contemporary implications of his reading of Article II for war powers, the unitary executive and late impeachments.

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Confirmation Hearing Blitz with No Bull Jan 25, 2021

Show notes

The day before last week's inauguration of President Joe Biden, four of the Biden administration's core national security nominees appeared before various Senate committees for their confirmation hearings. Avril Haines, Biden's nominee for Director of National Intelligence, appeared before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence; Alejandro Mayorkas, the nominee for Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, appeared before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs; retired general Lloyd Austin, Biden's nominee to head the Defense Department, appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee; and Antony Blinken, Biden's nominee for Secretary of State, appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The hearings included a whole lot of performative partisan flattery and outrage, but they also provided a snapshot of the Biden administration's national security priorities. We cut out all of the nonsense, all of the unnecessary information and the duplicative questions to leave you only the most interesting questions and answers.

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Dan Byman on the Sequel that Never Came to Be Jan 22, 2021

Show notes

It was supposed to be the big sequel to the January 6 "Stop the Steal" rally-turned-riot. It was supposed to be the largest armed protest in the history of the United States, taking place in all 50 state capitals. And yet, Inauguration Day turned out to be peaceful. Protesters were few; acts of violence were even fewer. It's a major counterterrorism success, and like many major counterterrorism successes, it has largely been unremarked upon. How did we go without the sequel to the bloody events of January 6? To what extent should we credit law enforcement action or the deplatforming of the president and his followers, or is the explanation something entirely different? To talk it through, Benjamin Wittes sat down with Dan Byman, Lawfare's foreign policy editor and counterterrorism expert, who has identified six major factors that likely contributed to this week's success.

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Information Disorder During and After the Trump Presidency Jan 21, 2021

Show notes

During his inaugural address yesterday, President Biden spoke about the subject of this podcast: disinformation. “There is truth and there are lies,” Biden said, “lies told for power and for profit.” And he asked Americans to unify rather than “turn inward” against those “who don't get their news from the same sources you do.”

But in an era of QAnon and pandemic disinformation, how will that unification be possible? The day before the inauguration, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Kate Starbird, an associate professor of Human Centered Design & Engineering at the University of Washington, for this first episode of Lawfare's Arbiters of Truth miniseries under the Biden administration. Kate last came on the podcast in March 2020 to discuss disinformation and misinformation around the coronavirus, and she has had a long year since then researching online ecosystems around the pandemic and supposed voter fraud. And the Capitol riot on January 6 threw all this into sharp relief, as the things that Kate studies every day boiled over into mainstream consciousness with a vengeance. They spoke with Kate about what led up to the riot, what the disinformation landscape looks like now and what kind of work will be required to move forward.

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Jeff Kosseff on the Fight Against Online Child Pornography Jan 20, 2021

Show notes

Private entities—in particular, technology giants like internet service providers, email services and social networks—play a vital role in helping law enforcement fight child pornography online. But the involvement of private entities does not eliminate the Fourth Amendment issues that come with electronic surveillance. In fact, the more the private entities cooperate with the government, the more likely it is that courts will consider them government agents, and the evidence they collect will be subject to the same Fourth Amendment restrictions as apply to law enforcement agencies. Jeff Kosseff is an assistant professor at the United States Naval Academy's Cyber Science Department. As part of Lawfare's ongoing Digital Social Contract research paper series, he published a paper entitled, "Online Service Providers and the Fight Against Child Exploitation: The Fourth Amendment Agency Dilemma." Alan Rozenshtein spoke with Jeff about how the government and internet companies can thread the needle on fighting digital child exploitation without running afoul of the Constitution.

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