The Lawfare Podcast: Patreon Edition

It’s the first anniversary of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia. To talk about this first year and what comes next, Lawfare editor-in-chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Alina Polyakova, president of the Center for European Policy Analysis. In a kind of tour of what's been happening in the region over the past year, they discussed what’s been going on in Ukraine, in Russia, in Eastern E...

On Tuesday and Wednesday of this week, the Supreme Court heard oral argument in a pair of cases concerning to what extent online platforms can be held responsible for terrorist content on their services. Gonzalez v. Google focused on the scope of Section 230, which shields platforms from liability for third-party content. Twitter v. Taamneh, meanwhile, concerned whether platforms can be held liabl...

Special Counsel Jack Smith has issued a subpoena to former Vice President Mike Pence as part of the investigation into Trump’s role in instigating the Jan. 6 riot. But Pence has said he’ll fight the subpoena. And he’s pointed to the Speech or Debate Clause—a constitutional immunity that protects members of Congress—on the argument that he was acting as part of the legislative branch when he presid...

Chris Inglis has had an illustrious career in the defense of this country, serving as an Air Force general, deputy director of the National Security Agency, and most recently as the first National Cyber Director in the White House. Chris stepped down from his position last week, and he sat down for his first interview as a private citizen with David Kris, Lawfare contributor and former assistant a...

From April 30, 2021: When President Biden entered office, he inherited a bilateral relationship with Turkey that was strained to the limits by the growing independent streak in that country's foreign policy—and one that had been pushed in unfamiliar directions by his predecessor's direct and often unpredictable personal relationship with Turkey's longstanding president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. This...

Along with co-editors Peter Feaver, William Inboden, and Meghan O'Sullivan, former National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley is editor of the new “ Hand-Off: The Foreign Policy George W. Bush Passed to Barack Obama .” This unique and massive book contains 30 Transition Memos prepared in 2008–2009 under Hadley's direction by the outgoing George W. Bush administration’s National Security Council...

From April 6, 2021: Natan Sachs is a Brookings senior fellow and the head of the Brookings Center for Middle East Policy, part of the Brookings Foreign Policy program. Benjamin Wittes sat down with Natan to talk about the results of the Israeli election, which are still unclear amid a haze over the entire political system. They talked about what the dispute between the camps is about, the many dif...

On February 14, the Brookings Institution hosted an event on the upcoming Supreme Court oral arguments in Gonzalez v. Google and Twitter v. Taamneh —two cases that could potentially reshape the internet. The Court is set to hear arguments in both cases next week, on February 21 and 22. Depending on how the justices rule, Gonzalez could result in substantial changes to Section 230 of the Communicat...

Earlier this month, a Pakistani man named Majid Khan started his new life in Belize after spending nearly half his previous life in U.S. detention, first at a CIA black site where he was subjected to torture and other mistreatment, and then at Guantanamo Bay. Lawfare managing editor Tyler McBrien sat down with Karen J. Greenberg, director of the Center on National Security at Fordham University Sc...

The Jan. 6 committee’s final report on the insurrection is over 800 pages, including the footnotes. But there’s still new information coming out about the committee’s findings and its work. Last week, we brought you an interview with Dean Jackson , one of the staffers who worked on the Jan. 6 committee’s investigation into the role of social media in the insurrection. Today, we’re featuring a conv...

Last month's brutal murder of Tyre Nichols by Memphis police has once again sparked a national conversation about the causes of and remedies for persistent police misconduct and abuse. To explore this issue, Jack Goldsmith sat down with Joanna Schwartz, a law professor at UCLA School of Law, who is the author of a new book called, “ Shielded: How the Police Became Untouchable .” The book argues th...

Since it launched in November of last year, ChatGPT has been subject to widespread attention. Cyber criminals have been quick to try to find ways to abuse the AI tool for their own purposes, from improving their phishing emails and supporting money-making schemes, to writing malware. Could ChatGPT help lower entry barriers for less skilled cyber criminals to be?  To answer that question, Lawf...

This week on Rational Security , Alan, Quinta, and Scott were joined once again by host emeritus Benjamin Wittes to talk through the week's various freak-outs, including: “We Found the 100th Luftballon.” Last week, a Chinese spy balloon floated over the United States, triggering a national freak-out that led to the cancellation of a major high-level summit between U.S. and Chinese leaders. Was thi...

From June 2, 2018: The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) plays an essential role in advising the president on how to exercise his or her authority to block foreign investments that might let the U.S.'s adversaries acquire sensitive American technology or intellectual property. A bipartisan proposal in Congress aims to expand CFIUS’s powers. On Thursday, the Center for St...

International law has been under significant stress in the last decade as a result of global populism, the rise of China, the war in Ukraine, and the challenges of the pandemic, climate change, and cybersecurity threats, among many others. To discuss why international law seems to be failing in important respects and what to do about it, Jack Goldsmith sat down with Paul Stephan, the John C. Jeffr...

On January 26, the Department of Justice held a press conference to announce its months-long disruption campaign against the Hive ransomware group that has targeted more than 1,500 victims in over 80 countries around the world, including hospitals, school districts, financial firms, and critical infrastructure. In July 2022, the FBI penetrated Hive’s computer networks, captured its decryption keys...

The Jan. 6 Committee released its final report on December 22, 2022—the capstone of a year and half of investigative work. But while the report is 800 pages, there’s a lot that it doesn’t include. The Washington Post recently reported on the work done by investigators looking into the role of social media in enabling the insurrection—work that wasn’t incorporated into the final document. Lawfare s...

How does computer hacking work? When is it good, and when is it bad? And what does it have to teach us about law, politics, and inequality? These are some of the questions that Bruce Schneier, a well-known security expert and lecturer at Harvard's Kennedy School, answers in his new book, “ A Hacker's Mind: How the Powerful Bend Society's Rules and How to Bend Them Back .” Jack Goldsmith sat down w...

Last week, the United States and the Philippines reached an agreement to expand U.S. military operations in the Philippines to deter China's increasingly aggressive actions toward Taiwan and in the South China Sea. The news was sandwiched between Air Force General Mike Minihan predicting that U.S. confrontation with China may happen as early as 2025 and Secretary Antony Blinken postponing his trip...

A sunken Soviet submarine. A secret CIA plan to lift it from the bottom of the ocean with a giant claw. And reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes. It sounds like the makings of a Netflix series—and it should be. But the story of the  Glomar Explorer  is the stuff of fact, even if it has long been shrouded in secrecy.   In his new book, intelligence historian M. Todd Bennett pierc...

From June 3, 2020: Dr. Rashawn Ray is a David M. Rubenstein fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution. He's also an associate professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he directs the Lab for Applied Social Science Research (LASSR). He is a scholar of, among other things, police-civilian relations and has done a lot of work on police-involved killings...

Next month will mark the five-year anniversary of the CLOUD Act, a foundational piece of legislation on cross-border data transfers and criminal investigations. Before he was a University of Minnesota law professor and senior editor at Lawfare , Alan Rozenshtein worked in the Department of Justice where he was a member of the team that developed the CLOUD Act. In that capacity, he interacted...

Last December, a German court convicted a 97-year-old former Nazi camp secretary of complicity in the murder of more than 10,000 people in what the media called—once again—the last Nazi trial. After almost eight decades, the Holocaust is still being litigated, remembered, and all-too-often misremembered. Lawfare managing editor Tyler McBrien sat down with Linda Kinstler, author of the book, “ Come...

You've likely heard of ChatGPT, the chatbot from OpenAI. But you’ve likely never heard an interview with ChatGPT, much less an interview in which ChatGPT reflects on its own impact on the information ecosystem. Nor is it likely that you’ve ever heard ChatGPT promising to stop producing racist and misogynistic content.  But, on this episode of Arbiters of Truth , Lawfare ’s occasional series o...

It seems like everyone has classified documents stashed away these days. First, it was Donald Trump, with the Justice Department investigation into documents stored improperly at Mar-a-Lago. Then, it was Joe Biden, with news that documents bearing classification markings were found at Biden’s Wilmington home and at the Penn Biden Center. And now, former Vice President Mike Pence has also uncovered...