The term “spyware” refers to software that's designed to infiltrate, monitor, and extract sensitive information from a user's device without their knowledge or consent. Perhaps the most infamous example of the harm that spyware can do is the 2018 killing of Saudi dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi government operatives, who used spyware to track Khashoggi before luring him to the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, where he was murdered. But spyware use is not just limited to repressive auto...
May 11, 2023•51 min
Since 2012, Germany has accepted more refugees than any other country in Europe aside from Turkey. The German government has dispersed these asylum seekers and other immigrants throughout the country, a policy roundly celebrated by refugee activists and governments alike. But as reporter Ali Breland recently wrote in the New Republic, “[T]hese seemingly well-intentioned policies have created dangerous situations where people of color are forced to reside in regions that may be hostile to their p...
May 10, 2023•43 min
Since March 2022, El Salvador has been under a state of exception as its President Nayib Bukele seeks to crack down on the country’s powerful gangs. Bukele, who once described himself on Twitter as the “world’s coolest dictator,” has engaged in a prolonged attack on El Salvador’s democratic institutions. And the crackdown has resulted in a range of human rights abuses. At the same time, Bukele really does seem to have been successful in curbing gang violence, and his popularity is sky high. To u...
May 09, 2023•1 hr 5 min
The Constitution specifies only one process for making international agreements—Article II gives the president the power to make treaties provided that two-thirds of the senators present concur. The treaty process has been on a long, slow path to obsolescence, having been replaced by various forms of binding and non-binding executive agreements. To assess the causes and impact of the United States’ declining use of treaties, Jack Goldsmith sat down with Jeffrey Peake, a political scientist at Cl...
May 08, 2023•55 min
This week on Rational Security , a Quinta-less Alan and Scott were joined by Lawfare legal fellow Saraphin Dhanani to talk through the week's big national security news, including: “Seoul Authority.” South Korea and the United States recommitted themselves to their close security relationship this past week, including through a state dinner and a new Washington Declaration that confirms that the United States will respond to any nuclear attack on South Korea with overwhelming force. What drove t...
May 07, 2023•1 hr 20 min
From July 7, 2020: David Priess is a former CIA briefer for the Attorney General and the FBI director, and he's the author of " The President's Book of Secrets: The Untold Story of Intelligence Briefings to America's Presidents ." The president's daily brief has been in the news of late because of the Russia bounties story and the question of whether President Trump is actually internalizing the intelligence he is given in his daily briefing. Benjamin Wittes spoke with David about the history of...
May 06, 2023•45 min
Yesterday was verdict day for the Proud Boys. Mid-morning, the jury notified Judge Tim Kelly that it had reached a partial verdict, and that partial verdict was “guilty of seditious conspiracy” for four of the five defendants. It was a big day for the Justice Department. To go over everything that happened, Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down for a live recording of the podcast with Lawfare Senior Editor Roger Parloff, who live-tweeted 61 days of the Proud Boys trial. Support this s...
May 05, 2023•43 min
Private equity firms rank among the largest employers in the United States and invest many billions of dollars in a wide variety of industries. Yet the public understanding of how private equity works and its impact on myriad areas of American life, including national security, remains limited. Brendan Ballou is trying to change that. A federal prosecutor who works in the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice, he has written a new book, Plunder: Private Equity's Plan To Pillage America...
May 04, 2023•1 hr 7 min
At the core of the regulatory state is the notice and comment process. Agencies propose what they're going to do, the public gets to comment, and agencies have to respond to those comments. It's an imperfect system, to be sure, but it's fundamental to making sure that agencies act with good information and with democratic legitimacy. So what happens when those comments start being made not by people, but by ChatGPT or other large language models? Or how about when agencies themselves use these A...
May 04, 2023•35 min
Risks associated with the rapid development and deployment of artificial intelligence are getting the attention of lawmakers. But one issue that may not be getting adequate attention by policymakers or by the AI research and cybersecurity communities is the vulnerability of many AI-based systems to adversarial attack. A new Stanford and Georgetown report, “ Adversarial Machine Learning and Cybersecurity: Risks, Challenges, and Legal Implications ,” offers a stark a reminder that security risks f...
May 03, 2023•57 min
Generative AI products have been tearing up the headlines recently. Among the many issues these products raise is whether or not their outputs are protected by Section 230, the foundational statute that shields websites from liability for third-party content. On this episode of Arbiters of Truth , Lawfare ’s occasional series on the information ecosystem, Lawfare Senior Editor Quinta Jurecic and Matt Perault, Director of the Center on Technology and Policy at UNC-Chapel Hill, talked through this...
May 02, 2023•30 min
David Cohen is the Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, a position he held also during the Obama administration. He's also been Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence in the Department of the Treasury and a partner at the WilmerHale law firm. 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 Cybersecuri...
May 01, 2023•52 min
As satellites around the planet proliferate, the tug they feel from international tensions seems to rival the gravitational pull exerted by the Earth itself. On issues from Space Traffic Management to scientific data sharing, the need for global cooperation is high but rarely easy. Dr. Mariel Borowitz is head of the Program on International Affairs, Science, and Technology at Georgia Tech's Sam Nunn School of International Affairs, where she is an Associate Professor, and author of “ Open Space:...
Apr 30, 2023•1 hr 17 min
From May 13, 2020: Scott R. Anderson sat down with Elizabeth Shackelford, a former foreign service officer whose late 2017 resignation became a sign of growing discontent with the Trump administration within the diplomatic corps. They talked about her new book, " The Dissent Channel ," out this week, which discusses her experience as a young diplomat living through a period of crisis in South Sudan, and the lessons it taught her about diplomacy, human rights and the role of the United States in ...
Apr 29, 2023•51 min
In 2018, news broke that Facebook had allowed third-party developers—including the controversial data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica—to obtain large quantities of user data in ways that users probably didn’t anticipate. The fallout led to a controversy over whether Cambridge Analytica had in some way swung the 2016 election for Trump (spoiler: it almost certainly didn’t), but it also generated a $5 billion fine imposed on Facebook by the FTC for violating users’ privacy. Along with that reco...
Apr 28, 2023•46 min
The Proud Boys trial has gone to the jury. It is the longest Jan. 6 case to date and the third case to involve seditious conspiracy charges against senior Proud Boys and folks who ended up being the pointy end of the spear on Jan. 6, 2021. Two reporters have sat through the entire case: Lawfare Senior Editor Roger Parloff , and Brandi Buchman, who covered the case for the emptywheel site. Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with them to go over the trial, what case the government pr...
Apr 27, 2023•50 min
If someone lies about you, you can usually sue them for defamation. But what if that someone is ChatGPT? Already in Australia, the mayor of a town outside Melbourne has threatened to sue OpenAI because ChatGPT falsely named him a guilty party in a bribery scandal. Could that happen in America? Does our libel law allow that? What does it even mean for a large language model to act with "malice"? Does the First Amendment put any limits on the ability to hold these models, and the companies that ma...
Apr 26, 2023•54 min
April is Sexual Assault Awareness and Prevention month. It’s a time—recognized by civilian and U.S. military communities—intended to promote the prevention of sexual violence, especially in U.S. armed forces. In light of Sexual Assault Awareness and Prevention month, Lawfare Associate Editor Katherine Pompilio sat down with author and attorney Ashley Merryman, who previously served at the Pentagon as Special Advisor for the Department of the Navy’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office. ...
Apr 25, 2023•56 min
Evan Gershkovich has been in Russian detention for the last several weeks. He is a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, and he’s the latest American taken hostage by the Vladimir Putin regime. His good friend Polina Ivanova is a reporter for the Financial Times, a colleague of Evan’s in Russia, and has been an outspoken advocate for his release. She joined Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes from Berlin to talk about Evan: who he is, why he has been detained by the Russians, what we know ab...
Apr 24, 2023•42 min
This week on Rational Security , Alan, Quinta, and Scott were joined by law professor extraordinaire Jed Shugerman to talk over his controversial take on the New York district attorney's case against former President Trump, among other items in the week's national security news, including: “If You Come at the King, You Best Not Whiff.” Former President Trump’s indictment on 34 counts of falsifying business records in the first degree under New York state law earlier this month has triggered a fi...
Apr 23, 2023•1 hr 3 min
From April 20, 2021: Jack Goldsmith sat down with Lee Bollinger, the president of Columbia University, and Geoffrey Stone, the Edward H. Levy Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago Law School, to discuss their new book, " National Security, Leaks and Freedom of the Press: The Pentagon Papers Fifty Years On ." They discussed the holding and legacy of the Pentagon Papers case, as well as some of the many challenges of applying the Pentagon Papers regime in the modern digital ...
Apr 22, 2023•52 min
Over the past decade, North Korea has taken on an exceptional global role: a sovereign state believed to be at the head of an unprecedented international criminal network—one that is particularly active in cyberspace, where the North Korea-backed Lazarus Group is believed to have been responsible for several of the largest and most audacious incidents of hacking, ransomware, and outright theft of the modern era. Journalists Jean Lee and Geoff White have been documenting the Lazarus Group’s activ...
Apr 21, 2023•50 min
In the last few months we've seen an explosion of new AI products, especially those built around large language models. And in response, we've also heard calls for far more aggressive government regulation. But what does it mean to regulate AI? Margot Kaminski is an Associate Professor of Law at University of Colorado Law School. She's just published a paper for Laware 's ongoing Digital Social Contract research paper series, in which she argues that the emerging law of artificial intelligence i...
Apr 20, 2023•41 min
Early this month, the Republican supermajority in the Tennessee House of Representatives voted to expel two Democratic lawmakers who had participated in a protest against gun violence on the House floor. The GOP also narrowly failed to expel a third Democrat. The two legislators who were expelled, Reps. Justin Pearson and Justin Jones, have now returned to the House. But the incident turned national attention on Tennessee’s struggling democracy. To discuss, Lawfare Senior Editor Quinta Jurecic s...
Apr 19, 2023•56 min
Chris Fonzone is the General Counsel of ODNI and has worked in senior legal roles at the Defense Department, the National Security Council, and the Department of Justice, and in the private sector as a partner at the Sidley Austin law firm. Laura Galante is the Intelligence Community's Cyber Executive and Director of ODNI’s Cyber Threat Intelligence Integration Center (CTIIC). She worked previously in a position that involves supporting Ukrainian government agencies on cyber defense in the Defen...
Apr 18, 2023•51 min
The Republic of Vanuatu, a small island nation in the South Pacific, just won a big victory in New York City. At the end of March, the UN General Assembly voted to adopt the request for an advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice on the obligations of states with respect to climate change. To talk through what Vanuatu's general counsel called, “a diplomatic feat of Herculean proportions,” Lawfare Managing Editor Tyler McBrien sat down with Melissa Stewart, Assistant Professor of La...
Apr 17, 2023•45 min
Nancy Youssef has reported on war and conflict around the world and from Washington. As a young journalist, she went to Iraq and sensed early on that a war most presumed would be over quickly was only just beginning. Her career has taken her to Afghanistan, Egypt, and into the center of power at the Pentagon. Nancy is now a national security correspondent for The Wall Street Journal. In her conversation with Shane Harris, Nancy talks about her Journal colleague, Evan Gershkovich, who was arreste...
Apr 16, 2023•49 min
From September 17, 2019: Tensions in the Middle East are at a high point. Over the weekend, large Saudi oil facilities were attacked. The Yemeni Houthis jumped in to claim responsibility. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo blamed Iran. President Trump tweets that the U.S. is 'locked and loaded' and ready for potential response. But what has actually happened in the Arabian Peninsula? What does the future hold for conflict between the Saudis and the Iranians? And what role will the United States have...
Apr 15, 2023•48 min
Over the past few years, TikTok has become a uniquely polarizing social media platform. On the one hand, millions of users, especially those in their teens and twenties, love the app. On the other hand, the government is concerned that TikTok's vulnerability to pressure from the Chinese Communist Party makes it a serious national security threat. There's even talk of banning the app altogether. But would that be legal? In particular, does the First Amendment allow the government to ban an applic...
Apr 14, 2023•47 min
A few weeks ago, China made headlines for brokering a deal between Iran and Saudi Arabia to thaw diplomatic relations after seven years of cutting ties and even more years of tense relations. Since then, we've already begun to see some downstream effects of this deal with significant movement on the war in Yemen and the reopening of Iran's embassy in Saudi Arabia. This is a story with two major strands—one about the potential effects of a successful normalization between Saudi Arabia and Iran, a...
Apr 13, 2023•56 min
