The Lawfare Podcast: Patreon Edition

The business of offensive cyber operations and intelligence gathering increasingly requires the military and intelligence community to exploit networks, hardware, and software owned or produced by American companies and used by American citizens. Sometimes this exploitation occurs with the use of zero-day vulnerabilities. In order to determine when zero-day vulnerabilities should be exploited vers...

This week on Chatter , Shane Harris talks with journalist Jamie Kirchick about his new book  Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington . Kirchick’s story unfolds over several decades and reveals the secret history of gays and lesbians in the capital, as well as the history of secrecy in which they played pivotal roles.  The book is a set of personal stories as well as an explorat...

From October 29, 2020: On this episode of  Lawfare 's Arbiters of Truth series on disinformation, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Casey Newton, veteran Silicon Valley editor for The Verge who recently went independent to start a newsletter on Substack called Platformer. Few people have followed the stories of platforms and content moderation in recent years as closely and carefully...

In May, news came out that the U.S. government was thinking of putting the Chinese video surveillance company Hikvision on the Treasury Department’s Specially Designated Nationals list, otherwise known as the SDN list. The move would have huge impacts on Hikvision’s business prospects in the U.S. and around the world and would represent yet another escalation in the way that the U.S. government ha...

As transparency reporting about content moderation enforcement has become standard across the platform industry, there's been growing questions about the reliability and accuracy of the reports the platforms are producing. With all reporting being entirely voluntary and the content moderation industry in general being very opaque, it’s hard to know how much to trust the figures that companies repo...

Non-Fungible Tokens, or NFTs, have captured the attention of thousands over the past few weeks and months. This technology's use has encompassed various forms of digital art such as the popular depictions of cartoon apes. But, one country has begun looking beyond NFT’s use as a digital asset toward using it for the creation of a more centralized and restrictive internet ecosystem. Lawfare fellow i...

A few weeks ago, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released the latest FISA transparency data . It was notable in at least two major respects: the continued decline of traditional Title I FISA applications—that is, warrants for individual surveillance—and separately, the rather large number of U.S. persons who had been searched under so-called 702 surveillance.  To discuss t...

Chatter is a podcast hosted by David Priess and Shane Harris that features in-depth discussions with fascinating people at the creative edges of national security. In this episode of Chatter , Priess sits down with Meredith Henley to discuss the movie “Casablanca,” the city's wartime history, and the veracity of “Casablanca”’s representations about Casablanca. Their conversation covers her advocac...

Rational Security is a weekly roundtable podcast featuring Quinta Jurecic, Scott R. Anderson and Alan Z. Rozenshtein. It's a lively, irreverent discussion of news, ideas, foreign policy and law. And there’s always a laugh. This week, Quinta, Scott and Alan were joined by Shane Harris to talk about the week's biggest national security news, including the recent House public hearing on unidentified...

From November 19, 2016: At this week's Hoover Book Soiree, Benjamin Wittes sat down with Bill Banks, Professor of Law at Syracuse University and the Founding Director of the Institute for National Security and Counterterrorism, to talk about Bill's book, “ Soldiers on the Homefront: The Domestic Role of the American Military ,”   with Stephen Dycus .  The book examines how both law...

Bryce Klehm sat down with Phil Klay, the author of the new book, “ Uncertain Ground: Citizenship in an Age of Endless Invisible War .” Klay is a winner of the National Book Award for fiction and a veteran of the war in Iraq. His latest book is a collection of essays from the past ten years that deal with the consequences of America's endless wars. His essays cover a number of topics, ranging from...

On May 14, a shooter attacked a supermarket in a historically Black neighborhood of Buffalo, New York, killing ten people and wounding three. The streaming platform Twitch quickly disabled the livestream the shooter had published of the attack—but video of the violence, and copies of the white supremacist manifesto released by the attacker online, continue to circulate on the internet.  How s...

Finland and Sweden have made the historic choice to apply to NATO, but there's a lot of misunderstanding out there about the context for these decisions. To talk through it all, David Priess sat down with Emanuel Örtengren, the acting director of the Stockholm Free World Forum, a Swedish foreign and security policy think tank; Minna Ålander from the German Institute for International and Security...

For years, Russia has both officially and unofficially used cyber tools to ruthlessly advance its international agenda. For this reason, many expected Russia's recent invasion of Ukraine to also kick off a new and brutal era of international cyberwar. Instead, cyber measures have only played a small part in the overall conflict compared to more conventional capabilities, leading many to ask whethe...

The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, known by its initials as SIGAR, released an interim report last week on the reasons for the collapse of the Afghan army. To break down the report’s findings, Bryce Klehm spoke with Dr. Jonathan Schroden, the research program director at the Center for Naval Analysis. Dr. Schroden is a longtime analyst of the Afghan military and has depl...

Rational Security is Lawfare ’s weekly roundtable podcast, featuring Quinta Jurecic, Scott R. Anderson and Alan Z. Rozenshtein. It's a lively and irreverent discussion of news, ideas, foreign policy and law—and there’s always a laugh. In this episode, Jurecic, Rozenshtein and Anderson were joined by Lawfare associate editor Bryce Klehm to hash through some of the week's big national security news,...

From September 21, 2020: Elizabeth Neumann served as the assistant secretary for threat prevention and security policy at the Department of Homeland Security. She has recently been speaking out about President Trump and, among other things, his failure of leadership with respect to the threat of white supremacist violence. In the course of doing so, she made reference to a book by Kathleen Belew,...

Congress this week held its first public hearing on unidentified flying objects in more than 50 years, as the House Intelligence Committee’s Subcommittee on Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence and Counterproliferation hosted two Department of Defense officials to discuss military encounters with unexplained objects. David Priess sat down with the Washington Post’s Shane Harris—who has been watch...

On May 12, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit allowed an aggressive new Texas law regulating social media to go into effect. The law, known as HB20, seeks to restrict large social media platforms from taking down content on the basis of viewpoint—effectively restricting companies from engaging in a great deal of the content moderation that they currently perform. It also imposes...

In October 2021, the House of Representatives voted to find Trump associate Steve Bannon in contempt of Congress after Bannon refused to comply with a subpoena from the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection. In November 2021, the Justice Department indicted Bannon, and the trial is currently scheduled to begin this summer. So what’s been happening in the interim? To catch up...

Bryce Klehm is an associate editor at Lawfare . Max Johnston is a creative producer at Goat Rodeo. Together, they are the creators of Lawfare and Goat Rodeo’s newest podcast series, Allies , which launched on Monday and covers the history of the Special Immigrant Visa Program in Afghanistan. It's an amazing story. It covers a lot of time, a lot of action and a lot of people, all through the lens o...

During the past couple of months, since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, there have been several claims that Russia was invading its neighbor to seize its oil and gas resources. And even in the cases where pundits were claiming that Russia was not doing this, they would often phrase it as, “This is not yet another oil war.” But do oil wars happen at all?  David Priess sat down with the woman...

For today's episode, the team at Lawfare decided to cross-post the latest episode of The Aftermath , a narrative podcast series from Lawfare and Goat Rodeo on picking up the pieces after the Jan. 6 insurrection. Episode 3 of The Aftermath looks at what Congress was doing in the days immediately after Jan. 6. In the episode, you'll hear from experts and from people who were actually on both sides o...

From April 16, 2021: On Wednesday, President Biden announced a full withdrawal of all U.S. military personnel from Afghanistan by September 11, 2021, an announcement that comes as the U.S. and Afghan governments have been trying to reach a power sharing agreement with the Taliban. Prior to the withdrawal announcement, Bryce Klehm spoke with Thomas Gibbons-Neff, a New York Times correspondent based...

David Fahrenthold is a reporter who works for the New York Times. In his capacity as a reporter at the Washington Post, he reported on misdeeds within the Trump financial universe, and now he’s come out with a story in the Times about a peculiar financial scandal at the United Nations. It’s about a little known UN agency trusting tens of millions of dollars to a relatively unknown British business...