The Lawfare Podcast

Probably best known as the Twitter handle @pwnallthethings , Matt Tait is the chief operating officer of Corellium. Previously, he was a hacker for GCHQ, the British version of the National Security Agency, he was the CEO of Capital Alpha Security, and he worked at Google Project Zero, among other things.  Most of this podcast was recorded before the news of the Kaseya ransomware attack broke...

From December 14, 2019: Recently, former CIA officer Jerry Lee was sentenced to 19 years in prison for conspiring to share classified information with the Chinese government. During the time in which Lee was in touch with Chinese intelligence agents,  dozens of CIA sources in China  were arrested or killed—a catastrophe for CIA operations in the country. What's the connection betwee...

From December 3, 2016: Earlier this week, the  New York Times  published a  story  by Charlie Savage, Eric Schmitt, and Mark Mazzetti informing us that the Obama administration had changed its interpretation of the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force to more broadly cover the use of force against al-Shabaab, expanding its previous reading of the AUMF as only author...

From February 27, 2019: On Wednesday, February 27, 2019, Michael Cohen—the former executive vice president of the Trump Organization, former deputy finance chairman of the Republican National Committee, and former personal lawyer to Donald Trump—paid a visit to the House Committee on Oversight and Reform. Cohen accused the president of campaign finance violations after taking office. He alleg...

The Manhattan district attorney and the New York attorney general's office have issued an indictment against the Trump Organization and its chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg. It was, shall we say, not the indictment that many people who imagined accountability for Donald Trump would have prayed for or would have expected. It focuses on under-the-table compensation for senior executives—one...

This week on Arbiters of Truth, our podcast on our online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic bring you an episode they’ve wanted to record for a while: a conversation with Nathaniel Gleicher, the head of security policy at Facebook. He runs the corner of Facebook that focuses on identifying and tackling threats aimed at the platform, including information operations.  They...

Early Monday morning, the U.S. carried out airstrikes in Iraq and Syria against two Iranian-backed militia groups. The strikes raise a whole host of diplomatic, legal and policy questions. To break them all down, Jacob Schulz sat down with Scott R. Anderson, Lawfare 's executive editor and a senior fellow in the National Security Law Program at Columbia Law School. Support this show http://support...

Adam Klein was, until the other day, the chairman of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, known colloquially as the PCLOB. In that capacity, he had the opportunity to do something that no one has ever really done before as an outsider: review a bunch of FISA applications, that is, applications for electronic surveillance under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The result is a...

In this second half of David Kris's two-part discussion with FBI historian John Fox, David and John continue their whirlwind tour of the Bureau, focused on its use of wiretap evidence, SIGINT and other intelligence. In the last episode , they worked their way from the FBI's founding through the era of prohibition and gangsters, World War II and part of the Cold War, including the prosecution of DO...

From the Lawfare Archive, July 18, 2015: While world powers and Iran were embroiled in last minute negotiations last week, Brookings hosted a panel discussion on the meaning of another power’s recent nuclear threats: Russia's. In recent months, Russia has rattled the saber, with Vladimir Putin remarking on his nuclear options during the Crimea crisis and making a mild threat to nuke the Danish nav...

From the Lawfare Archive, March 31, 2020: Saudi Arabia continues to be a mainstay of newspaper headlines, whether it be for its oil price war with Russia or for news about Turkish indictments in connection with the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. But making sense of Saudi Arabia’s de facto leader, Mohammed Bin Salman, known widely as MBS, can be a difficult proposition. He has made social re...

The Apple Daily newspaper in Hong Kong has shut down under pressure from the Chinese and Hong Kong governments. It's the latest political repression in Hong Kong that shows no sign of easing up. Alvin Cheung is a postdoctoral fellow at McGill University and a non-resident affiliated scholar at NYU's U.S.-Asia Law Institute. He joined Benjamin Wittes to talk about the Apple Daily case, the other ca...

This week on Arbiters of Truth, our podcast on our online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Camille François, the chief innovation officer at Graphika, about a new report released by her team earlier this month on an apparent Russian influence operation aimed at so-called “alt-tech” platforms, like Gab and Parler. A group linked to the Russian Internet Research Agen...

This is the latest installment in our ongoing series of historical inquiries with U.S. and Five Eyes intelligence agencies. Earlier episodes have featured CIA, NSA and GCHQ, and today, it's the first of a two-part discussion of FBI, featuring FBI historian John Fox. David Kris sat down with John for a whirlwind tour of the Bureau, from its founding through the era of prohibition and gangsters...

Bryce Klehm sat down with Peter Martin, a defense policy and intelligence reporter at Bloomberg. Peter is the author of the new book, " China's Civilian Army: The Making of Wolf Warrior Diplomacy ," which traces the history of China's diplomatic corps from the founding of the Chinese Communist Party to the present. They covered a lot of ground, from Zhou Enlai's impact on the Chinese foreign minis...

NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, was founded in 1949 and quickly became the main way that the United States guaranteed the security of Western Europe, especially against possible invasion by the Soviet Union. But with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the end of the Cold War, NATO has faced a series of identity crises. Should it conti...

From the Lawfare Archive, February 19, 2020: Jessica Stern, who served on the National Security Council during the Clinton administration, has a remarkable skill: she interviews really bad people, and she writes about them in really interesting ways. She spent quite a bit of time interviewing Bosnian-Serb war criminal Radovan Karadzic, who is serving a life sentence at the Yugoslav war crimes trib...

From the Lawfare Archive, July 17, 2018: U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin met in Helsinki for their first one-on-one summit, where the U.S. president said that he trusted the Russian president's denial of election interference over his own intelligence community. In the United States, furor followed on both sides of the aisle. To break down what happened and what it...

President Biden met with President Putin in Geneva on Wednesday. There was a lot of press and dueling press conferences, with both presidents having testy moments with them, and the whole thing was pretty different from the last time Putin met with a U.S. president.  To talk through the Putin-Biden summit, Benjamin Wittes sat down on Lawfare Live with Fiona Hill and Alex Vindman, both formerl...

TikTok has rapidly become one of the most popular apps for teenagers across the world for dancing, lip-syncing and sharing details about their lives. But if you cast your mind back to last year—specifically, August 2020—you may recall that the app’s future in the United States suddenly fell into doubt. The Trump administration began arguing that the app’s ownership by the Chinese company ByteDance...

The United States is quickly approaching its September deadline for a full military withdrawal from Afghanistan. As the U.S. completes its withdrawal, many Afghans who partnered with the U.S., serving as translators and interpreters, face the danger of severe retribution from the Taliban. Those who partner with the U.S. military can obtain a special immigrant visa, or SIV, through the U.S. State D...

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 with Gabe Rottman of th...

Public discourse is in bad shape these days. We all yell at and cancel each other on social media and college campuses, and politicians—especially those on the Trumpist right—lie so much that the very notion of truth threatens to lose any meaning. But, Jonathan Rauch is optimistic that this can change for the better. Jonathan is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the author of, most...

Daniel Richman and Sarah Seo are professors at Columbia Law School, and they are co-authors of a recent article on Lawfare entitled, " Toward a New Era for Federal and State Oversight of Local Police ." Benjamin Wittes sat down with them to discuss the article, the history of the federal-state relationship in law enforcement, how the feds came to play an oversight role with respect to police depar...

If you’ve listened to this show, you've probably read a fair number of news stories—and maybe even listened to some podcast episodes—about the Facebook Oversight Board’s recent ruling on the platform’s decision to ban President Trump’s account. The board temporarily allowed Facebook to keep Trump off the platform, but criticized the slapdash way Facebook made that call and provided a long list of...