The Lawfare Podcast - The Lawfare Institute

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Joby Warrick and William McCants at the Hoover Book Soiree Oct 23, 2015

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Joby Warrick, author of Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS, and William McCants, author of The ISIS Apocalypse: The History, Strategy, and Doomsday Vision of the Islamic State, join Benjamin Wittes in the first Hoover Book Soiree.

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The Lawfare Podcast: Surveillance Reform After Snowden Oct 16, 2015

Show notes

Last week, the Center for Strategic and International Studies hosted Ben, along with Laura Donohue of Georgetown Law, former NSA Director General 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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The Lawfare Podcast: Helen Mohrmann on Cybersecurity in an Insecure Environment Oct 09, 2015

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As listeners may know, while we often talk about cybersecurity on the show, Brookings itself has been subject to a number of cyber-attacks in recent years. Those attacks have ranged from infiltrations led by Chinese government-affiliated units to the more run-of-the-mill hacker intrusions targeting credit and financial information.

This week on the Lawfare Podcast, Helen Mohrmann, the Chief Information Officer at the Brookings Institution, discusses the difficulties of securing a large, public facing organization from a vast array of cyber-attacks. Helen walks Ben through the threat environment that an organization like Brookings faces (and how that is continuously changing) and she outlines some of the steps organizations and individuals can take to shore up their own security.

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The Lawfare Podcast: How Anwar al Awlaki Become Objective Troy Oct 02, 2015

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This week, New York Times national security reporter Scott Shane came on the Lawfare Podcast to provide an overview of his new book on the life and death of radical Islamic cleric Anwar al Awlaki, Objective Troy: A Terrorist, A President, and the Rise of the Drone. Shane provides an overview of the book, examining the role played by al Awlaki in al Qaeda plots against the United States, his continued influence on the jihadi movement, and how his life and death was intimately tied to the rise of the drone in U.S. counterterrorism efforts. Why and how did al Awlaki transform from a leader in American Islamic thought into a recruiter for al Qaeda? And what lessons can the trajectory of his life teach us about countering violent extremism and the methods the United States uses to achieve its counterterrorism goals?

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The Lawfare Podcast: Gregory Johnsen Answers "What is a Houthi?" Sep 25, 2015

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On this week’s Lawfare Podcast, Gregory Johnsen outlines the state-of-play currently in Yemen. Johnsen, who is a writer-at-large for Buzzfeed News, a doctoral candidate at Princeton University, and an all-things-Yemen-expert, walks Ben through the byzantine power politics in Sanaa that led to the conflict now engulfing Yemen and he explains why the war shouldn’t be viewed as just another Sunni-Shia fight. Yet while he clarifies that the issues that sparked the war are much more local, he warns that the longer the conflict goes on, the more likely it is to expand. Johnsen also outlines the events that led to the Saudi intervention and just whether or not Yemen, which he says is really twelve separate countries now, can ever be put back together again.

Johnsen is the author of The Last Refuge: Yemen, al Qaeda, and America’s War in Arabia. Follow him on Twitter for the latest updates on Yemen.

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The Lawfare Podcast: Richard Gross on the Law of Hybrid Conflict Sep 18, 2015

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Last week, Ben attended a symposium at the Pentagon on the rise of so-called “hybrid conflicts,” whereprofessionals from around the national security establishment attempted to define the idea as well as its implications for existing legal structures and the law of war. In this week’s podcast, Brig. Gen. Richard Gross, the legal counsel to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, explains that the DOD’s senior leadership has increasingly begun discussing conflicts such as Ukraine, Syria, and the South China sea, in terms of hybrid conflict. He and Ben explore what lawyers should do with the idea, asking is it really new and should the law adjust to deal with it?

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The Lawfare Podcast: A Band-Aid for a Bomber: Is Medical Assistance to Terrorists Protected Under IHL? Sep 11, 2015

Show notes

On this week’s Lawfare Podcast, Ben sits down with Professor Gabriella Blum, professor at Harvard Law School, and Dustin Lewis, a senior researcher at Harvard Law Schools’ Program on International Law and Armed Conflict, to discuss their new report written with Naz Modirzadeh entitled Medical Care in Armed Conflict: IHL and State Responses to Terrorism. The conversation takes a look at whether we should consider medical care a form of illegitimate support to terrorists. Their argument? We shouldn't, because IHL lays down extensive protections for medical care, and those protections in many instances should also constrain domestic material support cases. Yet the authors make clear that in their view, there's also more to be done, as there are gaps and weaknesses in the protections afforded by IHL itself.

Lawfare ran a summary of the report earlier this week, which you can read here.

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Encore Performance: Bone-Crushing Zombie Action Aug 29, 2015

Show notes

It's a special encore performance of our panel discussion from last year on the legal architecture of the zombie apocalypse: Foreign Policy's Shane Harris hosts a panel--incuding Bobby Chesney, Benjamin Wittes, and Jennifer Daskal--on the law of the War on Zombies. What will be the legal architecture when the dead walk and come for your brains? Do we need a zombie AUMF? Do zombies have due process rights? Find out on this week's special episode.

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The Lawfare Podcast: The American Defense Economy and the Future of American Prosperity Aug 21, 2015

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With Congress is away, the economists will play, and last week, Brookings hosted a discussion on the health of the U.S. national security industrial base. The panel, which featured Brookings scholars Michael O'Hanlon, Ben Bernanke, and Mark Muro, looks across the spectrum at both the security and economic sides of the defense economy, evaluating the effects of sequestration, how America’s defense needs are informed by the threats it faces, and exactly what impact defense spending has on regional and national job creation and technological innovation.

It’s the Lawfare Podcast Episode #137: The American Defense Economy and the Future of American Prosperity

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The Lawfare Podcast: Mike Janke on Encryption, Going Dark, and Corporate Social Responsibility Aug 14, 2015

Show notes

Last week, Ben posted five hard questions to both government and industry regarding encryption and the "going dark" debate. We posed these questions and more on the issues of technology, public policy and corporate responsibility to Mike Janke, co-founder and Chairman of Silent Circle, an international company that sells a platform of devices and services with built-in privacy-by-design. As a former Navy SEAL, Mr. Janke, who previously was CEO and founder of a private security company, offers a unique perspective with respect to the equities of law enforcement and other government officials who have a mandate to keep people safe, individuals' right to privacy, and corporate duties to protect intellectual property and customer data.

One thing that listeners will likely take away from the interview is that law enforcement has a long way to go before convincing sophisticated industry participants that the FBI or other government entities are not actually technically capable of accessing the communications or devices they need in a pinch. Janke also makes a compelling case for why companies should be wary of the cybersecurity risks posed by communications or storage services or products that are capable of being decrypted. And yet, we identify what just might be a fault line between tech leaders' claims that end-to-end encryption is necessary to address the privacy concerns of everyday users, and the reality of who is the real market for a secure platform, at least in Silent Circle's recent experience. And we leave open the door as to whether there is room in the debate to carve out some middle ground when innocent victims are in harms way.

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