The Lawfare Podcast

Lawfare Archive: Ambassador David O'Sullivan on the US-EU Relationship

02 Oct 2021

Contributed by Lukas

From October 9, 2018: It's easy to spend all our time focusing on American domestic politics these days, but the rest of the world is not going away. ...

Hostage Diplomacy Between China, Canada and the United States

01 Oct 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer of Huawei, is free, having been put on a flight from Canada back to her native China. Moments later, two Can...

Defamation Down Under

30 Sep 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Just two days ago, on September 28, CNN announced that it was turning off access to its Facebook pages in Australia. Why would the network cut of...

Ronen Bergman on the A.I.-Assisted, Remote-Control Killing Machine

29 Sep 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Ronan Bergman is a reporter for the New York Times and the author of the book, “Rise and Kill First,” a history of Israeli targeted killings. Most...

An Election in Germany

28 Sep 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Over the weekend, Germany held elections to see who will succeed Angela Merkel as Germany's chancellor. The results are in, but there's still a lot of...

Benjamin Haddad on Submarine Contracts and French Anger

27 Sep 2021

Contributed by Lukas

France is mad. More specifically, France is mad about Australia reneging on a deal for French submarines and opting to go instead with an American con...

Lawfare Archive: Gayle Tzemach Lemmon on ‘Ashley's War’ and the Role of Women on the Special Ops Battlefield

26 Sep 2021

Contributed by Lukas

From January 23, 2016: The fourth Hoover Book Soiree, held this week in Hoover's beautiful Washington, D.C. offices, featured Gayle Tzemach Lemmo...

Lawfare Archive: Shivshankar Menon on India's Role in the World

25 Sep 2021

Contributed by Lukas

From October 11, 2014: On his recent trip to the United States, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi emphasized India's desire to take up a greate...

The Quad Summit with Lavina Lee, Tanvi Madan and Sheila Smith

24 Sep 2021

Contributed by Lukas

The Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, more commonly known as the Quad, brings together the United States, Australia, Japan and India in strategic dialo...

Inside the Facebook Files

23 Sep 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Today, we’re bringing you another episode of Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem. We’ll be talking about “The Face...

What's Up at Congress with Quinta Jurecic and Molly Reynolds

22 Sep 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Congress, which has been on recess for the month of August, has a lot on its plate. The January 6 committee is starting to receive information, and it...

Milley, Trump and Civil-Military Relations with Peter Feaver, Kori Schake and Alexander Vindman

21 Sep 2021

Contributed by Lukas

A new book by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa contains reporting about several controversial actions by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Mille...

Seth Stoughton on the Shooting of Ashli Babbitt

20 Sep 2021

Contributed by Lukas

On January 6, a mob of pro-Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol during the certification of the Electoral College vote. As lawmakers were being e...

Lawfare Archive: Defending an Unowned Internet

19 Sep 2021

Contributed by Lukas

A discussion at the Berkman Center: In the wake of the disclosures about government surveillance and the rise of corporate-run applications and protoc...

Lawfare Archive: Benjamin Wittes Gives a Talk at Parliament on Whether Drones are the New Guantanamo

18 Sep 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Lawfare's editor in chief, Benjamin Wittes, gives a talk at the Palace of Westminster--sponsored by the Henry Jackson Society--on whether drones are b...

A Sneak Peak: Lawfare’s New “No Bull” Podcast

17 Sep 2021

Contributed by Lukas

It’s Lawfare No Bull” with: “For today’s episode of the Lawfare Podcast, we are bringing you a preview of a new podcast Lawfare is launching: ...

The Broken Rube Goldberg Machine of Online Advertising

16 Sep 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Today, we’re bringing you another episode of Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem.In a 2018 Senate hearing, Facebook CE...

Bruce Reidel with Breaking 9/11 News

15 Sep 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Lawfare Editor-In-Chief Benjamin Wittes sits down with Bruce Reidel of the Brookings Institution to discuss a pair of new articles in Lawfare on his f...

U.S Security Commitments Post-Afghanistan Withdrawl

14 Sep 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/lawfare. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jack Goldsmith and Ben Wittes on Lawfare Origins and 9/11

13 Sep 2021

Contributed by Lukas

More than 11 years ago. Bobby Chesney, Jack Goldsmith and Ben started a national security law blog called Lawfare. Focused, almost exclusively on...

Lawfare Archive: How Osama bin Laden Escaped Afghanistan

12 Sep 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/lawfare. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lawfare Archive: Kent Roach on the 9/11 Effect

11 Sep 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Lawfare's Alan Rozenshtein interviews University of Toronto Professor Kent Roach about his new book, The 9/11 Effect: Comparative Counter-Terrorism.Su...

Marc Polymeropoulos on the CIA, 9/11 and Havana Syndrome

10 Sep 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Marc Polymeropoulos served for 26 years in the CIA. He joined the agency working on Afghanistan in the 1990s and moved on to operational roles across ...

Content Moderation Comes for Parler and Gettr

09 Sep 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Let’s say you’re a freedom-loving American fed up with Big Tech’s effort to censor your posts. Where can you take your business? One option is P...

‘Humane’ with Samuel Moyn

08 Sep 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Jack Goldsmith sat down with Samuel Moyn, Henry R. Luce Professor of Jurisprudence at Yale Law School and a professor of history at Yale University. T...

Tony Saich on 100 Years of the CCP

07 Sep 2021

Contributed by Lukas

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party. To get more insight into the workings of the CCP, Bryce Klehm sa...

Lawfare Archive: Danielle Citron on Feminism and National Security

06 Sep 2021

Contributed by Lukas

From December 12, 2019: Live from the #NatSecGirlSquad Conference in Washington, DC, on December 12, 2019, Benjamin Wittes sat down with Danielle Citr...

Lawfare Archive: Phil Carter on Civil-Military Relations in the Trump Administration

05 Sep 2021

Contributed by Lukas

From February 20, 2018: The military has been not been a refuge from the Trump administration's norm-defying nature. Jack Goldsmith speaks to Phil Car...

Lawfare Archive: Shane Harris on Drones

04 Sep 2021

Contributed by Lukas

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: Th...

Sue Gordon and John McLaughlin on Intelligence and the Afghanistan Withdrawal

03 Sep 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Many questions involving intelligence and Afghanistan have come up in the past few weeks. Did intelligence prepare policymakers for the rapid collapse...

The Disinformation Industrial Complex

02 Sep 2021

Contributed by Lukas

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...

Data Brokers and National Security

01 Sep 2021

Contributed by Lukas

A privacy and national security threat that goes under-discussed is data brokers, the secretive industry of companies buying, aggregating, selling, li...

‘Reign of Terror’ with Spencer Ackerman

31 Aug 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Jack Goldsmith sat down with national security reporter Spencer Ackerman, the author of the new book, “Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilize...

AUMF Reform After Afghanistan

30 Aug 2021

Contributed by Lukas

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 mo...

Lawfare Archive: Bob Bauer and A.B. Culvahouse on Defending the President

29 Aug 2021

Contributed by Lukas

From October 7, 2017: Last month, Lawfare and Foreign Policy hosted an event on lawyering for the Trump presidency. Susan Hennessey spoke with former ...

Lawfare Archive: Michelle Melton on Climate Change as a National Security Threat

28 Aug 2021

Contributed by Lukas

From April 16, 2019: Since November, Lawfare Contributor Michelle Melton has run a series on our website about Climate Change and National S...

The World Reacts to Afghanistan

27 Aug 2021

Contributed by Lukas

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 exper...

Why the Taliban Can’t Use Facebook

26 Aug 2021

Contributed by Lukas

When the Taliban seized power following the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan this month, major platforms like Facebook and Twitter faced a quandary. W...

‘Bitskrieg’ with John Arquilla

25 Aug 2021

Contributed by Lukas

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 ...

China’s Perfect Police State in Xinjiang

24 Aug 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Bryce Klehm spoke with Geoffrey Cain, an investigative journalist and the author of the new book, “The Perfect Police State: An Undercover Odyssey i...

Tom Nichols on ‘Our Own Worst Enemy’

23 Aug 2021

Contributed by Lukas

All across the world, citizens of liberal democracies are justifying their rejection of democratic norms and traditions as a protest against a cast of...

Lawfare Archive: Joseph Nye on "Do Morals Matter?: Presidents and Foreign Policy from FDR to Trump"

22 Aug 2021

Contributed by Lukas

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 inte...

Lawfare Archive: Jihadology Podcast: al-Qaeda's Franchising Strategy

21 Aug 2021

Contributed by Lukas

From February 2, 2016: Barak Mendelsohn comes on the Jihadology Podcast to discuss his new book, “The al-Qaeda Franchise: The Expansion of al-Q...

The State of the Kabul Airlift

20 Aug 2021

Contributed by Lukas

The city of Kabul’s international airport has become the unlikely focal point of an unprecedented humanitarian effort as U.S. soldiers and diplomats...

Facebook Shuts Down Research On Itself

19 Aug 2021

Contributed by Lukas

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 platf...

Zack Beauchamp on the American Right’s Embrace of the Hungarian Regime of Viktor Orbán

18 Aug 2021

Contributed by Lukas

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 t...

After the Fall in Afghanistan

17 Aug 2021

Contributed by Lukas

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 ...

How Can Congress Take on the Ransomware Problem?

16 Aug 2021

Contributed by Lukas

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 ...

Lawfare Archive: Fighting Deep Fakes

15 Aug 2021

Contributed by Lukas

From August 4, 2018: Technologies that distort representations of reality, like audio, photo and video editing software, are nothing new, but what hap...

Lawfare Archive: A Conversation with John Rizzo

14 Aug 2021

Contributed by Lukas

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 Con...

Mayank Varia and Riana Pfefferkorn on Apple's Decision to Scan for Child Exploitation Material

13 Aug 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Two of the biggest controversies in tech are how to stop the spread of child pornography and other exploitation material, and whether encryption preve...

With Disinformation, The Past Isn’t Past

12 Aug 2021

Contributed by Lukas

We live in the Disinformation Age. The internet has revolutionized our information ecosystem and caused disruption totally unprecedented in human hist...

A Moratorium Fiasco

11 Aug 2021

Contributed by Lukas

You've probably heard about the craziness around the Biden administration’s new eviction moratorium. They consulted outside law professors instead o...

Ben Kaiser and Jonathan Mayer on Fighting Misinformation Online

10 Aug 2021

Contributed by Lukas

The spread of misinformation is one of the biggest challenges facing social media platforms. A standard approach is to label suspicious posts or links...

The Olympics Aren't All Fun and Games

09 Aug 2021

Contributed by Lukas

The Olympics ended yesterday after more than two weeks of exciting international competition in Tokyo. On this episode of the podcast, we're taking a ...

Lawfare Archive: War Powers History You Never Knew with Matt Waxman

08 Aug 2021

Contributed by Lukas

From March 9, 2019: For the past year, Matthew Waxman has been writing a series of vignettes on Lawfare about interesting—and usually over...

Lawfare Archive: Antony Blinken on the Future of Central Asia

07 Aug 2021

Contributed by Lukas

From the April 18, 2015: Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Brookings for a public address on the current priorities and futur...

Unfinished Business at the Department of Justice

06 Aug 2021

Contributed by Lukas

It's been a busy few weeks at the Justice Department. There was a major indictment of the chair of the former president's inaugural committee. There h...

Facebook’s Thoughts on Its Oversight Board

05 Aug 2021

Contributed by Lukas

There have been a thousand hot takes about the Facebook Oversight Board, the Supreme Court-like thing Facebook set up to oversee its content moderatio...

Peter Bergen Reassessing Osama bin Laden

04 Aug 2021

Contributed by Lukas

The U.S. raid on the compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, that brought Osama bin Laden to ultimate justice also recovered nearly half a million files. In...

Alex Vindman on 'Here, Right Matters'

03 Aug 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman is the Pritzker Military Fellow at the Lawfare Institute, a former NSC staffer, and of course, an impeachment wit...

Sue Gordon and John McLaughlin on Intelligence, Biden and Trump

02 Aug 2021

Contributed by Lukas

The president's interactions with intelligence and public comments about intelligence are dramatically different in the first six months of the Biden ...

Lawfare Archive: Mark Rozell on 'Presidential Power, Secrecy and Accountability'

01 Aug 2021

Contributed by Lukas

From August 6, 2019: Over the years, presidents have used different language to describe the withholding of information from Congress. To discuss the ...

Lawfare Archive: Bryan Fogel on 'Icarus' and Russia

31 Jul 2021

Contributed by Lukas

From August 12, 2017: The new Netflix documentary Icarus may seem at first glance off the beaten path for Lawfare. It's a film about do...

Sarah Yerkes on Tunisia's Democracy in Crisis

30 Jul 2021

Contributed by Lukas

For the past decade, Tunisia's democracy has stood out as one of the few remaining bright spots of the Arab Spring. But earlier this week, it entered ...

The FBI, Social Media and Jan. 6

29 Jul 2021

Contributed by Lukas

The attempted insurrection on January 6 is back in the headlines. This week, the House select committee investigating the Capitol riot began its work ...

Quinta Jurecic and Molly Reynolds on the First Jan. 6 Hearings

28 Jul 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Yesterday saw the first hearing of the special House Select Committee to investigate the Jan. 6 riots and insurrection. Four law enforcement officers ...

Jonathan Schroden on the State of the Afghanistan Withdrawal

27 Jul 2021

Contributed by Lukas

The United States is just over a month out from completing its full military withdrawal from Afghanistan, but as U.S. troops have moved on, the situat...

Trump’s Final Year with Carol Leonnig and Phil Rucker

26 Jul 2021

Contributed by Lukas

There are some stunning revelations coming out of the new blockbuster book by Carol Leonnig and Phil Rucker, “I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump's ...

Lawfare Archive: Amanda Sloat on Boris Johnson and Brexit

25 Jul 2021

Contributed by Lukas

From August 10, 2019: The United Kingdom has a new Prime Minister. It also has a looming cliff it is careening toward and about to leap off of on Hall...

Lawfare Archive: John Carlin on 'Dawn of the Code War'

24 Jul 2021

Contributed by Lukas

From November 24, 2018: John Carlin served as assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s National Security Division from April 2014 to ...

A Guantanamo Update with Latif Nasser and Steve Vladeck

23 Jul 2021

Contributed by Lukas

It's been a busy couple of weeks at Guantanamo Bay, a place that has not had a busy couple of weeks in a while. There was a transfer, there was a resu...

Facebook v. the White House: Renee DiResta and Brendan Nyhan Weigh In

22 Jul 2021

Contributed by Lukas

This week we're bringing you the breakdown of the heavyweight bout of the century—a battle over vaccine misinformation. In the left corner we have t...

Yemen on the Brink of Hope with Elisabeth Kendall and Alexandra Stark

21 Jul 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Yemen remains a mess. Many years of warfare have left it politically fractured, economically shattered and with a true humanitarian crisis of multiple...

Dmitri Alperovitch and Matt Tait on the Latest in Cybersecurity

20 Jul 2021

Contributed by Lukas

It was quite a week in cybersecurity. The Israeli firm NSO Group was outed by a consortium of newspapers and media entities for its snooping software ...

Scott Anderson on Withdrawals, Then and Now

19 Jul 2021

Contributed by Lukas

U.S. troops are pulling out of Afghanistan, the withdrawal is almost done and U.S. forces turned over the Bagram Airfield to Afghan forces the other d...

Lawfare Archive: Afghan Parliamentarian and Female Presidential Candidate Fawzia Koofi on Afghan Security and the Condition of Women and Girls

18 Jul 2021

Contributed by Lukas

From February 16, 2013: Fawzia Koofi (website, Twitter) is an Afghan Member of Parliament and Vice President of the Afghan National Assembly...

Lawfare Archive: Eric Schwartz, Refugee Policy and the Syrian Civil War

17 Jul 2021

Contributed by Lukas

From April 9, 2016: This week on the podcast, we welcome Eric Schwartz, the Dean of the Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the Univer...

Africa and U.S. Foreign Policy Opportunities with Judd Devermont

16 Jul 2021

Contributed by Lukas

National security attention rarely focuses for long on Sub-Saharan Africa, and when it does, it's largely on the most populous countries like Nigeria,...

Florida Man Regulates Social Media

15 Jul 2021

Contributed by Lukas

On May 24, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed into law a bill designed to limit how social media platforms can moderate content. Technology companie...

When Red Lines Fade Away

14 Jul 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Jack Goldsmith is feeling a little bit grouchy. In a piece on Lawfare entitled, "Empty Threats and Warnings on Cyber," he blasts the Biden administrat...

Robert Fatton on the Assassination in Haiti and Its Aftermath

13 Jul 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Last week, the country of Haiti was rocked by the assassination of its controversial president, Jovenel Moïse, who was killed in a bizarre plot, the ...

Anne Neuberger on Cybersecurity Strategy

12 Jul 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Dmitri Alperovitch sat down with Anne Neuberger, Deputy National Security Advisor for Cyber and Emerging Technology, to discuss the Biden administrati...

Lawfare Archive: Harold Holzer on 'The Presidents vs. the Press'

11 Jul 2021

Contributed by Lukas

From August 25, 2020: Jack Goldsmith spoke with Harold Holzer, director of the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College, about his ne...

Lawfare Archive: Bruce Riedel on ‘Lessons from America’s Secret War in Afghanistan’

10 Jul 2021

Contributed by Lukas

From July 11, 2014: As the election crisis in Afghanistan comes to a head, all eyes are once again on the future of Afghan democracy. But, Americ...

Joshua Geltzer on the National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism

09 Jul 2021

Contributed by Lukas

For many Americans, the events of the past several years—from the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, to the January 6 assault ...

Can America Save the News?

08 Jul 2021

Contributed by Lukas

The news business in America is in crisis. Between 2008 and 2019, newspapers in the U.S. lost half of their newsroom employees. Journalism jobs cut du...

Carol Leonnig on the United States Secret Service and What to Do About It

07 Jul 2021

Contributed by Lukas

The United States Secret Service has many important missions, the most public of which is protecting the president of the United States. And in this m...

Matt Tait Ransom"wears" All the Things

06 Jul 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Probably best known as the Twitter handle @pwnallthethings, Matt Tait is the chief operating officer of Corellium. Previously, he was a hacker for GCH...

Lawfare Archive: Countering Chinese Espionage

05 Jul 2021

Contributed by Lukas

From December 14, 2019: Recently, former CIA officer Jerry Lee was sentenced to 19 years in prison for conspiring to share classified information with...

Lawfare Archive: Al-Shabaab Under the AUMF

04 Jul 2021

Contributed by Lukas

From December 3, 2016: Earlier this week, the New York Times published a story by Charlie Savage, Eric Schmitt, and Mark Mazzetti ...

Lawfare Archive: Michael Cohen vs. the Committee with No Bull

03 Jul 2021

Contributed by Lukas

From February 27, 2019: On Wednesday, February 27, 2019, Michael Cohen—the former executive vice president of the Trump Organization, former de...

The Trump Organization Indicted

02 Jul 2021

Contributed by Lukas

The Manhattan district attorney and the New York attorney general's office have issued an indictment against the Trump Organization and its chief fina...

Coordinating Inauthentic Behavior With Facebook’s Head of Security Policy

01 Jul 2021

Contributed by Lukas

This week on Arbiters of Truth, our podcast on our online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic bring you an episode they’ve wanted...

What to Make of U.S. Airstrikes in Iraq and Syria

30 Jun 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Early Monday morning, the U.S. carried out airstrikes in Iraq and Syria against two Iranian-backed militia groups. The strikes raise a whole host of d...

Adam Klein Looks Behind the FISA Curtain

29 Jun 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Adam Klein was, until the other day, the chairman of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, known colloquially as the PCLOB. In that capacit...

The FBI, Part Deux

28 Jun 2021

Contributed by Lukas

In this second half of David Kris's two-part discussion with FBI historian John Fox, David and John continue their whirlwind tour of the Bureau, focus...

Lawfare Archive: Russia's Nuclear Threats

27 Jun 2021

Contributed by Lukas

From the Lawfare Archive, July 18, 2015: While world powers and Iran were embroiled in last minute negotiations last week, Brookings hosted a panel di...

Lawfare Archive: Ben Hubbard on MBS

26 Jun 2021

Contributed by Lukas

From the Lawfare Archive, March 31, 2020: Saudi Arabia continues to be a mainstay of newspaper headlines, whether it be for its oil price war with Rus...

Alvin Cheung on Apple Daily

25 Jun 2021

Contributed by Lukas

The Apple Daily newspaper in Hong Kong has shut down under pressure from the Chinese and Hong Kong governments. It's the latest political repression i...