The Lawfare Podcast

Last week, General Michael Hayden—the only person to be both the director of the CIA and the NSA—joined Lawfare’s Benjamin Wittes at the Hoover Book Soiree for a discussion of his new book, Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror . Over the course of an hour, Hayden provides an inside look at some of the most critical intelligence decisions since 9/11, including the CIA’s c...

This week, the president’s Homeland Security Advisor, Lisa Monaco, made news by announcing that the White House will release long sought data on the U.S. drone program. Delivering the Kenneth A. Moskow Lecture at the Council on Foreign Relations, Monaco outlined the evolving nature of the terrorist threat to U.S. national security. In her address, she notes that we no longer think of sleeper cells...

The Wilson Center takes on the Apple v. FBI controversy in a panel entitled “Will They or Won’t They? Understanding the Encryption Debate.” Wilson Center President Jane Harman hosts the event, which features Congressman Ted Lieu of California discussing the encryption challenge with Lawfare’s Susan Hennessey and Kate Martin of the Center for American Progress. Politico’s David Perera moderates the...

This week as the battle between the FBI and Apple raged in a California court, the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington hosted Chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee Michael McCaul (R-TX) and Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) at an event unveiling new legislation that would create a commission tasked with developing viable recommendations on how to balance competing digital security prioriti...

This week we have Leon Wieseltier on the show, who among many other things, is the Isaiah Berlin Senior Fellow in Culture and Policy at the Brookings Institution. Wieseltier is currently completing an essay on the moral, historical and philosophical dimensions of the refugee crisis. During his conversation with Lawfare editor-in-chief Ben Wittes, Wieseltier expresses his frustrations with the Unit...

Last week as part of the University of Texas at Austin Strauss Center's conference on "The Frontiers of Cybersecurity Policy and Law," Daniel Placek, formerly one of the key figures behind the underground hacker website Darkode, offered an inside look into what led him to start the website, which Europol once called “the most prolific English-speaking cybercriminal forum to date.”  In an interview...

This week as Iowa voters took to the caucuses, Brookings hosted a panel discussion on defense strategy for the next president . The panel, moderated by Brookings Senior Fellow Michael O’Hanlon, included Robert Kagan of the Brookings Institution, Mackenzie Eaglen of the American Enterprise Institute, and former Department of Defense Undersecretary for Policy James Miller, all making the case for U....

Last week at The Brookings Institution, United States Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer participated in a discussion with Lawfare’s Benjamin Wittes and Newsweek’s Dahlia Lithwick about his new book, The Court and the World: American Law and the New Global Realities. During their conversation, Justice Breyer provides an overview of how in a globalizing world, the steady operation of American law...

The fourth Hoover Book Soiree  held this week in Hoover's beautiful Washington, D.C. offices featured Gayle Tzemach Lemmon on her newest book,  Ashley’s War: The Untold Story of a Team of Women Soldiers on the Special Ops Battlefield . At the event, Lemmon, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and Lawfare’s editor-in-chief Ben Wittes discussed the growing role of women soldiers in...

This week, Brookings hosted a discussion on Bitcoin and the technology that undergirds the currency, specifically focusing on the promise of the distributed-ledger. The panel featured David Wessel , Michael Barr , Brad Peterson, Barry Silbert, and Margaret Liu, on how the blockchain could revolutionize payment flows and reduce the cost of financial transactions, all while securing information and...

This week we have on Nick Weaver  the show. Nick's a regular  Lawfare contributor , senior staff researcher at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, California, and as you’ll see, quite the Bitcoin skeptic. Nick walks Ben through what exactly Bitcoin is, answering whether the platform is a financial opportunity of historical proportions, the massive criminal problem law enforce...

This week, we asked Lorenzo Vidino and his co-author, Seamus Hughes, both from the George Washington University Program on Extremism, into the studio to discuss their new report, “ISIS in America: From Retweets to Raqqa.” Their study looked at the 71 Americans charged with ISIS-related activities. So what commons denominators did they find within the group? How much of a role does social media pla...

We welcome Edward Lucas , a senior editor at the Economist and author of the new book, Cyberphobia: Identity, Trust, Security and the Internet ,  to the show this week . At the third Hoover Book Soiree a few weeks ago, Lucas shared a drink with Lawfare’s Ben Wittes and discussed the rapid increase in cybercrime, the difficulties of identity verification on the web, and why, even today, we still do...

The show this week features Natan Sachs, a Fellow in Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institution, who recently published an article in Foreign Affairs on anti-solutionism as strategy in the Israel-Palestine conflict. During his conversation with Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Ben Wittes, Sachs argues that what resembles the absence of a constructive national security agenda is actually better described a...

At the last Hoover Book Soiree —which if you haven’t attended one yet, you really should—Charlie Savage, New York Times national security reporter and author of the newly released book  Power Wars: Inside Obama’s Post-9/11 Presidency ,  sat down with Lawfare’s Jack Goldsmith for a detailed discussion of the Obama administration’s national security legacy. The conversation, and so too the book, is...

Earlier this week, Lawfare’s Benjamin Wittes interviewed John Carlin  at the Atlantic Council on National Security and the Cyber Threat Landscape. Carlin, the Assistant Attorney General for National Security, walks Ben through recent changes in his division of the Justice Department, the U.S. government’s ongoing efforts to deter and disrupt cyber threats, and how the shorter flash-to-bang timelin...

Last week, George Washington University and the CIA co-hosted an event entitled Ethos and Profession of Intelligence . As part of the conference, Kenneth Wainstein moderated a conversation between CIA General Counsel Caroline Krass, Orin Kerr, and Benjamin Wittes on Bridging 20th Century Law and 21st Century Intelligence . What new legal questions are raised by rapidly evolving technologies and ho...

Perhaps you’ve heard, but tensions between the United States and Russia are heating up. With Putin upping the ante in Syria,  Marvin Kalb , journalist, scholar, and a nonresident senior fellow in Foreign Policy at Brookings, came to Brookings to launch his new book that looks at the Russian leader’s last foray titled, Imperial Gamble: Putin, Ukraine, and the New Cold War .  Putin’s recent actions...

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.  Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/lawfare . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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...

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 Info...

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 conti...

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-Sh...

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 t...

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 w...