The Lawfare Podcast

Content moderation in video games turns out to be just as much of a bummer as content moderation everywhere else, perhaps even more so. This week on Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Daniel Kelley, the director of strategy and operations for the Anti-Defamation League’s Center for Technology and Society. He studies how com...

The “going dark” debate, which concerns how society and the technology industry should address the challenges that law enforcement faces in investigating crime due to the increasing use of encryption on mobile devices and by communication platforms and services, was in the news again because of Apple's recent proposal to engage in client-side scanning. Apple planned to scan iPhones for child sexua...

Jack Goldsmith sat down with John Mearsheimer, the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor in the Political Science department at the University of Chicago, to discuss his recent article in Foreign Affairs, called “The Inevitable Rivalry: America, China, and the Tragedy of Great-Power Politics.” In that essay, Mearsheimer argues that America's engagement with China following the Cold W...

The complicated relationship between Iraq and the United States is once again approaching a crossroads. Parliamentary elections held in Iraq last month promise a new government featuring a new cast of political forces with their own difficult histories with the United States. The United States, meanwhile, is approaching the self-imposed deadline by which it has promised to withdraw U.S. combat tro...

From June 7, 2012: We don't review our own books here on  Lawfare —not even if we happen to be  Lawfare 's book review editor. But Benjamin Wittes sat down the other day with Ken Anderson to discuss his wonderful new book,  Living With the UN: American Responsibilities and International Order . It's a terrific read, full of insights about the U.S.-U.N. relationship, the U.N. as an i...

From June 14, 2014: At the  2014 Computers, Freedom and Privacy Conference , a panel of experts debated the pros and cons of adding outside lawyers to litigation before two tribunals at the heart of the NSA surveillance controversy: the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ("FISC") and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review ("FISCR"). As is well known, proceedings at th...

Only twice in history have two women who served as CIA officers been elected to Congress. The first time was 2018, and the second was 2020—both of them featuring Abigail Spanberger and Elissa Slotkin. David Priess hosted an event for the Michael V. Hayden Center at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government, speaking with both of them about their careers, both in the intellige...

There’s been a lot of news recently about Facebook, and a lot of that news has focused on the frustration of employees assigned to the platform’s civic integrity team or other corners of the company focused on ensuring user trust and safety. If you read reporting on the documents leaked by Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, you’ll see again and again how these Facebook employees raised concern...

Last week, Facebook unveiled its new corporate brand—Meta—and its corresponding vision for a new immersive world called the metaverse. The rebrand announcement attracted plenty of consternation from tech journalists, but there are also plenty of interesting issues about the metaverse itself. What type of content moderation problems does virtual reality pose? How might we think about the challenges...

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has issued a declassified assessment of the origins of the coronavirus, and it’s a bit of a muddle. Was it a lab leak? They don't really know. Was it naturally occurring? They're not quite sure.  They do know a few things. It wasn't a bioweapon, and we're not going to find out any real answers until China starts cooperating. To chew over the...

Last week, the Department of Defense ,  Office of the Director of National Intelligence ,  Department of Homeland Security  and  National Security Council each released their own reports addressing the issue of climate change as a national security threat. To unpack what's in the reports and what it all means, Natalie Orpett sat down on Lawfare Live with Mark Nevitt, associate...

From March 27, 2019: From 1989 to early 2017, Sue Biniaz was the lead climate lawyer and a climate negotiator at the State Department. She was also a key architect of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, a UN-negotiated agreement designed to mitigate global warming, which went into effect in November 2016. In June 2017, President Trump announced his intention to withdraw the United States from t...

From January 5, 2019: The murder of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville in 2017 and other recent events have drawn in the public discourse to the fact that domestic terrorism is not a federal crime in and of itself. Earlier this week, Benjamin Wittes sat down with two experts on domestic terrorism to talk about ways that it might be incorporated into our criminal statutes. Mary McCord is a professor...

There's a presidential election coming up in France in April 2022. In a surprise to many, recent polls show that the occupant of second place behind the incumbent president is a man who has never run for office before: Éric Zemmour. He's a veteran journalist, a provocateur and a virulent Islamophobe. Jacob Schulz sat down with Yasmeen Serhan, a staff writer at The Atlantic to talk about Zemmour’s...

This week on Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, we’re talking about a subject that doesn’t come up much on the Lawfare Podcast : the Securities and Exchange Commission. Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen has made waves with her congressional testimony and the many damaging news stories being reported about Facebook based on the documents she released. But before...

In November 2020, a raid against terrorists in Somalia led to the death of an American working for the CIA Special Activities Center. This, after the Trump administration had eased combat rules and airstrikes in Somalia surged. Now the Biden administration seems to be reviewing its policy toward Somalia and the al-Shabab terrorists there. David Priess talked about it with Julian Barnes, a national...

Evergrande is a massive Chinese real estate company that has found itself with more than $300 billion in liability and no real idea of how to get out of debt. Its financial problems have come to a head in recent months, and concerns have grown about the potential of Evergrande’s debt problems to threaten the Chinese economy. It's a financial story, but one with real implications for China's broade...

Pete Strzok is a former counter-intelligence official at the FBI. He is the author most recently of an article in Lawfare entitled, “The Sussmann Indictment, Human Source Handling, and the FBI’s Declining FISA Numbers.” It's an article that makes an interesting connection between a sentence in the indictment of Democratic lawyer Michael Sussmann and some data on FISA applications released by the O...

From March 25, 2017: 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, ...

From February 25, 2017: Under the oversight of Paul Lewis, the Department of Defense’s Special Envoy for Guantanamo Closure under the Obama administration, the detainee population at Guantanamo Bay went from  164  to 41. But Guantanamo remains open, and the Trump administration has promised not only to halt any further transfers or releases of detainees, but also to possibly bring in mor...

Ports in many countries are experiencing congestion. For weeks now, there have been reports that there will be delays in many common products, and people are wondering what is causing this and how it can end. David Priess sat down with Gregg Easterbrook, a former fellow in economics and in governance studies at the Brookings Institution. He was a staff writer, national correspondent or contributin...

On this week’s episode of Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Nick Pickles, the director of global public policy strategy at Twitter. They discussed a new paper just released by Twitter, “ Protecting the Open Internet: Regulatory Principles for Policy Makers ”—which sketches out, in broad strokes, the company’s vision for wh...

Jonathan David Shaub is an assistant professor of law at the University of Kentucky. He is a former OLC attorney and the author of a series of recent Lawfare posts on executive privilege, witnesses, documents and the Jan. 6 committee. He sat down with Benjamin Wittes to talk about Steve Bannon, the former president's suit against the National Archives, all of the privilege claims that are floating...

Around a hundred people have already pleaded guilty to crimes in connection with the Jan. 6 attempted insurrection on the Capitol. What should we make of the plea deals thus far? Are they overly lenient? Are they what we might expect? To talk through the Jan. 6 plea deals, Jacob Schulz sat down on Lawfare Live with Carissa Byrne Hessick, the Anne Shea Ransdell and William Garland "Buck" Ransdell,...

It has been a decade since the Supreme Court decided on a case involving the state secrets privilege, a common law rule that allows the government to block the release of state secrets in civil litigation. In this term, the justices will hear two cases involving the privilege: United States v. Abu Zubaydah and Federal Bureau of Investigation v. Fazaga. To talk about the two cases before the Suprem...