Thomas Rid is a Professor of Strategic Studies at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. Aric Toler is the Director of Research and Training at Bellingcat. Both have been writing about the latest megaleak out of the U.S. national security establishment, a story that the New York Times reported on last week and that gets weirder and weirder every day that passes. Rid has been tweeting about the subject, and Toler is the author of a major investigation for Bellingcat on...
Apr 12, 2023•48 min
Document leaking has been in the news lately—and not just stories about the leaking of U . S. intelligence documents. On March 30, 2023, the Washington Post published a series of stories about the Vulkan files , an international investigative project based on thousands of pages of leaked documents from a Russian company that reveal new details about how Russian intelligence agencies seek to operate disinformation campaigns and enhance their ability to launch cyberattacks with the help of contrac...
Apr 11, 2023•32 min
On March 23, 2023, an Indian court found Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s principal opposition leader, Rahul Gandhi, guilty of defaming the Prime Minister and the Modi surname. He was sentenced to two years in prison and expelled from Parliament in what journalists and pro-democracy groups view as yet another inflection point of democratic decline under Modi’s leadership. To understand the challenges facing Indian society and the current deterioration of India’s democracy, Lawfare Legal Fellow Sar...
Apr 10, 2023•1 hr 6 min
This week on Rational Security , Quinta and Scott were joined by Lawfare Managing Editor Tyler McBrien to celebrate the return of the complete media madhouse and talk through the week’s big stories, including: I’m So Indicted and I Just Can’t Fight It.” Donald Trump became the first former president to be indicted this past week—and he celebrated with a speech from his Mar-a-Lago estate that painted the charges against him as a partisan witch-hunt. How big a step is this? And where is it likely ...
Apr 09, 2023•1 hr 7 min
From August 2, 2014: This week, Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes asked three of his colleagues—all from the Brookings Center on Middle East Policy—to chat about Gaza: Natan Sachs is a specialist in Israeli politics; Khaled Elgindy has served as an advisor to the Palestinian leadership on final status negotiations; and Tamara Cofman Wittes directs the center and served as deputy assistant secretary of state during the Arab Spring. (She is also, by the way, married to someone somehow connec...
Apr 08, 2023•53 min
Rob Joyce is the Director of the Cybersecurity Directorate at the National Security Agency. He's been NSA's top cryptologic representative in the United Kingdom and has also worked in the U.S. National Security Council. David Kris, Lawfare contributor and former Assistant Attorney General for the National Security Division, and Bryan Cunningham, Lawfare contributor and Executive Director of the University of California, Irvine’s Cybersecurity Policy & Research Institute, sat down with Rob to...
Apr 07, 2023•57 min
Finland is in NATO. This week, the ratification was made complete, and the country joined the North Atlantic alliance. To talk through how it got there, Lawfare Publisher David Priess sat down with two research fellows at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs in Helsinki: Henri Vanhanen, who has also served as a foreign policy advisor to the National Coalition Party, which recently won the most seats in the Finnish parliament and is in the process of forming a government, and Minna Ålan...
Apr 06, 2023•50 min
The grand jury indictment of Donald Trump in the Supreme Court of the State of New York has been unsealed. It involves Stormy Daniels, Karen McDougal, David Pecker, the famous doorman, Trump Tower, and a lot of salacious stuff—and 34 counts of falsified business records with intent to facilitate other crimes. On this emergency edition of the Lawfare Podcast , Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down to unpack it all with Rebecca Roiphe of the New York Law School, Lawfare Senior Editor Qu...
Apr 05, 2023•53 min
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has tested the international legal order like never before. For many, the fact that a nuclear power and member of the U.N. Security Council would commit unveiled aggression against another state seemed like it might be the death knell of the international system as we know it. But last week, in the annual Breyer Lecture on International Law at the Brookings Institution, Oona Hathaway, the Gerard C. and Bernice Latrobe Professor of International Law at Yale Law School...
Apr 04, 2023•1 hr 27 min
Hosted by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation Cyber Initiative and Aspen Digital, Verify 2023 brings together journalists and cyber and tech policy experts to discuss critical issues in cybersecurity. For this live recording of the Lawfare Podcast , Benjamin Wittes sat down at Verify 2023 with Alex Stamos of the Stanford Internet Observatory; Nicole Perlroth, formerly of the New York Times and the author of a recent book on zero days; and Dave Willner, the Head of Trust & Safety at Open...
Apr 03, 2023•1 hr 5 min
Misperceptions about nuclear proliferation attempts abound, particularly when we find authoritarian leaders involved. It is easy to picture these determined owners of nuclear weapons as omnipotent, unconstrained micromanagers—willing and able to do whatever is necessary to take their country over the threshold. Political scientist Målfrid Braut-Hegghammer disagrees. She conducted extensive research in IAEA and other archives as well as in-depth interviews with senior scientists and regime offici...
Apr 02, 2023•1 hr 12 min
From January 8, 2019: The Russian government's recent arrest of American Paul Whelan and its charges against him have many politicians and pundits speculating about the possibility of an intended spy swap for Maria Butina. There's a lot going on here, but there's also a lot of misunderstanding about the history of spy swaps, what they are, and what they aren't. Earlier this week, David Priess sat down with his former CIA colleague John Sipher to talk about it all. They discussed the history of s...
Apr 01, 2023•35 min
On March 27, the Biden administration issued an Executive Order on Prohibition on Use by the United States Government of Commercial Spyware that Poses Risks to National Security . The Executive Order, as the title says, limits executive departments and agencies from using commercial spyware if they determine that its use would present a counterintelligence or security risk to the U.S., or if it poses significant risks of improper use by a foreign government or person. To talk about the new execu...
Mar 31, 2023•41 min
For months, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been promising a set of legal reforms favored by partners in his far-right coalition government that many fear would spell the end of liberal democracy in the state of Israel. But this week, these efforts hit a roadblock in the form of an unprecedented degree of popular resistance—one that ultimately led Netanyahu to put his reform proposals on hold, at least for the moment. On Wednesday, Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Natan Sachs convened a...
Mar 30, 2023•1 hr 42 min
Tatyana Bolton is a Security Policy Manager working on cybersecurity at Google, and Dave Kleidermacher is the Vice President of Android Security & Privacy at Google. They are among the people at Google who are thinking about IoT, that is, Internet of Things security and privacy. They sat down with Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes to talk about Google's thinking on how to create a secure environment for all those little things that we have traveling with us, connected to our computers,...
Mar 29, 2023•54 min
States are increasingly turning to artificial intelligence systems to enhance their national security decision-making. The real risks that states will deploy unlawful or unreliable national security AI make international regulations seem appealing, but what's the right model for them? Ashley Deeks is the Class of 1948 Professor of Scholarly Research in Law at the University of Virginia Law School. She's just published a paper for Laware 's ongoing Digital Social Contract research paper series, i...
Mar 28, 2023•37 min
On the latest episode of Arbiters of Truth , Lawfare 's series on the information ecosystem, Quinta Jurecic and Alan Rozenshtein spoke with Ravi Iyer, the Managing Director of the Psychology of Technology Institute at the University of Southern California's Neely Center. Earlier in his career, Ravi held a number of positions at Meta, where he worked to make Facebook's algorithm provide actual value, not just "engagement," to users. Quinta and Alan spoke with Ravi about why he thinks that content...
Mar 27, 2023•45 min
This week on Rational Security , Alan, Quinta, and Scott waited for a big shoe to drop by talking over the week's big national security news, including: “What Else Can I Get Away With on Fifth Avenue...” Donald Trump is expected to become the first former president to be indicted on criminal charges this week—if, that is, local authorities are not deterred by the public protests Trump’s supporters are preparing to hold in New York City at his request. What will this move mean for the country? An...
Mar 26, 2023•1 hr 6 min
From April 28, 2021: The Biden administration has now responded to two major cyberattacks—one from Russia, the SolarWinds attack, and the other from China, the so-called Hafnium Microsoft Exchange Server attack. Recently, Lawfare has run articles on both of these incidents—a piece from Dmitri Alperovitch , the co-founder and former CTO of CrowdStrike, and a piece from Alex Iftimie , a former Justice Department official and a lawyer at Morrison & Foerster. They joined Benjamin Wittes to discu...
Mar 25, 2023•38 min
Last month, the Government Accountability Office released its latest report on the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, focusing on the failures of several government agencies to fully process and share information about a potential attack in the days and weeks leading up to January 6, 2021. Lawfare Senior Editor and Brookings Senior Fellow Molly Reynolds sat down with NBC News Justice Reporter Ryan Reilly, who's reported broadly on law enforcement issues related to Jan. 6, and Lawfare Senior Edito...
Mar 24, 2023•58 min
The open nature of the internet has allowed malicious actors to abuse technology. Information operations, offensive cyber, and IP theft are just some examples of this misuse. The Biden administration has pursued an industrial policy that hopes to counter the weaponization of globalized systems. This approach includes technology subsidies, export controls, and rethinking supply chains. But this approach could undermine efforts to advance global rules and values. To discuss how the United States c...
Mar 23, 2023•43 min
On December 31, 2023, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) will expire unless it is reauthorized by Congress. Section 702 authorizes the U.S. government, in order to obtain foreign intelligence information, to target foreigners who are reasonably believed to be outside of the U.S. and collect their communications inside the U.S. without a warrant—even when such surveillance may involve the incidental collection of communications of U.S. persons. Privacy and civil liber...
Mar 22, 2023•49 min
By many accounts, the United States is living through a new era of competition—not just between major powers and strategic rivals, but between ideologies. Around the world, many authoritarian governments seem to be on the rise, even as many liberal democracies are facing a crisis of confidence, including, by some accounts, here in the United States. In a new book entitled, “ Defeating the Dictators ,” Charles Dunst, a former journalist and current deputy director of research and analytics at The...
Mar 21, 2023•56 min
Twenty years ago today, the United States invaded the nation of Iraq, intent on removing the regime of dictator Saddam Hussein and installing a stable democratic government. What followed instead was two decades of political instability and horrible sectarian violence that has yielded a modern Iraqi state that remains plagued with corruption and other problems, and is increasingly under immense pressure from the nearby regime in Iran. To gain perspective on the legacy of the U.S. invasion of Ira...
Mar 20, 2023•1 hr 27 min
The Academy loves a good spy flick, and so do we! This week, Shane Harris talks with Washington Post culture critic Alyssa Rosenberg about the enduring power of espionage on the big screen. Movies like Zero Dark Thirty , the Mission: Impossible franchise, and this year’s Top Gun: Maverick and All Quiet on the Western Front , which both took home Oscars, help us understand global conflict as they wrestle with questions of personal morality. How do the stories of James Bond and George Smiley help ...
Mar 19, 2023•1 hr 10 min
From February 24, 2020: What do Russia, China and Canada all have in common? They all disagree—in one manner or another—with American policy goals in the Arctic, where climate change is driving opportunities and challenges for U.S. policy-makers. In this episode, National Security Institute Visiting Fellow and former senior intelligence official Jim Danoy discusses his paper, “The Arctic: Securing the High Ground,” with host Lester Munson. They discuss the fascinating policy dilemmas posed by th...
Mar 18, 2023•41 min
Artificial Intelligence is advancing at what seems like an exponential rate, with every month—sometimes every week—bringing news of a new, game-changing discovery. But just as the progress in AI is accelerating, so is the pessimism about it, with many scholars, commentators, and technologists themselves raising the alarm about AI's potential harms to equality, privacy, and security. Challenging this consensus is Orly Lobel, a law professor at the University of San Diego and the author of the new...
Mar 17, 2023•50 min
As U.S. counterterrorism efforts have waned in Yemen, Libya, and parts of Pakistan, Somalia has emerged as the most active element in the “forever wars” that the U.S. has waged since 9/11, according to Eric Schmitt of the New York Times. Schmitt traveled to Somalia in February for a rare embed with U.S. Special Operations forces on the ground in the midst of a recent offensive launched by the Somali government against a formidable enemy, Al Shabab. Lawfare Managing Editor Tyler McBrien sat down ...
Mar 16, 2023•46 min
As Director of the United States Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, Jen Easterly is one of several women at the very top of the cybersecurity pyramid in the United States. A graduate of West Point, decorated U.S. Army officer, and a Rhodes Scholar, Jen has served her country in a plethora of senior cybersecurity and counterterrorism roles, and most recently before her return to government, was the head of Firm Resilience at Morgan Stanley. David Kris, Lawfare contributor and forme...
Mar 15, 2023•48 min
For years, the international community has wrestled with how to reconcile sanctions policies targeting terrorist groups and other malevolent actors with the need to provide humanitarian assistance in areas under those groups’ control. Late last year, both the Biden administration and the UN Security Council took major steps toward a new approach on this issue, installing broad carveouts for humanitarian assistance into existing sanctions regimes. To talk through these changes, Lawfare Senior Edi...
Mar 14, 2023•44 min
