The Lawfare Podcast: Patreon Edition

Since March 2022, El Salvador has been under a state of exception as its President Nayib Bukele seeks to crack down on the country’s powerful gangs. Bukele, who once described himself on Twitter as the “world’s coolest dictator,” has engaged in a prolonged attack on El Salvador’s democratic institutions. And the crackdown has resulted in a range of human rights abuses. At the same time, Bukele rea...

The Constitution specifies only one process for making international agreements—Article II gives the president the power to make treaties provided that two-thirds of the senators present concur. The treaty process has been on a long, slow path to obsolescence, having been replaced by various forms of binding and non-binding executive agreements.  To assess the causes and impact of the United...

This week on Rational Security , a Quinta-less Alan and Scott were joined by  Lawfare  legal fellow Saraphin Dhanani to talk through the week's big national security news, including: “Seoul Authority.” South Korea and the United States recommitted themselves to their close security relationship this past week, including through a state dinner and a new Washington Declaration that confirm...

From July 7, 2020: David Priess is a former CIA briefer for the Attorney General and the FBI director, and he's the author of " The President's Book of Secrets: The Untold Story of Intelligence Briefings to America's Presidents ." The president's daily brief has been in the news of late because of the Russia bounties story and the question of whether President Trump is actually internalizing the i...

Yesterday was verdict day for the Proud Boys. Mid-morning, the jury notified Judge Tim Kelly that it had reached a partial verdict, and that partial verdict was “guilty of seditious conspiracy” for four of the five defendants.  It was a big day for the Justice Department. To go over everything that happened, Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down for a live recording of the podcast...

At the core of the regulatory state is the notice and comment process. Agencies propose what they're going to do, the public gets to comment, and agencies have to respond to those comments. It's an imperfect system, to be sure, but it's fundamental to making sure that agencies act with good information and with democratic legitimacy. So what happens when those comments start being made not by peop...

Risks associated with the rapid development and deployment of artificial intelligence are getting the attention of lawmakers. But one issue that may not be getting adequate attention by policymakers or by the AI research and cybersecurity communities is the vulnerability of many AI-based systems to adversarial attack. A new Stanford and Georgetown report, “ Adversarial Machine Learning and Cyberse...

Generative AI products have been tearing up the headlines recently. Among the many issues these products raise is whether or not their outputs are protected by Section 230, the foundational statute that shields websites from liability for third-party content. On this episode of Arbiters of Truth , Lawfare ’s occasional series on the information ecosystem, Lawfare Senior Editor Quinta Jurecic and M...

David Cohen is the Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, a position he held also during the Obama administration. He's also been Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence in the Department of the Treasury and a partner at the WilmerHale law firm. David Kris, Lawfare contributor and former Assistant Attorney General for the National Security Division, and Bryan Cunningh...

As satellites around the planet proliferate, the tug they feel from international tensions seems to rival the gravitational pull exerted by the Earth itself. On issues from Space Traffic Management to scientific data sharing, the need for global cooperation is high but rarely easy. Dr. Mariel Borowitz is head of the Program on International Affairs, Science, and Technology at Georgia Tech's Sam Nu...

From May 13, 2020: Scott R. Anderson sat down with Elizabeth Shackelford, a former foreign service officer whose late 2017 resignation became a sign of growing discontent with the Trump administration within the diplomatic corps. They talked about her new book, " The Dissent Channel ," out this week, which discusses her experience as a young diplomat living through a period of crisis in South Suda...

In 2018, news broke that Facebook had allowed third-party developers—including the controversial data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica—to obtain large quantities of user data in ways that users probably didn’t anticipate. The fallout led to a controversy over whether Cambridge Analytica had in some way swung the 2016 election for Trump (spoiler: it almost certainly didn’t), but it also generated...

The Proud Boys trial has gone to the jury. It is the longest Jan. 6 case to date and the third case to involve seditious conspiracy charges against senior Proud Boys and folks who ended up being the pointy end of the spear on Jan. 6, 2021. Two reporters have sat through the entire case: Lawfare Senior Editor Roger Parloff , and Brandi Buchman, who covered the case for the emptywheel site. Lawfare...

If someone lies about you, you can usually sue them for defamation. But what if that someone is ChatGPT? Already in Australia, the mayor of a town outside Melbourne has threatened to sue OpenAI because ChatGPT falsely named him a guilty party in a bribery scandal. Could that happen in America? Does our libel law allow that? What does it even mean for a large language model to act with "malice"? Do...

April is Sexual Assault Awareness and Prevention month. It’s a time—recognized by civilian and U.S. military communities—intended to promote the prevention of sexual violence, especially in U.S. armed forces. In light of Sexual Assault Awareness and Prevention month, Lawfare Associate Editor Katherine Pompilio sat down with author and attorney Ashley Merryman, who previously served at the Pentagon...

Evan Gershkovich has been in Russian detention for the last several weeks. He is a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, and he’s the latest American taken hostage by the Vladimir Putin regime. His good friend Polina Ivanova is a reporter for the Financial Times, a colleague of Evan’s in Russia, and has been an outspoken advocate for his release.  She joined Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin W...

This week on Rational Security , Alan, Quinta, and Scott were joined by law professor extraordinaire Jed Shugerman to talk over his controversial take on the New York district attorney's case against former President Trump, among other items in the week's national security news, including: “If You Come at the King, You Best Not Whiff.” Former President Trump’s indictment on 34 counts of...

From April 20, 2021: Jack Goldsmith sat down with Lee Bollinger, the president of Columbia University, and Geoffrey Stone, the Edward H. Levy Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago Law School, to discuss their new book, " National Security, Leaks and Freedom of the Press: The Pentagon Papers Fifty Years On ." They discussed the holding and legacy of the Pentagon Papers case,...

Over the past decade, North Korea has taken on an exceptional global role: a sovereign state believed to be at the head of an unprecedented international criminal network—one that is particularly active in cyberspace, where the North Korea-backed Lazarus Group is believed to have been responsible for several of the largest and most audacious incidents of hacking, ransomware, and outright theft of...

In the last few months we've seen an explosion of new AI products, especially those built around large language models. And in response, we've also heard calls for far more aggressive government regulation. But what does it mean to regulate AI? Margot Kaminski is an Associate Professor of Law at University of Colorado Law School. She's just published a paper for Laware 's ongoing Digital Soci...

Early this month, the Republican supermajority in the Tennessee House of Representatives voted to expel two Democratic lawmakers who had participated in a protest against gun violence on the House floor. The GOP also narrowly failed to expel a third Democrat.  The two legislators who were expelled, Reps. Justin Pearson and Justin Jones, have now returned to the House. But the incident turned...

Chris Fonzone is the General Counsel of ODNI and has worked in senior legal roles at the Defense Department, the National Security Council, and the Department of Justice, and in the private sector as a partner at the Sidley Austin law firm. Laura Galante is the Intelligence Community's Cyber Executive and Director of ODNI’s Cyber Threat Intelligence Integration Center (CTIIC). She worked previousl...

The Republic of Vanuatu, a small island nation in the South Pacific, just won a big victory in New York City. At the end of March, the UN General Assembly voted to adopt the request for an advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice on the obligations of states with respect to climate change. To talk through what Vanuatu's general counsel called, “a diplomatic feat of Herculean proporti...

Nancy Youssef has reported on war and conflict around the world and from Washington. As a young journalist, she went to Iraq and sensed early on that a war most presumed would be over quickly was only just beginning. Her career has taken her to Afghanistan, Egypt, and into the center of power at the Pentagon. Nancy is now a national security correspondent for The Wall Street Journal.  In...

From September 17, 2019: Tensions in the Middle East are at a high point. Over the weekend, large Saudi oil facilities were attacked. The Yemeni Houthis jumped in to claim responsibility. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo blamed Iran. President Trump tweets that the U.S. is 'locked and loaded' and ready for potential response. But what has actually happened in the Arabian Peninsula? What does the fut...