The Lawfare Podcast

This week, Ben discusses recent events in cybersecurity with Matt Tait. Matt shared his views on WannaCry, NotPetya, and what companies and governments can do to protect against such attacks in the future. Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/lawfare . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Today, Shane Harris of The Wall Street Journal published an article entitled "GOP Operative Sought Clinton Emails From Hackers, Implied a Connection to Flynn." He sat down with Benjamin Wittes to discuss the story in this special edition of the podcast. Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/lawfare . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week, in Israel ,  Ben had two conversations about the television show Fauda .  On Tuesday, Ben spoke with Avi Issacharoff, the show's co-creator and a journalist at the  Times of Israel  and  Walla!.  Then, on Thursday, Ben talked to Brig. Gen. Dov "Fufi" Sedaka, a former Israeli special operator and former head of the Civil Administration in the West Bank. With each, Ben discussed Fauda' s...

This week, the  Lawfare Podcast  brings you Jack Goldsmith's interview with Dan Drezner at the Hoover Book Soirée about Drezner's new book,  The Ideas Industry: How Pessimists, Partisans, and Plutocrats are Transforming the Marketplace of Ideas.  The conversation covers how polarization, inequality, and mistrust are changing the way ideas influence policy and public opinion. Support this show http...

Attorney General Jeff Sessions faced questioning from the Senate Intelligence Committee today. He answered questions on his recusal, on his role in James Comey's firing, on his disputed conversation with the former FBI Director, and on his meetings with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. He also declined to answer a lot of questions about his conversations with President Trump—without an assertion...

As the dust settles following former FBI Director James Comey’s testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee, the Lawfare Podcast brings you expert views on what exactly happened yesterday and what it means for the Trump administration going forward. Benjamin Wittes sat down with Carrie Cordero, a former attorney at the National Security Division of the Justice Department, and Paul Rosenzwei...

In much-anticipated testimony today, former FBI Director James Comey spoke before the Senate Intelligence Committee on the subject of his many interactions with President Donald Trump prior to his dismissal. The testimony took up a tight three hours, but there were still plenty of repetitions and instances in which the former director was unable to answer questions in an open session. To save you...

With the impending sunset of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in December 2017, debate is heating up over how the crucial intelligence-gathering provision will be reauthorized by Congress—and even if it will be reauthorized at all. At the Hoover Institution, Benjamin Wittes sat down with former Director of the National Counterterrorism Center Matt Olsen to talk about the in...

Just before the holiday weekend, as you were drifting out of town, the Washington Post dropped its 15 kiloton Kushner bomb . Over the weekend, the New York Times piled on , and by the time we got here this morning, there was only one thing to do: A special edition of the podcast. Carrie Cordero, Susan Hennessey, and Benjamin Wittes talked through the details of the latest bizarro revelations about...

Amidst the hurricane of news coming out of the White House in recent weeks, one question has surfaced again and again: why isn't White House Counsel Don McGahn stopping Donald Trump from doing all this? This week on the podcast, Benjamin Wittes sat down with Bob Bauer, former White House Counsel for Barack Obama, to talk about the Office of the White House Counsel and how President Trump can and c...

It's been a long and stressful week on the domestic front, so we at the  Lawfare Podcast  are bringing you a podcast on a cheerier subject: the looming crisis on the Korean Peninsula. Benjamin Wittes sat down with Mira Rapp-Hooper, Senior Fellow with the Asia-Pacific Security Program at the Center for a New American Security, to chat about the recent series of escalating North Korean missile tests...

It has been, to put it mildly, a busy week. So perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that when Benjamin Wittes sat down with former attorney general to President George W. Bush Michael Mukasey and former Obama White House Counsel Neil Eggleston this morning at a Federalist Society panel on the unitary executive, Mukasey and Eggleston made some news of their own—pointedly criticizing the Trump White Ho...

This afternoon, the Washington Post broke a major story: Donald Trump disclosed highly classified material to the Russian ambassador and Foreign Minister in the Oval Office last week, compromising a highly sensitive counterterrorism program run by an allied intelligence service. This evening, we got former DNI General Counsel Robert Litt on the line for a discussion with Susan Hennessey and Benjam...

It’s been a long week, so after our s pecial emergency edition on the firing of FBI Director James Comey, the Lawfare Podcast is coming to your rescue with an episode that has nothing at all to do with the crisis at the FBI. Instead, take a listen to Jack Goldsmith’s interview of Mark Moyar at the Hoover Book Soiree about Moyar’s new book, Oppose Any Foe: The Rise of America’s Special Operations F...

The sound quality is, well, substandard, and we apologize for that. But people on Twitter were asking for an emergency podcast on FBI Director James Comey's firing today, and we put together an incredible group to discuss the day's events. In a recorded conference call this evening, we heard from—in addition to the two of us—Jack Goldmith, who knows a little something about confrontations between...

Three months into the Trump presidency, where does the relationship between the President and the intelligence community stand? Donald Trump is no longer quite so regularly combative in his tweets and public comments about the various intelligence agencies, but the White House-intelligence community relationship is still far from normal under this very unusual presidency. Here to ponder the questi...

Four years on, the cultural differences between Europe and the United States exposed by Edward Snowden’s disclosures of NSA surveillance programs still loom large in transatlantic relations. At our most recent Hoover Book Soiree, Benjamin Wittes sat down with Russell Miller—editor of a new volume on Privacy and Power: A Transatlantic Dialogue in the Shadow of the NSA-Affair— and Ralf Poscher—who,...

Over the past year, Lawfare has expended a great deal of ink on the problem of sextortion , a form of online sexual assault in which perpetrators obtain explicit images or video of their victims and use those images to extort further explicit content. We even brought Mona Sedky, a Justice Department prosecutor who focuses on sextortion cases, onto the podcast to discuss her work. Now, we’re please...

As our dependence on cyberspace increases, so too will the urgency of crafting good cybersecurity policy—but the combination of knotty problems in the realms of both technology and law often makes these issues particularly difficult to iron out. In this episode of the podcast, Susan Hennessey sits down with Trey Herr, Fellow with the Belfer Center's Cyber Security Project at the Harvard Kennedy Sc...

At the Third Triple Entente Beer Summit, the usual Rational Security gang (Shane Harris, Benjamin Wittes, Tamara Cofman Wittes, and Susan Hennessey) joins up with Stewart Baker and Michael Vatis of the Steptoe Cyberlaw Podcast to discuss airstrikes in Syria, the misadventures of Devin Nunes, and Steve Bannon's ouster from the National Security Council. Plus, in Object Lessons, Stewart recommends S...

On Friday, March 31st, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence held its first open hearing in its investigation into Russian interference in the U.S. election on "Disinformation: A Primer in Russian Active Measures and Influence Campaigns." The experts before the committee, including Eugene Rumer, Roy Godson, Clint Watts, Kevin Mandia, General Keith Alexander, and Thomas Rid, gave a useful run...

At this week's Hoover Book Soiree, Samuel Tadros of the Hudson Institute and the Hoover Institution sat down with Graeme Wood to discuss his new book,  The Way of the Strangers: Encounters with the Islamic State .  The book both situates ISIS within context of Islamic history and theology and chronicles Wood's meetings with ISIS supporters and sympathizers across the world in an effort to understa...

Between leading the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence's first open hearing on Russian election interference on Monday, and sparring with HPSCI Chairman Rep. Devin Nunes over Nunes's odd escapades  regarding possible incidental collection of communications of Trump associates, HPSCI Ranking Member Rep. Adam Schiff has had a busy week. On Tuesday,  Lawfare and the Brookings Institutio...

Yesterday, FBI Director James Comey and NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers testified before the House Intelligence Committee on Russian interference in the U.S. election for an exhausting five and a half hours. They made a lot of news, but there were also a lot of refusals to comment and speeches made by members of the Committee. So we've cut down their testimony to less than an hour, giving you onl...

President Donald Trump has pledged to end the defense sequester and make the development of defensive and offensive cyber capabilities a White House priority, but the contours of U.S. cyber policy under the new administration have yet to be set—in fact, the administration still hasn't released its much-heralded Executive Order on cybersecurity, though several drafts have been leaked. So what  shou...