The Lawfare Podcast: Patreon Edition

Over the past few years, TikTok has become a uniquely polarizing social media platform. On the one hand, millions of users, especially those in their teens and twenties, love the app. On the other hand, the government is concerned that TikTok's vulnerability to pressure from the Chinese Communist Party makes it a serious national security threat. There's even talk of banning the app altogether. Bu...

A few weeks ago, China made headlines for brokering a deal between Iran and Saudi Arabia to thaw diplomatic relations after seven years of cutting ties and even more years of tense relations. Since then, we've already begun to see some downstream effects of this deal with significant movement on the war in Yemen and the reopening of Iran's embassy in Saudi Arabia. This is a story with two major st...

Thomas Rid is a Professor of Strategic Studies at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. Aric Toler is the Director of Research and Training at Bellingcat. Both have been writing about the latest megaleak out of the U.S. national security establishment, a story that the New York Times reported on last week and that gets weirder and weirder every day that passes. Rid has...

Document leaking has been in the news lately—and not just stories about the leaking of U . S. intelligence documents. On March 30, 2023, the Washington Post published a  series  of  stories  about the  Vulkan files , an international investigative project based on thousands of pages of leaked documents from a Russian company that reveal new details about how Russian intell...

On March 23, 2023, an Indian court found Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s principal opposition leader, Rahul Gandhi, guilty of defaming the Prime Minister and the Modi surname. He was sentenced to two years in prison and expelled from Parliament in what journalists and pro-democracy groups view as yet another inflection point of democratic decline under Modi’s leadership.  To understand the cha...

This week on Rational Security , Quinta and Scott were joined by Lawfare Managing Editor Tyler McBrien to celebrate the return of the complete media madhouse and talk through the week’s big stories, including: I’m So Indicted and I Just Can’t Fight It.” Donald Trump became the first former president to be indicted this past week—and he celebrated with a speech from his Mar-a-Lago estate that paint...

From August 2, 2014: This week, Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes asked three of his colleagues—all from the Brookings Center on Middle East Policy—to chat about Gaza:  Natan Sachs  is a specialist in Israeli politics;  Khaled Elgindy  has served as an advisor to the Palestinian leadership on final status negotiations; and  Tamara Cofman Wittes  directs the...

Rob Joyce is the Director of the Cybersecurity Directorate at the National Security Agency. He's been NSA's top cryptologic representative in the United Kingdom and has also worked in the U.S. National Security Council.  David Kris,  Lawfare  contributor and former Assistant Attorney General for the National Security Division, and Bryan Cunningham,  Lawfare  contributor an...

Finland is in NATO. This week, the ratification was made complete, and the country joined the North Atlantic alliance. To talk through how it got there, Lawfare Publisher David Priess sat down with two research fellows at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs in Helsinki: Henri Vanhanen, who has also served as a foreign policy advisor to the National Coalition Party, which recently won th...

The grand jury indictment of Donald Trump in the Supreme Court of the State of New York has been unsealed. It involves Stormy Daniels, Karen McDougal, David Pecker, the famous doorman, Trump Tower, and a lot of salacious stuff—and 34 counts of falsified business records with intent to facilitate other crimes. On this emergency edition of the Lawfare Podcast , Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Witte...

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has tested the international legal order like never before. For many, the fact that a nuclear power and member of the U.N. Security Council would commit unveiled aggression against another state seemed like it might be the death knell of the international system as we know it.  But last week, in the annual Breyer Lecture on International Law at the Brookings Insti...

Hosted by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation Cyber Initiative and Aspen Digital, Verify 2023 brings together journalists and cyber and tech policy experts to discuss critical issues in cybersecurity. For this live recording of the  Lawfare Podcast , Benjamin Wittes sat down at Verify 2023 with Alex Stamos of the Stanford Internet Observatory; Nicole Perlroth, formerly of the New Yo...

Misperceptions about nuclear proliferation attempts abound, particularly when we find authoritarian leaders involved. It is easy to picture these determined owners of nuclear weapons as omnipotent, unconstrained micromanagers—willing and able to do whatever is necessary to take their country over the threshold. Political scientist Målfrid Braut-Hegghammer disagrees. She conducted extensive researc...

From January 8, 2019: The Russian government's recent arrest of American Paul Whelan and its charges against him have many politicians and pundits speculating about the possibility of an intended spy swap for Maria Butina. There's a lot going on here, but there's also a lot of misunderstanding about the history of spy swaps, what they are, and what they aren't. Earlier this week, David Priess sat...

On March 27, the Biden administration issued an  Executive Order on Prohibition on Use by the United States Government of Commercial Spyware that Poses Risks to National Security . The Executive Order, as the title says, limits executive departments and agencies from using commercial spyware if they determine that its use would present a counterintelligence or security risk to the U.S., or if...

For months, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been promising a set of legal reforms favored by partners in his far-right coalition government that many fear would spell the end of liberal democracy in the state of Israel. But this week, these efforts hit a roadblock in the form of an unprecedented degree of popular resistance—one that ultimately led Netanyahu to put his reform proposals on hol...

Tatyana Bolton is a Security Policy Manager working on cybersecurity at Google, and Dave Kleidermacher is the Vice President of Android Security & Privacy at Google. They are among the people at Google who are thinking about IoT, that is, Internet of Things security and privacy. They sat down with Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes to talk about Google's thinking on how to create a secure...

States are increasingly turning to artificial intelligence systems to enhance their national security decision-making. The real risks that states will deploy unlawful or unreliable national security AI make international regulations seem appealing, but what's the right model for them? Ashley Deeks is the Class of 1948 Professor of Scholarly Research in Law at the University of Virginia Law School....

On the latest episode of Arbiters of Truth , Lawfare 's series on the information ecosystem, Quinta Jurecic and Alan Rozenshtein spoke with Ravi Iyer, the Managing Director of the  Psychology of Technology Institute  at the University of Southern California's Neely Center. Earlier in his career, Ravi held a number of positions at Meta, where he worked to make Facebook's al...

This week on Rational Security , Alan, Quinta, and Scott waited for a big shoe to drop by talking over the week's big national security news, including: “What Else Can I Get Away With on Fifth Avenue...” Donald Trump is expected to become the first former president to be indicted on criminal charges this week—if, that is, local authorities are not deterred by the public protests Trump’s supporters...

From April 28, 2021: The Biden administration has now responded to two major cyberattacks—one from Russia, the SolarWinds attack, and the other from China, the so-called Hafnium Microsoft Exchange Server attack. Recently,  Lawfare  has run articles on both of these incidents—a  piece from Dmitri Alperovitch , the co-founder and former CTO of CrowdStrike, and a  piece from Alex...

Last month, the Government Accountability Office released its latest report on the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, focusing on the failures of several government agencies to fully process and share information about a potential attack in the days and weeks leading up to January 6, 2021. Lawfare Senior Editor and Brookings Senior Fellow Molly Reynolds sat down with NBC News Justice Reporter Ryan...

The open nature of the internet has allowed malicious actors to abuse technology. Information operations, offensive cyber, and IP theft are just some examples of this misuse. The Biden administration has pursued an industrial policy that hopes to counter the weaponization of globalized systems. This approach includes technology subsidies, export controls, and rethinking supply chains. But this app...

On December 31, 2023, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) will expire unless it is reauthorized by Congress. Section 702 authorizes the U.S. government, in order to obtain foreign intelligence information, to target foreigners who are reasonably believed to be outside of the U.S. and collect their communications inside the U.S. without a warrant—even when such surveilla...

By many accounts, the United States is living through a new era of competition—not just between major powers and strategic rivals, but between ideologies. Around the world, many authoritarian governments seem to be on the rise, even as many liberal democracies are facing a crisis of confidence, including, by some accounts, here in the United States. In a new book entitled, “ Defeating the Dic...