The Lawfare Podcast: Patreon Edition

TikTok has rapidly become one of the most popular apps for teenagers across the world for dancing, lip-syncing and sharing details about their lives. But if you cast your mind back to last year—specifically, August 2020—you may recall that the app’s future in the United States suddenly fell into doubt. The Trump administration began arguing that the app’s ownership by the Chinese company ByteDance...

World leaders convene in Cornwall and Brussels as President Biden makes his first official trip abroad. Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin have a face-to-face meeting in Geneva. And leak investigations aplenty have ensnared journalists, former officials and members of Congress. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The United States is quickly approaching its September deadline for a full military withdrawal from Afghanistan. As the U.S. completes its withdrawal, many Afghans who partnered with the U.S., serving as translators and interpreters, face the danger of severe retribution from the Taliban. Those who partner with the U.S. military can obtain a special immigrant visa, or SIV, through the U.S. State D...

A spree of stories has emerged over the last week or so that the Justice Department under the prior administration obtained phone and email records of several journalists, several members of Congress and staffers, and even family members. It has provoked a mini scandal, calls for investigation, howls of rage and serious questions. To discuss it all, Benjamin Wittes sat down with Gabe Rottman of th...

Public discourse is in bad shape these days. We all yell at and cancel each other on social media and college campuses, and politicians—especially those on the Trumpist right—lie so much that the very notion of truth threatens to lose any meaning. But, Jonathan Rauch is optimistic that this can change for the better. Jonathan is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the author of, most...

Daniel Richman and Sarah Seo are professors at Columbia Law School, and they are co-authors of a recent article on Lawfare entitled, " Toward a New Era for Federal and State Oversight of Local Police ." Benjamin Wittes sat down with them to discuss the article, the history of the federal-state relationship in law enforcement, how the feds came to play an oversight role with respect to police depar...

Bibi Netanyahu may be out of a job. Alleged drug lords and contract killers thought they were using a secure messaging app but WOOPS, they were talking to the cops. And there’s no evidence it's aliens, but the USG doesn’t know WTF is flying around in our airspace. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

For years, Congress and the Defense Department have debated how best to handle the pernicious problem of sexual assault in the military. Now, a bipartisan majority in the Senate appears to have settled on a set of reforms that would make unprecedented changes to the military justice system. But do these changes actually get at the root cause of the military sexual assault problem? Or do they simpl...

It's been more than a year since the first contact tracing and exposure notification apps for the novel coronavirus have appeared, and the apps have not at all lived up to the hype. In fact, they've almost invariably stumbled or not really worked at all. Jacob Schulz sat down with Alan Rozenshtein, associate professor of law at the University of Minnesota School of Law and a senior editor at Lawfa...

Bryce Klehm sat down with Ryan Hass, a senior fellow and the Michael H. Armacost Chair in the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution. Ryan is the author of the new book , "Stronger: Adapting America’s China Strategy in an Age of Competitive Interdependence." The book is informed by Hass's experience as a foreign service officer in China and by his time in the Obama administration, whe...

Tensions between major social media platforms and the Indian government have reached a new high. In recent months, India has demanded that Twitter remove a range of content critical of the government and has even sent police to Twitter’s offices in New Delhi in what Twitter has called “intimidation tactics”. The government recently instituted new rules that exert strong control over how companies...

Violence escalates in Afghanistan as U.S. troops withdraw. President Biden directs intelligence agencies to look for more evidence that a lab leak may have started the covid pandemic. And a ransomware attack targets the world’s largest beef processor. Plus, special guest Madiha Afzal of the Brookings Institution joins the gang. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.