The Lawfare Podcast

From April 16, 2019: Since November, Lawfare Contributor Michelle Melton has run a  series  on our website about Climate Change and National Security, examining the implication of the threat as well as U.S. and international responses to climate change. Melton is a student a Harvard Law school. Prior to that she was an associate fellow in the Energy and National Security Program at the C...

Much of the world has been watching the rapidly developing situation in Afghanistan with a mix of shock and anguish. Bryce Klehm spoke with five experts to get a sense of how the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan is being perceived around the world. You’ll hear from Madiha Afzal, the David M. Rubenstein Fellow in the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution, on Pakistan; Suzanne Maloney,...

When the Taliban seized power following the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan this month, major platforms like Facebook and Twitter faced a quandary. What should they do with accounts and content belonging to the fundamentalist insurgency that was suddenly running a country? Should they treat the Taliban as the Afghan government and let them post, or should they remove Taliban content under U.S. sa...

Jack Goldsmith sat down with John Arquilla, an analyst with the RAND Corporation and professor emeritus with the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School. He's the author of the new book, “ Bitskrieg: The New Challenge of Cyberwarfare .” The two discussed the challenges posed by cyber warfare, which John argues have been neither met nor mastered. He offers solutions for protecting against enemies that are o...

Bryce Klehm spoke with Geoffrey Cain, an investigative journalist and the author of the new book, “ The Perfect Police State: An Undercover Odyssey into China's Terrifying Surveillance Dystopia of the Future .” They had a wide-ranging discussion about the Chinese government's use of surveillance technology to suppress its Uyghur population, the history of Xinjiang since 9/11, the development of Ch...

All across the world, citizens of liberal democracies are justifying their rejection of democratic norms and traditions as a protest against a cast of elite villains. It comes in different flavors around the world, but the underlying trend seems to be the same. While most observers are focusing on the impact of globalization or the activities of these very elites, Tom Nichols is placing responsibi...

From March 7, 2020: We ask a lot of questions about foreign policy on this podcast. Why do certain countries make certain decisions? What are the interests of the players in question? What are the consequences and, of course, the legality of foreign policy choices. In a new book, Joseph Nye, professor emeritus and former dean of the Harvard Kennedy School, asks another question about foreign polic...

From February 2, 2016: Barak Mendelsohn comes on the Jihadology Podcast to discuss his new book, “The al-Qaeda Franchise: The Expansion of al-Qaeda and Its Consequences .”  Some of the topics covered include: How organizations expand Why AQ decided to branch out and the strategy behind that decision AQ’s choices on where to expand Case studies on AQ’s different branches Support this show...

The city of Kabul’s international airport has become the unlikely focal point of an unprecedented humanitarian effort as U.S. soldiers and diplomats seek to maintain control of their airport facility while facilitating the evacuation of thousands of Americans and foreign nationals, as well as at least some vulnerable Afghans. Meanwhile, on the outside, an improvised network of veterans, former dip...

In October 2020, Facebook sent a cease and desist letter to two New York University researchers collecting data on the ads Facebook hosts on its platform, arguing that the researchers were breaching the company’s terms of service. The researchers disagreed and kept up with their work. On August 3, after months of failed negotiations, Facebook shut off access to their accounts—an aggressive move th...

Earlier this month, Tucker Carlson, whose nightly news show on Fox has become the most popular show in U.S. cable news history, traveled to Budapest to record a special version of his show. The centerpiece of his visit was an interview with Hungary's authoritarian leader, Viktor Orbán. But far from criticizing Orbán or questioning him on Hungary's increasing move away from liberal democracy, Carls...

This past Sunday, Americans woke up to a new reality in the country of Afghanistan—the Afghan government that the United States and its allies have supported for the last two decades is gone. In its place is a resurgent Taliban, now firmly in control of nearly the entire country. Meanwhile, the U.S. presence has been reduced to Kabul’s international airport where soldiers and diplomats are working...

The United States government has been wrestling with what to do about a particular type of cyber threat—ransomware—that holds a victim's data and computer systems hostage until they pay, usually in the form of cryptocurrency, to an anonymous recipient. Recent ransomware attacks have threatened everything from hospitals to the media industry, with payment being the main way that most companies are...

From August 4, 2018: Technologies that distort representations of reality, like audio, photo and video editing software, are nothing new, but what happens when these technologies are paired with artificial intelligence to produce hyper-realistic media of things that never happened? This new phenomenon, called "deep fakes," poses significant problems for lawyers, policymakers, and technologists. On...

From April 19, 2014: Benjamin Wittes had meant to have a book review of former CIA lawyer John Rizzo's new book,  Company Man: Thirty Years of Controversy and Crisis in the CIA , ready to run along with this episode of the podcast. But he was still working on the review, which will be up shortly, and he didn't want to hold up the podcast while he finished it. Ben caught up with Rizzo at...

Two of the biggest controversies in tech are how to stop the spread of child pornography and other exploitation material, and whether encryption prevents legitimate law enforcement investigations. In an announcement last week, Apple dropped a bomb into both of these debates. Apple announced that future versions of its iPhone operating system would scan photos its users post to the cloud and automa...

We live in the Disinformation Age. The internet has revolutionized our information ecosystem and caused disruption totally unprecedented in human history, and democracy may not survive. ... Just like it didn’t survive the television, radio, telegram and printing press before it. Right? When it comes to talking about the internet, all too often history is either completely ignored with bold claims...

You've probably heard about the craziness around the Biden administration’s new eviction moratorium. They consulted outside law professors instead of the Justice Department. Or did they? The president said he didn't have the authority to do it, and then he did it anyway. Lawfare has published two big articles on the subject in the last couple of days— one of them by Lawfare senior editor Alan Roze...

The spread of misinformation is one of the biggest challenges facing social media platforms. A standard approach is to label suspicious posts or links so as to warn users that what they're engaging with is not reputable, but warnings, despite their wide use, haven't proven to be particularly successful. So what's a social media platform to do?  Two Princeton University computer scientists, Be...

The Olympics ended yesterday after more than two weeks of exciting international competition in Tokyo. On this episode of the podcast, we're taking a look back at some of the security and international affairs issues that you might have noticed in this year's games and in Olympic history. Rohini Kurup sat down with author Roy Tomizawa to talk about the last time that Japan hosted the Summer Olympi...

From March 9, 2019: For the past year, Matthew Waxman has been writing a series of vignettes on  Lawfare  about interesting—and usually overlooked—historical episodes of American constitutional war powers in action, and relating them to modern debates. These include the stories of  St. Claire’s Defeat  and the  Whiskey Rebellion  during the Washington administration,&...

From the April 18, 2015: Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken  visited Brookings for a public address  on the current priorities and future prospects for U.S. engagement in Central Asia. With the draw-down in Afghanistan on the horizon, Mr. Blinken makes clear that the United States is not relinquishing its interests in the region. Blinken stresses that the security of the United Sta...

It's been a busy few weeks at the Justice Department. There was a major indictment of the chair of the former president's inaugural committee. There have been new policies promulgated on subpoenas to media organizations and on Justice Department White House contacts. There's been a decision not to defend a member of Congress for his role in the Jan. 6 uprising, and there are questions about what p...

There have been a thousand hot takes about the Facebook Oversight Board, the Supreme Court-like thing Facebook set up to oversee its content moderation. The Board generated so much press coverage when it handed down its decision on Donald Trump’s account that Kaitlyn Tiffany at The Atlantic called the whole circus “ like Shark Week, but less scenic .” Everyone weighed in, from Board Members, to la...

The U.S. raid on the compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, that brought Osama bin Laden to ultimate justice also recovered nearly half a million files. In 2017, these files were publicly released, but few people have the expertise, the experience and the time to go through those materials, as well as interview family members of bin Laden and former associates to try to paint a full picture of the man....