The Lawfare Podcast
Episodes
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...
Information Operations, Then and Now
24 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
This week on Arbiters of Truth, our podcast on our online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Camille François, the chi...
The FBI, Part 1
23 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
This is the latest installment in our ongoing series of historical inquiries with U.S. and Five Eyes intelligence agencies. Earlier episodes have feat...
China's Civilian Army with Peter Martin
22 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Bryce Klehm sat down with Peter Martin, a defense policy and intelligence reporter at Bloomberg. Peter is the author of the new book, "China's Civilia...
Stephen Wertheim and Sara Moller on the Past, Present and Future of NATO
21 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, was founded in 1949 and quickly became the main way that the United States guaranteed the security of We...
Lawfare Archive: Jessica Stern on Radovan Karadzic
20 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
From the Lawfare Archive, February 19, 2020: Jessica Stern, who served on the National Security Council during the Clinton administration, has a remar...
Lawfare Archive: Julia Ioffe and Ian Bremmer on the Trump-Putin Summit
19 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
From the Lawfare Archive, July 17, 2018: U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin met in Helsinki for their first one-on-one s...
Putin and Biden Meet in Geneva
18 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
President Biden met with President Putin in Geneva on Wednesday. There was a lot of press and dueling press conferences, with both presidents having t...
A TikTok Tick Tock
17 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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. ...
Rep. Seth Moulton and Matt Zeller on Securing Visas for U.S. Partners in Afghanistan
16 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The United States is quickly approaching its September deadline for a full military withdrawal from Afghanistan. As the U.S. completes its withdrawal,...
The Justice Department, Congress and the Press
15 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Jonathan Rauch on the Constitution of Knowledge
14 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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 t...
Daniel Richman and Sarah Seo on Law Enforcement Federalism
11 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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...
The Empire (Facebook) Strikes Back (at the Oversight Board’s Trump Decision)
10 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
If you’ve listened to this show, you've probably read a fair number of news stories—and maybe even listened to some podcast episodes—about the F...
Michel Paradis on Sexual Assault and Reforming the Military Justice System
09 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
For years, Congress and the Defense Department have debated how best to handle the pernicious problem of sexual assault in the military. Now, a bipart...
Alicia Wanless on What's Wrong with the Discussion of Influence Operations
08 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Alicia Wanless is the director of the Partnership for Countering Influence Operations at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and she has a...