The Lawfare Podcast

From March 3, 2012: Missy Cummings , Director of the Humans and Automation Laboratory and a professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT, sat down with Ritika Singh for the fifth episode of the  Lawfare Podcast to talk about robots on our battlefields. Cummings is a bit of a force of nature. In addition to designing unmanned weapons systems, she was one of the Navy's first femal...

The Lawfare Podcast isn't Lawfare ’s only podcast offering. Each week, Scott R. Anderson, Quinta Jurecic, Alan Rozenshtein and a special guest sit down on the podcast Rational Security to have a more casual and freewheeling conversation about national security stories in the news. Today, we thought we'd share one of our favorite Rational Security episodes from the past year, originally released on...

We're giving you something a bit different for today's Lawfare Podcast . It's an episode of Lawfare ’s new podcast, Chatter , in which Shane Harris or David Priess, or occasionally both of them, have extended, one-on-one conversations with fascinating people working at the creative edges of national security. In this episode, Shane talks with Noah Shachtman, the editor-in-chief of Rolling Stone, w...

Despite being isolated from much of the rest of the international community, North Korea has emerged as an unexpected powerhouse in the realm of cybercrime, with affiliated hackers pulling off some of the most daring heists in cyberattacks of the past decade. Scott R. Anderson sat down with journalists Jean Lee and Geoff White, who have put together a podcast series entitled “ The Lazarus Heist ”...

This past weekend marked the 30th anniversary of the collapse of the Soviet Union. To discuss the collapse and its implications, Bryce Klehm sat down with Vladislav Zubok, professor of international history at the London School of Economics and author of the new book, “ Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union .” They covered a range of topics, including Mikhail Gorbachev’s economic and political re...

From October 17, 2015: Last week, the  Center for Strategic and International Studies  hosted Ben, along with Laura Donohue of Georgetown Law School, former NSA Director 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 sin...

From July 28, 2019: In the 1950s and 1960s, the Central Intelligence Agency had a major problem. The streets of Moscow were a virtually impossible operating environment due to heavy KGB surveillance and other operational difficulties. Through a series of trial and error, and a whole lot of ingenuity, along came the "Moscow rules," a series of technical advancements in the area of disguise and comm...

From August 23, 2014: News broke yesterday that the Russian military has moved artillery units inside of Ukraine and that Russian troops are actively using them against Ukranian forces---a move with dramatic escalatory potential. At the same time, Ukraine appears to be closing in on the last Russian-backed rebel strongholds. As the crisis unfolds and the United States seeks to isola...

 In 2018, a group of academics and free expression advocates convened in Santa Clara, California, for a workshop. They emerged with the Santa Clara Principles on Transparency and Accountability in Content Moderation —a high level list of procedural steps that social media companies should take when making decisions about the content on their services. The principles quickly became influential...

President Biden recently authorized the release of almost 1,500 documents related to the JFK assassination. But ten times that number still have had their release deferred. What might be in them? What's holding them back from release? And how did we get here?  David Priess spoke with journalist and bestselling author Gerald Posner, who wrote the Pulitzer finalist “ Case Closed: Lee Harvey Osw...

Merrick Garland has been getting a lot of criticism these days, and a lot of it is less than entirely fair, or at least it's premature. But Andrew Kent, Quinta Jurecic and Benjamin Wittes argue in a Lawfare piece published today that there is at least one matter on which Garland's decision-making is ripe for criticism: He is not speaking enough. Garland has modeled himself after Attorney General E...

In 2006, al-Qaeda-trained operatives planned and nearly executed an operation to destroy passenger aircraft over the Atlantic Ocean. Because it was discovered and stopped, it did not accomplish its purpose: killing thousands of people in the air and possibly hundreds or thousands on the ground. Aki Peritz is a former CIA intelligence officer and current adjunct professor at American University who...

From May 21, 2016: Four years ago, Anwar al Awlaki—an American citizen—was killed in an American drone strike in Yemen, marking the first targeted killing of a U.S. citizen by the U.S. government. While the attack occurred almost four years ago, the legality, morality and prudential nature of the strike, and others like it that occur nearly daily in a scattershot of countries around the world, rem...

From September 18, 2018: Security technologist Bruce Schneier's latest book, " Click Here to Kill Everybody: Security and Survival in a Hyper-connected World ," argues that it won't be long before everything modern society relies on will be computerized and on the internet. This drastic expansion of the so-called 'internet of things,' Schneier contends, vastly increases the risk of cyberattack. To...

On November 2, the Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai publicly accused on social media a former vice-premier of China of sexual assault. Chinese authorities responded by taking down her posts and engaging in a mass campaign of censorship on Chinese social media. Later on, Peng disappeared from public view, prompting many tennis stars, athletes and others to demand answers about where she was. It's a l...

On this show, we’ve discussed no end of proposals for how to regulate online platforms. But there’s something many of those proposals are missing: data about how the platforms actually work. Now, there’s legislation in Congress that aims to change that. The Platform Accountability and Transparency Act , sponsored by Senators Chris Coons, Rob Portman and Amy Klobuchar, would create a process throug...

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals last week issued a surprisingly under-discussed opinion in the case of Trump v. Thompson , which involves the production of the executive branch and White House records to the January 6 committee. The opinion of a three-judge panel is a decisive rejection of Trump's assertions of executive privilege after leaving office. It also has potential implications for the...

Syria’s decade-long civil war has left the state and economy shells of their former selves. But a new industry is stepping in to fill the void: the manufacture and export of illicit drugs, specifically Captagon, a type of amphetamine that has a growing global market. To better understand Syria’s emerging role in the global Captagon trade, Scott R. Anderson sat down with Caroline Rose of the Newlin...

Barton Gellman is a long-time national security reporter for the Washington Post, for The Atlantic and elsewhere. His latest article and Atlantic cover story is entitled, “ Trump's Next Coup has Already Begun .” He joined Benjamin Wittes on Lawfare Live to talk about the article; about what the Republican party is doing to position itself to overturn, if necessary, the results of an adverse electi...

From May 15, 2018: In her new book, " Habeas Corpus in Wartime: From the Tower of London to Guantanamo Bay ," Amanda Tyler presents a comprehensive account of the legal and political history of habeas corpus in wartime in the Anglo-American legal tradition. On Monday, Benjamin Wittes sat down with Tyler at the Hoover Book Soiree for a wide-ranging discussion of the history of habeas corpus, where...

From June 3, 2017: 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 t...

On March 18, 2019, the U.S. conducted an airstrike in Baghuz, Syria, as part of its battle against the Islamic State. Two bombs were dropped killing dozens of people, as many as 80 according to U.S. Central Command, the majority of whom seem to have been civilians. But the American public had never heard of the strike until last month when a New York Times investigation revealed not only the fact...

We talk a lot about how content moderation involves a lot of hard decisions and trade-offs—but at the end of the day, someone has to make a decision about what stays on a platform and what comes down. This week on Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with “The Decider” —Nicole Wong, who earned that tongue-in-cheek nickname during...

For the past year, the country of Ethiopia has been embroiled in a brutal civil war. At the center of it is Tigray, a region that has played a prominent role in the evolution of Ethiopia's modern ethnofederalist state. Just weeks ago, rebels seemed to be on the verge of seizing the capital city of Addis Ababa, leading foreign governments to urge their nationals to evacuate the country as soon as p...

COVID-19 has shown us all that pandemics aren’t just a public health issue, but a national security one as well. Are America’s national security institutions prepared to address this threat? And what role should the intelligence community play in addressing pandemics?   To address these questions, Lawfare ’s David Priess moderated a live recording of the Lawfare Podcast featuring a discu...