The Lawfare Podcast: Patreon Edition

The practice of surveillance capitalism—the widespread private collection and commodification of personal data—is well understood. Less well understood is the extent to which the U.S. government purchases this data in the commercial marketplace to use it for intelligence and law enforcement purposes.  Byron Tau, when he was a reporter with The Wall Street Journal, did more than anyone to brin...

Jonna Mendez advanced in her Central Intelligence Agency career to become Chief of Disguise despite the many institutional challenges to women's promotions. And now she has written a memoir, In True Face , about it all. David Priess spoke with Jonna about career options for women at CIA in the early Cold War, her own start there in the 1960s, how photography classes set her on a path that ultimate...

Everyone agrees that the United States has a serious cybersecurity problem. But how to fix it—that's another question entirely. Over the past decade, a consensus has emerged across multiple administrations that NIST—the National Institute of Standards and Technology—is the right body to set cybersecurity standards for both the government and private industry. Alan Rozenshtein, Associate Professor...

Executive branch constraints and the posture of the media have shifted in significant ways over the past two decades. Lyrissa Lidsky and Christina Koningisor, law professors at the University of Florida and the University of California San Francisco, respectively, argue in  a forthcoming law review article  that these changes—including the erosion of certain post-Watergate reforms and th...

In mid-February, Chinese cybersecurity firm i-Soon appeared to suffer a massive data leak, which offered unprecedented insight into the operations of the company, known to contract for many Chinese government agencies. The more than 500 documents include conversations between employees, sales pitches, and internal documents, and expose the firm’s hacking methods, tools, and victims. They also show...

As the 2024 presidential election approaches, a vital question is whether the legal architecture governing the election is well crafted to prevent corruption and abuse. In their new book, “ How to Steal a Presidential Election ,” Lawrence Lessig and Matthew Seligman argue that despite the Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022, serious abuse of the presidential election rules remains a live possi...

This week on Rational Security , Quinta and Scott were joined by Molly Reynolds and (a prerecorded) Anna Bower to talk through some of the week’s big national security news, including: “The Shutdown Rut.” Congress once again has the government on the verge of a shutdown. And while Speaker of the House Mike Johnson has reportedly committed to avoiding one, demands from within his caucus may ma...

It's another episode of “Trump's Trials and Tribulations,” recorded on February 29 in front of a live audience on YouTube and Riverside. Lawfare Senior Editor Scott R. Anderson sat down with Lawfare Senior Editors Quinta Jurecic and Roger Parloff, Lawfare Courts Correspondent and Legal Fellow Anna Bower, and Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes to talk about the Supreme Court's decisi...

From May 26, 2020: On Wednesday, NASA and the SpaceX Corporation are scheduled to send astronauts back into outer space from U.S. soil for the first time since the U.S. space shuttle program ended in 2011. The launch promises to kick off a new era in space exploration, one that will see the increased use of outer space for both public and private purposes, as well as greater involvement by private...

It’s December 2020. Donald Trump continues to deny that he has lost the election. He and his inner circle are working feverishly to try to overturn it while Trump is getting more and more irate. Then, on Dec. 21, he meets a man named Jeffrey Clark. Suddenly, the full might of the Justice Department is within reach. And he plans to use it.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more infor...

Following Hamas’s attacks on Oct. 7, the Israeli military retaliated with a relentless and devastating air war. By mid-December, Israeli forces had struck more than 22,000 targets in Gaza, and the Israeli military  said it had used artificial intelligence  to select many of them. The targeting system, called “The Gospel” by the IDF, was not the first time a military used AI on the battle...

We all know how superpower competition spurred one giant leap for mankind on the lunar surface in July 1969. But the story of how the Moon and its tides affect national security is deeper and wider than most of us realize. David Priess explored this intersection with science journalist Rebecca Boyle, author of the new book Our Moon , about her path to writing about astronomy, Anaxagoras, Julius Ca...

Over the past several decades, financial sanctions have become one of the most widely used tools in the U.S. foreign policy arsenal. And since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine two years ago, the Biden administration has wielded them in a number of innovative ways. At the same time, some of these uses have also triggered concerns about U.S. overreach, something that could have consequences for both U.S...

On Feb. 13, Senator Ron Wyden released a  letter  documenting an investigation his office has been conducting into the activities of Near Intelligence Inc., a data broker that allegedly enabled an anti-abortion organization to target anti-abortion messaging and ads to people visiting 600 Planned Parenthood clinics across the United States. Lawfare Senior Editor Stephanie Pell sat down wi...

The Supreme Court heard hours and hours of oral arguments today brought by a trade association called NetChoice against laws restricting content moderation in Florida and Texas. It's the big First Amendment case of the year, and we sat through the whole oral argument. Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes spoke with Lawfare Senior Editors Quinta Jurecic and Alan Rozenshtein, and Kyle Langvardt o...

At a South Carolina campaign rally on Feb. 10, former President Donald Trump told a crowd of supporters that while he was president he told “one of the presidents of a big country” in the NATO alliance that he would not protect that country from a Russian invasion if that country didn’t pay. Trump then said, “In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want. You got to pay. You go...

This week on Rational Security , Alan, Quinta, and Scott got together to talk over the week’s big national security news, including: “Is Revanchism a Dish Best Served Cold?” Russia boosters seem to be feeling bullish for the first time in a long time. This week, its forces captured the strategic town of Avdiivka from Ukrainian forces, who have been weakened by bickering among their Western allies....

It's another episode of “Trump's Trials and Tribulations,” recorded on February 22 in front of a live audience on YouTube and Zoom. Lawfare Senior Editor Quinta Jurecic sat down with Lawfare Senior Editor Roger Parloff, Lawfare Legal Fellow and Courts Correspondent Anna Bower, and Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes to talk about the continued drama in Fulton County and what has happ...

From September 15, 2020: Alexei Navalny is Russia's most prominent dissident, opposition leader, and anti-corruption crusader—and the latest such person to be poisoned by the Vladimir Putin regime, which, of course, it denies. When we recorded this episode, Navalny's condition was improving as he received medical treatment in Germany. To discuss Navalny's career and why Putin chose now to attack h...

Since a grand jury in Fulton County, Georgia, handed up an indictment in August of former President Donald Trump and 18 other defendants for their efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election in Georgia, all eyes had been on the defendants’ behavior and their legal fate. That was until an explosive filing by one of the defendants, Mike Roman, alleged that Fulton County District Attorney Fa...

Joe Biden took office with a big ambition: To repair America’s reputation abroad and set the country on a new path, where foreign policy would be crafted with the middle class in mind. So writes journalist Alexander Ward, whose new book,  The Internationalists: The Fight to Restore American Foreign Policy After Trump , chronicles Biden’s first two years in the White House.  The cent...

As  a new report  on the intimidation of state and local officeholders from the Brennan Center for Justice points out, “The January 6 insurrection at the Capitol seemed to mark a new peak in extremist intimidation targeting public officials. But it was hardly the only act of political violence to break the period of relative stability that followed the assassinations of the 1960s.” Citin...

The advocacy group Protect Democracy last month issued an updated version of its report entitled, “The Authoritarian Playbook.” The new report is called, “The Authoritarian Playbook for 2025: How an authoritarian president will dismantle our democracy and what we can do to protect it.” It is a fascinating compilation of things that Donald Trump has promised to do and how they could likely be...

The conflict in Gaza is headed toward a critical juncture. Israeli political leaders have signaled their intent to assault Rafah, one of the final safe havens for displaced Gazan civilians—a move that U.S. and other international leaders fear could trigger a humanitarian crisis, or the long-term displacement of Palestinians from Gaza. Meanwhile, negotiations for both a ceasefire and a longer term...

From December 10, 2016: This week at the Hoover Book Soiree, Jack Goldsmith interviewed Christopher Moran, a professor at the University of Warwick, on his book “ Company Confessions: Secrets, Memoirs, and the CIA .” Moran's work is a history of CIA memoirs, but it's also a history of the Agency itself and its efforts to shape its image in the public eye. How does an organization whose w...