The Lawfare Podcast: Patreon Edition

Internet blackouts are on the rise. Since 2016, governments around the world have fully or partially shut down access to the internet almost 1000 times, according to a tally by the human rights organization Access Now. As the power of the internet grows, this tactic has only become more common as a means of political repression. Why is this and how, exactly, does a government go about turning off...

Dmytro Kuzubov is the editor-in-chief of Lyuk Media in Kharkiv, Ukraine. It is a publication that used to be devoted to the culture and people and underground life of the country's second largest city. Then came the war. Dmytro joined Benjamin Wittes from 10 kilometers outside of Kharkiv to talk about his work as a Ukrainian cultural journalist before the war, and about how everything has changed...

Modern life relies on digital technology, but with that reliance comes vulnerability. How can we trust our technology? How can we be sure that it does what we expect it to do? Earlier this month, Lawfare released the results of a long-term research project on those very questions. The report , prepared by the Lawfare Institute’s Trusted Hardware and Software Working Group, is titled, “Creating a F...

Many individuals seeking asylum or other forms of immigration relief in the U.S. are subject to a program run by Immigration Customs Enforcement, or ICE, called the Intensive Supervision Appearance Program, which uses various kinds of tracking technologies as a way of keeping tabs on individuals who are not detained in ICE custody Stephanie Pell sat down with Sejal Zota, legal director of Just Fut...

Today on Lawfare No Bull : On April 29, at the 2022 Verify Conference hosted by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Aspen Institute, journalist Aruna Viswanatha hosted a fireside chat with Matt Olsen, the Assistant Attorney General for the National Security Division at the Justice Department. They discussed the report published earlier that day from the Office of the Director of Natio...

From August 5, 2012: Ritika Singh sat down with  Bruce Riedel , one of the country’s leading experts on Al Qaeda. Riedel’s long and impressive career speaks for itself. A 30-year veteran of the CIA, a senior advisor on South Asia and the Middle East to the last four presidents of the United States in the staff of the National Security Council, and an expert advisor to the prosecution of under...

The COVID-19 pandemic, disputed elections and threats against election officials have brought back into focus a set of questions first raised for many after the terrorist attacks of September 11. What would happen if a large number of members of Congress were dead, incapacitated or otherwise unable to meet to do the work of the country? A new report from the American Enterprise Institute’s Continu...

While the U.S. Congress has been doing hearing after hearing with tech executives that include a lot of yelling and not much progress, Europe has been quietly working away on some major tech regulations. Last month, it reached agreement on the content moderation piece of this package: the Digital Services Act. It's sweeping in scope and likely to have effects far beyond Europe.  This week on...

Catarina Buchatskiy was—until a couple of months ago—a student at Stanford University. For the past couple of years, she has run The Shadows Project , an online forum devoted to the preservation of Ukrainian cultural heritage. A couple of months ago, she took a leave to go to Poland where she has been shuttling protective equipment into Ukraine to help museums preserve artifacts. She joined Benjam...

Hosted by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation Cyber Initiative and Aspen Digital, Verify 2022 brings together journalists and cyber and tech policy experts to discuss critical issues in cybersecurity. On this live recording of the Lawfare Podcast , Benjamin Wittes sat down at Verify 2022 to talk about cybersecurity and Ukraine with a truly remarkable panel: Kori Schake of the American Enterpr...

Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine is putting one of its closest partners, China, in a difficult position. Just weeks before the conflict began, China and Russia announced a new partnership without limits that was seen as a shared bulwark against pressure by the United States and its allies. But Russia's choice to attack its neighbor Ukraine is an awkward tension with China's long-standing posi...

This week on Rational Security, Alan Rozenshtein and Scott R. Anderson were joined by  Lawfare  executive editor Natalie Orpett and law professor extraordinaire Kate Klonick to hash through some of the week's big national security news, including:  “Time to Musk Up.” Prototypical eccentric billionaire Elon Musk has just  finalized a deal  to purchase Twitter, bring it priv...

From August 22, 2012: This is the second in a series of interviews Ritika Singh is doing with scholars around town who have non-legal expertise that bears on the national security law issues  Lawfare  readers care about. As she did in  her first piece with Brookings Senior Fellow Bruce Riedel , she is posting the full interview as an episode of the  Lawfare Podcast  and wr...

Last week, a federal district judge in Florida named Kathryn Mizelle struck down the Biden administration's policy requiring that individuals wear masks on airplanes and other forms of interstate travel. In doing so, she adopted an extremely narrow reading of relevant public health statutes to conclude that they did not authorize any such masking policies, a move that has since triggered more ques...

This week on Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek spoke to Charlotte Willner, who has been working in content moderation longer than just about anyone. Charlotte is now the executive director of the Trust and Safety Professionals Association , an organization that brings together the professionals that write and enforce the rules for what’s fair game and...

Finlandization is a troubled concept. It is generally used to describe the attempt by the Soviet Union during the Cold War to hold Finland in a position of neutrality and friendliness toward the Soviet Union, even while politically, Finland was more aligned with the West. In recent years—before the Russian invasion of Ukraine—it was sometimes brought up as a model for Ukraine to straddle the bound...

Vladislav Davidzon is a journalist and author. He is a New Yorker, a Parisian and an Odessa resident. He's the author of “ From Odessa with Love: Political and Literary Essays in Post-Soviet Ukraine ,” and he joined Benjamin Wittes from Odessa where he is covering the war. It's a wide-ranging conversation about the course of the war, the state of life in Odessa today and the current state of Ukrai...

Emily Hoge is a PhD candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, writing a dissertation on Russian veterans groups from the Afghan war and their evolution over time. She wrote a recent piece in Lawfare about how these groups, which started as anti-war, anti-state, pro-veterans activist organizations, morphed into a big part of Vladimir Putin's propaganda operations. She joined Benjamin Wit...

In this episode of Chatter , a podcast hosted by David Priess and Shane Harris that features in-depth discussions with fascinating people at the creative edges of national security, Harris and Priess speak jointly with former intelligence officer, prominent yacht-watcher and book author Alex Finley. They talk about her career in the CIA's Directorate of Operations (which became the National Clande...

From July 12, 2014: As the election crisis in Afghanistan comes to a head, all eyes—or some of them, anyway—are once again on the future of Afghan democracy. But the United States's history in the region extends back much further than its nation-building efforts there since September 2001. On Tuesday, at a Brookings Institution launch event for his newest book entitled,  “What We Won: Am...

In this live recording of the Lawfare Live event, “Ukraine and the Future of National Security Law,” Natalie Orpett moderated a panel of experts, including Brian Finucane, senior adviser for the U.S. Program at the International Crisis Group; Chimene Keitner, professor of international law at UC Hastings; Todd Huntley, director of the National Security Law Program at Georgetown Law; and Scott R. A...

This week on Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with a reporter who has carved out a unique beat writing about not just technology but the creativity and peculiarities of the people who use it—Taylor Lorenz, a columnist at the Washington Post covering technology and online culture. Her recent writing includes reporting on “ algo...

Monday evening on the Tucker Carlson show, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene was complaining that she had to submit to sworn questioning in connection with the Jan. 6 insurrection. That will come on Friday in a case designed to disqualify her as an insurrectionist from future holding of office. It will take place before an administrative law judge in Georgia, her home state, and that makes thi...

Throughout human history, democracies have been the exception, not the rule, and that's been doubly true for ethnically, religiously or linguistically diverse societies. But these are precisely the societies that benefit the most from politically stable and inclusive institutions. So why is it so hard to get them to work? And what can we do to encourage them? Yascha Mounk teaches political science...

Scott R. Anderson is a senior editor at Lawfare , a fellow at the Brookings Institution and a senior fellow with the National Security Law Program at Columbia Law School. He’s also the author of a new Politico Magazine piece that raises an often overlooked vulnerability in the presidential election. A lot of attention after Jan. 6 and Nov. 2020 has rightly gone to the Electoral Count Act and other...