The Lawfare Podcast: Patreon Edition

Lawfare senior editor Roger Parloff has a piece out on Lawfare , entitled “ The Conspirators: The Proud Boys and Oath Keepers on Jan. 6 .” It is an examination of the major conspiracy indictments flowing from the January 6 investigation. Both sets of indictments focus on far right militia organizations that participated in the attack—one set on the group called the Oath Keepers; the other on a gro...

One year ago, a violent mob broke into the U.S. Capitol during the certification of the electoral vote, aiming to overturn Joe Biden’s victory and keep Donald Trump in power as the president of the United States. The internet played a central role in the insurrection: Trump used Twitter to broadcast his falsehoods about the integrity of the election and gin up excitement over January 6, and rioter...

Two years ago this week, the head of the Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, Qassem Soleimani, was killed in an American strike. At the time, we convened a group of Brookings and Lawfare experts to talk about the potential benefits and risks of the strike, and two years later, we got the gang back together. Benjamin Wittes sat down with Suzanne Maloney, the head of Foreign Policy progra...

Government secrecy is pervasive when it comes to national security and foreign affairs, and it’s becoming more and more common for state and even local governments to invoke government secrecy rationales that in the past, only the president of the United States and the national intelligence community were able to claim. While some of the secrecy is no doubt necessary to ensure that police investig...

As is our annual tradition, we're bringing you the Lawfare “Ask Us Anything” episode. You, the listeners, sent over your questions, and we, the Lawfare staff and Lawfare contributors, have got answers. Julian Ku, Alan Rozenshtein, Benjamin Wittes, Natalie Orpett, Scott R. Anderson and David Priess tackle questions about the South China Sea, Jan. 6, and an interesting collection of questions about...

From February 11, 2020: Afshon Ostovar is the associate chair for research and an assistant professor of national security affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School. He is also the author of " Vanguard of the Imam: Religion, Politics, and Iran's Revolutionary Guards ." The IRGC has been in the news of late because of the killing of the head of the Quds Force of the Revolutionary Guard Corps, Qassem...

From April 22, 2017: Over the past year,  Lawfare  has expended a great deal of ink on the problem of  sextortion , a form of online sexual assault in which perpetrators obtain explicit images or video of their victims and use those images to extort further explicit content. We even brought Mona Sedky, a Justice Department prosecutor who focuses on sextortion cases,  onto the p...

From March 3, 2012: Missy Cummings , Director of the Humans and Automation Laboratory and a professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT, sat down with Ritika Singh for the fifth episode of the  Lawfare Podcast to talk about robots on our battlefields. Cummings is a bit of a force of nature. In addition to designing unmanned weapons systems, she was one of the Navy's first femal...

The Lawfare Podcast isn't Lawfare ’s only podcast offering. Each week, Scott R. Anderson, Quinta Jurecic, Alan Rozenshtein and a special guest sit down on the podcast Rational Security to have a more casual and freewheeling conversation about national security stories in the news. Today, we thought we'd share one of our favorite Rational Security episodes from the past year, originally released on...

We're giving you something a bit different for today's Lawfare Podcast . It's an episode of Lawfare ’s new podcast, Chatter , in which Shane Harris or David Priess, or occasionally both of them, have extended, one-on-one conversations with fascinating people working at the creative edges of national security. In this episode, Shane talks with Noah Shachtman, the editor-in-chief of Rolling Stone, w...

Despite being isolated from much of the rest of the international community, North Korea has emerged as an unexpected powerhouse in the realm of cybercrime, with affiliated hackers pulling off some of the most daring heists in cyberattacks of the past decade. Scott R. Anderson sat down with journalists Jean Lee and Geoff White, who have put together a podcast series entitled “ The Lazarus Heist ”...

This past weekend marked the 30th anniversary of the collapse of the Soviet Union. To discuss the collapse and its implications, Bryce Klehm sat down with Vladislav Zubok, professor of international history at the London School of Economics and author of the new book, “ Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union .” They covered a range of topics, including Mikhail Gorbachev’s economic and political re...

From October 17, 2015: Last week, the  Center for Strategic and International Studies  hosted Ben, along with Laura Donohue of Georgetown Law School, former NSA Director Michael Hayden, and Robin Simcox of the Henry Jackson Society, to discuss the future of surveillance reform in a post-Snowden world. What have we learned about NSA surveillance activities and its oversight mechanisms sin...

From July 28, 2019: In the 1950s and 1960s, the Central Intelligence Agency had a major problem. The streets of Moscow were a virtually impossible operating environment due to heavy KGB surveillance and other operational difficulties. Through a series of trial and error, and a whole lot of ingenuity, along came the "Moscow rules," a series of technical advancements in the area of disguise and comm...

From August 23, 2014: News broke yesterday that the Russian military has moved artillery units inside of Ukraine and that Russian troops are actively using them against Ukranian forces---a move with dramatic escalatory potential. At the same time, Ukraine appears to be closing in on the last Russian-backed rebel strongholds. As the crisis unfolds and the United States seeks to isola...

 In 2018, a group of academics and free expression advocates convened in Santa Clara, California, for a workshop. They emerged with the Santa Clara Principles on Transparency and Accountability in Content Moderation —a high level list of procedural steps that social media companies should take when making decisions about the content on their services. The principles quickly became influential...

President Biden recently authorized the release of almost 1,500 documents related to the JFK assassination. But ten times that number still have had their release deferred. What might be in them? What's holding them back from release? And how did we get here?  David Priess spoke with journalist and bestselling author Gerald Posner, who wrote the Pulitzer finalist “ Case Closed: Lee Harvey Osw...

Merrick Garland has been getting a lot of criticism these days, and a lot of it is less than entirely fair, or at least it's premature. But Andrew Kent, Quinta Jurecic and Benjamin Wittes argue in a Lawfare piece published today that there is at least one matter on which Garland's decision-making is ripe for criticism: He is not speaking enough. Garland has modeled himself after Attorney General E...

In 2006, al-Qaeda-trained operatives planned and nearly executed an operation to destroy passenger aircraft over the Atlantic Ocean. Because it was discovered and stopped, it did not accomplish its purpose: killing thousands of people in the air and possibly hundreds or thousands on the ground. Aki Peritz is a former CIA intelligence officer and current adjunct professor at American University who...

From May 21, 2016: Four years ago, Anwar al Awlaki—an American citizen—was killed in an American drone strike in Yemen, marking the first targeted killing of a U.S. citizen by the U.S. government. While the attack occurred almost four years ago, the legality, morality and prudential nature of the strike, and others like it that occur nearly daily in a scattershot of countries around the world, rem...

From September 18, 2018: Security technologist Bruce Schneier's latest book, " Click Here to Kill Everybody: Security and Survival in a Hyper-connected World ," argues that it won't be long before everything modern society relies on will be computerized and on the internet. This drastic expansion of the so-called 'internet of things,' Schneier contends, vastly increases the risk of cyberattack. To...

On November 2, the Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai publicly accused on social media a former vice-premier of China of sexual assault. Chinese authorities responded by taking down her posts and engaging in a mass campaign of censorship on Chinese social media. Later on, Peng disappeared from public view, prompting many tennis stars, athletes and others to demand answers about where she was. It's a l...

On this show, we’ve discussed no end of proposals for how to regulate online platforms. But there’s something many of those proposals are missing: data about how the platforms actually work. Now, there’s legislation in Congress that aims to change that. The Platform Accountability and Transparency Act , sponsored by Senators Chris Coons, Rob Portman and Amy Klobuchar, would create a process throug...

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals last week issued a surprisingly under-discussed opinion in the case of Trump v. Thompson , which involves the production of the executive branch and White House records to the January 6 committee. The opinion of a three-judge panel is a decisive rejection of Trump's assertions of executive privilege after leaving office. It also has potential implications for the...

Syria’s decade-long civil war has left the state and economy shells of their former selves. But a new industry is stepping in to fill the void: the manufacture and export of illicit drugs, specifically Captagon, a type of amphetamine that has a growing global market. To better understand Syria’s emerging role in the global Captagon trade, Scott R. Anderson sat down with Caroline Rose of the Newlin...