The Lawfare Podcast

John Bridgeland, Executive Chair & CEO of More Perfect & former Director of the White House Domestic Policy Council & National Service Czar, joins Kevin Frazier, Senior Research Fellow in the Constitutional Studies Program at the University of Texas at Austin and a Tarbell Fellow at Lawfare , to examine America’s general preparedness for a large-scale conflict and its culture of servic...

At a  recent conference  co-hosted by  Lawfare  and the Georgetown Institute for Law and Technology, Fordham law professor Chinny Sharma moderated a conversation on "Old Laws, New Tech: How Traditional Legal Doctrines Tackle AI,” between NYU law professor Catherine Sharkey, Ohio State University law professor Bryan Choi, and NYU and Cornell Tech postdoctoral fellow Kat Geddes....

From April 9, 2016: This week on the podcast, we welcome  Eric Schwartz , the Dean of the Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota. Schwartz previously served as U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Population, Refugees, and Migration. In our conversation, he sketches the key aspects of U.S. refugee policy, explaining how it both protects the security of the...

Carmen Medina defies simple description. She spent more than 30 years at the CIA, rising to the leadership team of the Directorate of Intelligence, despite her iconoclasticism and vociferous evangelism of new technologies. Since retiring more than a decade ago, she has co-written a book about rebelling within bureaucracy--and advocated the exploration of precognition for intelligence purposes...

From July 31, 2023: This past week, the House Oversight Subcommittee on National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs held a spirited hearing on an unusual topic: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, or UAPs, the more correct term for what are commonly called UFOs, or Unidentified Flying Objects. The witnesses included two military veterans who claimed to have borne eyewitness to UAPs, and an intel...

On today's podcast,  Lawfare  Executive Editor Natalie Orpett talks with Michael Posner, a professor of business and human rights at New York University, about the landmark verdict last month in  Al-Shimari v. CACI.  The case involved  claims against a government contractor  for its role in the abuse of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib detention facility in Iraq in 2004. I...

From April 14, 2023: Over the past few years, TikTok has become a uniquely polarizing social media platform. On the one hand, millions of users, especially those in their teens and twenties, love the app. On the other hand, the government is concerned that TikTok's vulnerability to pressure from the Chinese Communist Party makes it a serious national security threat. There's even talk of banning t...

From June 15, 2021: A spree of stories has emerged over the last week or so that the Justice Department under the prior administration obtained phone and email records of several journalists, several members of Congress and staffers, and even family members. It has provoked a mini scandal, calls for investigation, howls of rage and serious questions. To discuss it all, Benjamin Wittes sat down wit...

Adam Thierer, Senior Fellow for the Technology & Innovation team at R Street, joins Kevin Frazier, Senior Research Fellow in the Constitutional Studies Program at the University of Texas at Austin and a Tarbell Fellow at Lawfare , to examine a  lengthy, detailed report issued by the Bipartisan House Task Force on AI . Thierer walks through  his own analysis  of the report and co...

This week, Scott sat down with his Lawfare colleagues Anna Bower and Natalie Orpett and Lawfare Contributing Editor Michel Paradis to talk about the week’s biggest national security news stories, including: “A Justice Delayed Still Has Justice on the Mind.” After weeks of waiting, New York state court judge Justice Juan Merchan has finally become the first judge to apply the Supreme Court’s Trump...

For today’s episode, Lawfare Senior Editor Scott R. Anderson sat down with Ashley Deeks, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law, and Kristen Eichensehr, also a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law, but currently a visiting professor at Harvard Law School, to discuss their forthcoming law review article, “Frictionless Government and Foreign Relations,” which focuse...

In response to the compromise of telecommunication companies by the Chinese hacker group Salt Typhoon, senior officials from the FBI and CISA recommended that American citizens use encrypted messaging apps to minimize the chances of their communications being intercepted. This marks a departure in law enforcement’s position on the use of encrypted communications.  Susan Landau, Professor of C...

Shane Harris makes no secret about his love for the film version of this Cold War submarine thriller, based on the Tom Clancy novel. It’s his favorite movie. So he was delighted to welcome fellow obsessive Katherine Voyles to the podcast. A PhD in English, Voyles writes about national security in culture, as well as the culture of national security. She and Shane talked about why they love the mov...

CNN correspondent Elle Reeve has spent the last decade reporting on extremism in the United States. Her book , "Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society and Capture American Politics" provides an insider's glimpse into the "insidious"—and underestimated—world of alt-right internet culture that is now at the center of the Republican Party under Do...

Sam Manning, Senior Research Fellow at GovAI, joins Kevin Frazier, Assistant Professor at St. Thomas University College of Law and a Tarbell Fellow at Lawfare , to discuss his research on different options to share AI's benefits at the international level. The two also explore Sam's analysis of the incentives that may steer adoption of different benefits sharing strategies and his plans for f...

From October 19, 2019: It's been a horrible week in northeastern Syria. The U.S. abandoned its Kurdish allies after the president had a conversation by phone with Turkish President Erdogan and pulled the plug on the stabilizing U.S. presence in the region. The Turkish government began a major incursion over the border, which has produced significant casualties and major questions about ISIS detain...

In a  live conversation on December 12 ,  Lawfare  Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with  Lawfare  Senior Editors Scott Anderson, Middle East Institute Senior Fellow Charles Lister, and Syrian pro-democracy activist Ammar Abdulhamid to discuss Syrian rebels overthrowing the Bashar al-Assad regime, what the current situation on the ground is, what the reactions of f...

At a virtual panel conversation co-hosted by  Lawfare  and NYU's Center for Technology Policy, center Director Scott Brennen moderated a conversation between  Lawfare  Senior Editor and University of Minnesota law professor Alan Rozenshtein, University of North Carolina law professor Mary-Rose Papandrea, and Georgetown law professor Anupam Chander, about the recent  D.C. C...

This week, Scott was joined by his Lawfare colleagues Benjamin Wittes, Eugenia Lostri, and Tyler McBrien to break down the week's big national security news, including: “The Long Road to Damascus.” Syria’s Assad regime collapsed suddenly last week in the face of a rebel offensive, ending thirteen years of revolution. What comes next, however, is anyone’s guess. How will this shift impact regional...

On November 28, Georgia Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze announced that he was suspending Georgia’s accession process to the European Union. In the weeks since, thousands of protestors have demonstrated in the capital city, Tbilisi, and across the country.  Lawfare  Associate Editor for Communications Anna Hickey sat down with Dr. Beka Kobakhidze, Professor and Co-chair of MA Program in...

Ukraine’s defense industry has grown substantially after Russia’s full-scale invasion. But it also suffered from a huge domestic burden—a ban on arms exports, which forced companies to close down or relocate abroad. Ukrainian lawmaker  Halyna Yanchenko  sits down with Lawfare Ukraine Fellow Anastasiia Lapatina to explain why exporting Ukrainian weapons will benefit Ukraine and global sec...

International politics and security expert Dr. Ben Tallis, who now directs the Berlin-based Democratic Strategy Initiative, joined David Priess to discuss the challenges of German grand strategy since 1945, the country's musical culture in the 1950s and 1960s, the origins and evolution of Kraftwerk and its members' effort to reconceptualize German identity, the band's influence on musicians g...

Jack Goldsmith sits down with Glenn Fine, the former principal deputy Inspector General of the Department of Defense and former Acting IG of the Department of Defense, and author of the new book , “Watchdogs: Inspectors General and the Battle for Honest and Accountable Government.” They discuss the history of inspectors general and early constitutional concerns about the role that inspectors gener...

Kevin Xu, founder of Interconnected Capital and author of the  Interconnected newsletter , joins Kevin Frazier, Senior Research Fellow in the Constitutional Studies Program at the University of Texas at Austin and a Tarbell Fellow at Lawfare , to analyze China’s AI ambitions, its current AI capacities, and the likely effect of  updated export controls  on the nation’s AI efforts. Th...

From May 11, 2021: David Ignatius, a columnist for the Washington Post, recently ran a lengthy  column  about the machinations of Kash Patel in the executive branch during the presidential transition. Patel, a former staffer for Devin Nunes, held a variety of positions in the months before Donald Trump left office, and Donald Trump considered him for a variety of other positions. It's a...