The Lawfare Podcast: Patreon Edition

From January 29, 2012: Our subject in the podcast's inaugural episode is a remarkable article by journalist Shane Harris entitled "Out of the Loop: The Human-Free Future of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles." Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Many questions involving intelligence and Afghanistan have come up in the past few weeks. Did intelligence prepare policymakers for the rapid collapse of the Afghan forces and the Taliban’s taking of the capital? How unusual is it for a CIA director to visit a de facto war zone—in this case, Bill Burns to travel to Kabul to meet with Taliban leaders? What's the context for intelligence sharing wit...

This week on our Arbiters of Truth series on our online information ecosystem, we’re going to be talking about … disinformation! What else? It’s everywhere. It’s ruining society. It’s the subject of endless academic articles, news reports, opinion columns, and, well, podcasts.  Welcome to what BuzzFeed News reporter Joe Bernstein has termed “Big Disinformation.” In a provocative essay in the...

A privacy and national security threat that goes under-discussed is data brokers, the secretive industry of companies buying, aggregating, selling, licensing and otherwise sharing consumer data. Justin Sherman is a fellow at Duke University's Technology Policy Lab, where he directs the project on data brokers. He also recently wrote a piece for Lawfare about data brokers advertising data on U.S. m...

Jack Goldsmith sat down with national security reporter Spencer Ackerman, the author of the new book, “ Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump .” The two discussed the book and the consequences of twenty years of the War on Terror. With the recent developments in Afghanistan, the conversation touches on the complicated history of the United States and the Middle...

Since January, talk about reforming the nearly 20-year-old 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, or AUMF, that provides the legal basis for most overseas U.S. counterterrorism activities, has once again been on the rise. While past efforts have generally failed to yield results, the combination of growing bi-partisan disenchantment with the status quo and a seemingly supportive Biden admin...

From October 7, 2017: Last month, Lawfare and Foreign Policy hosted an event on lawyering for the Trump presidency. Susan Hennessey spoke with former White House Counsels Bob Bauer, who served in the Obama administration from 2010 to 2011, and A.B. Culvahouse, who served in the Reagan administration from 1987 to 1989, in a lively discussion on providing legal support when your client is the presid...

From April 16, 2019: Since November, Lawfare Contributor Michelle Melton has run a  series  on our website about Climate Change and National Security, examining the implication of the threat as well as U.S. and international responses to climate change. Melton is a student a Harvard Law school. Prior to that she was an associate fellow in the Energy and National Security Program at the C...

Much of the world has been watching the rapidly developing situation in Afghanistan with a mix of shock and anguish. Bryce Klehm spoke with five experts to get a sense of how the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan is being perceived around the world. You’ll hear from Madiha Afzal, the David M. Rubenstein Fellow in the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution, on Pakistan; Suzanne Maloney,...

When the Taliban seized power following the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan this month, major platforms like Facebook and Twitter faced a quandary. What should they do with accounts and content belonging to the fundamentalist insurgency that was suddenly running a country? Should they treat the Taliban as the Afghan government and let them post, or should they remove Taliban content under U.S. sa...

Jack Goldsmith sat down with John Arquilla, an analyst with the RAND Corporation and professor emeritus with the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School. He's the author of the new book, “ Bitskrieg: The New Challenge of Cyberwarfare .” The two discussed the challenges posed by cyber warfare, which John argues have been neither met nor mastered. He offers solutions for protecting against enemies that are o...

Bryce Klehm spoke with Geoffrey Cain, an investigative journalist and the author of the new book, “ The Perfect Police State: An Undercover Odyssey into China's Terrifying Surveillance Dystopia of the Future .” They had a wide-ranging discussion about the Chinese government's use of surveillance technology to suppress its Uyghur population, the history of Xinjiang since 9/11, the development of Ch...

All across the world, citizens of liberal democracies are justifying their rejection of democratic norms and traditions as a protest against a cast of elite villains. It comes in different flavors around the world, but the underlying trend seems to be the same. While most observers are focusing on the impact of globalization or the activities of these very elites, Tom Nichols is placing responsibi...

From March 7, 2020: We ask a lot of questions about foreign policy on this podcast. Why do certain countries make certain decisions? What are the interests of the players in question? What are the consequences and, of course, the legality of foreign policy choices. In a new book, Joseph Nye, professor emeritus and former dean of the Harvard Kennedy School, asks another question about foreign polic...

From February 2, 2016: Barak Mendelsohn comes on the Jihadology Podcast to discuss his new book, “The al-Qaeda Franchise: The Expansion of al-Qaeda and Its Consequences .”  Some of the topics covered include: How organizations expand Why AQ decided to branch out and the strategy behind that decision AQ’s choices on where to expand Case studies on AQ’s different branches Hosted on Acast....

The city of Kabul’s international airport has become the unlikely focal point of an unprecedented humanitarian effort as U.S. soldiers and diplomats seek to maintain control of their airport facility while facilitating the evacuation of thousands of Americans and foreign nationals, as well as at least some vulnerable Afghans. Meanwhile, on the outside, an improvised network of veterans, former dip...

In October 2020, Facebook sent a cease and desist letter to two New York University researchers collecting data on the ads Facebook hosts on its platform, arguing that the researchers were breaching the company’s terms of service. The researchers disagreed and kept up with their work. On August 3, after months of failed negotiations, Facebook shut off access to their accounts—an aggressive move th...

Earlier this month, Tucker Carlson, whose nightly news show on Fox has become the most popular show in U.S. cable news history, traveled to Budapest to record a special version of his show. The centerpiece of his visit was an interview with Hungary's authoritarian leader, Viktor Orbán. But far from criticizing Orbán or questioning him on Hungary's increasing move away from liberal democracy, Carls...

This past Sunday, Americans woke up to a new reality in the country of Afghanistan—the Afghan government that the United States and its allies have supported for the last two decades is gone. In its place is a resurgent Taliban, now firmly in control of nearly the entire country. Meanwhile, the U.S. presence has been reduced to Kabul’s international airport where soldiers and diplomats are working...

The United States government has been wrestling with what to do about a particular type of cyber threat—ransomware—that holds a victim's data and computer systems hostage until they pay, usually in the form of cryptocurrency, to an anonymous recipient. Recent ransomware attacks have threatened everything from hospitals to the media industry, with payment being the main way that most companies are...

From August 4, 2018: Technologies that distort representations of reality, like audio, photo, and video editing software, are nothing new, but what happens when these technologies are paired with artificial intelligence to produce hyper-realistic media of things that never happened? This new phenomenon, called "deep fakes," poses significant problems for lawyers, policymakers, and technologists. O...

From April 19, 2014: Benjamin Wittes had meant to have a book review of former CIA lawyer John Rizzo's new book,  Company Man: Thirty Years of Controversy and Crisis in the CIA , ready to run along with this episode of the podcast. But he was still working on the review, which will be up shortly, and he didn't want to hold up the podcast while he finished it. Ben caught up with Rizzo at...

Two of the biggest controversies in tech are how to stop the spread of child pornography and other exploitation material, and whether encryption prevents legitimate law enforcement investigations. In an announcement last week, Apple dropped a bomb into both of these debates. Apple announced that future versions of its iPhone operating system would scan photos its users post to the cloud and automa...

We live in the Disinformation Age. The internet has revolutionized our information ecosystem and caused disruption totally unprecedented in human history, and democracy may not survive. ... Just like it didn’t survive the television, radio, telegram and printing press before it. Right? When it comes to talking about the internet, all too often history is either completely ignored with bold claims...

You've probably heard about the craziness around the Biden administration’s new eviction moratorium. They consulted outside law professors instead of the Justice Department. Or did they? The president said he didn't have the authority to do it, and then he did it anyway. Lawfare has published two big articles on the subject in the last couple of days— one of them by Lawfare senior editor Alan Roze...