Until this year, Tim Wu was Special Assistant to President Biden for competition and tech policy. One of the leading thinkers in progressive approach to antitrust, Tim has since returned to Columbia Law School, where he is the Julius Silver Professor of Law, Science and Technology. Since leaving government, Tim has been offering his thoughts on how the government should regulate artificial intelligence. Alan Rozenshtein, Associate Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota and Senior Editor...
Jul 03, 2023•46 min
This week on Rational Security , Alan, Quinta, and Scott were joined by their colleague and think-tank neighbor, Russia/Ukraine expert Eric Ciaramella, to talk over the week's big news, including: “Going All (Prigozh)in.” Yevgeny Prighozin, leader of the mercenary Wagner Group, went all in this past week, marching his troops into Russia and halfway to Moscow for the stated purpose of removing Russia’s military leadership, only to abruptly halt and accept exile in Belarus instead. What does this ...
Jul 02, 2023•1 hr 17 min
From October 23, 2020: It's been a wild couple of days of disinformation in the electoral context. Intelligence community officials are warning about Russian and Iranian efforts to influence the U.S. presidential election—and claiming that Iran is responsible for sending threatening emails from fake Proud Boys to Democratic voters. What exactly is going on here? To talk through the developments and the questions that linger, Benjamin Wittes sat down with Scott R. Anderson, Susan Hennessey and Qu...
Jul 01, 2023•43 min
On Thursday, South Africa’s Department of International Relations confirmed it would host the 15th BRICS Summit in August. Normally, this wouldn’t make the news. But because South Africa is a signatory to the International Criminal Court, the country is obligated under international law to arrest one of the summit’s invitees—Russian President Vladimir Putin—the moment he sets foot in Johannesburg. This presents South Africa with what Nosmot Gbadamosi has dubbed a “Putin problem.” Lawfare Managin...
Jun 30, 2023•28 min
This week, Shane sits down with law professor and hacker historian Scott Shapiro to rant, and rave, about hacker movies. From War Games to the Die Hard franchise to TV’s “Mr. Robot,” Hollywood has portrayed hackers as heroes and villains. Sometimes filmmakers get the art and culture of hacking right. Sometimes they get basic technology very wrong. But the results are almost always entertaining. Scott is a professor at Yale Law School and the author of the new book Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The D...
Jun 29, 2023•1 hr 12 min
How much transparency do big technology companies owe to their users? The question has become pointed in recent years as users, researchers, and politicians voice discontent about the absence of public information available about how platforms moderate and amplify content. Today, Meta’s President of Global Affairs, Nick Clegg, announced a new initiative to provide more information about how the company’s ranking algorithms work on Facebook and Instagram. On this episode of Arbiters of Truth , La...
Jun 29, 2023•47 min
The United States in the early 21st century has been involved in a so-called “forever” war involving military threats, interventions, occupations, counterinsurgencies, and the like. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the United States engaged in an at least superficially analogous many-decades series of interventions in the Western Hemisphere with the aim of achieving regional hegemony. This earlier period is the topic of a new book by Sean Mirski, an attorney at Arnold & Porter and ...
Jun 28, 2023•1 hr 5 min
It was a heck of a weekend in Russia. There was an insurrection, kind of? A coup, sort of? A column of troops led by Wagner chieftain Yevgeny Prigozhin marched toward Moscow from Rostov-on-Don, threatened the destabilization of the Putin regime, and then in a sudden back flip, everybody stood down and the whole thing was resolved in a weird deal between the Russian president and the renegade mercenary. To talk it all through, Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Alina Polyakova,...
Jun 27, 2023•51 min
Countries across Africa are procuring and employing surveillance tools from China. This trend is a product of China’s diplomatic strategy, its technological ambitions, and growing corporate power and reach, as well as African domestic demands. A white paper from the Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab) at the Atlantic Council argues that research on this topic disproportionately focuses on the motivations and ambitions of the supplier, and seeks instead to focus on the local features that driv...
Jun 26, 2023•44 min
This week on Rational Security , Alan, Quinta, and Scott were joined by UVA Law Professor Paul Stephan to talk through the close-calls in this week’s national security news, including: “Xi’s All That.” Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Beijing this past week, for a long delayed sit-down with President Xi Jinping to try and de-escalate the two superpowers’ tense relationship. Was this meeting a smart move or a giveaway? And what should we make of President Biden calling the Chinese leader...
Jun 25, 2023•1 hr 16 min
From July 9, 2019: President Trump has declared that he will fight “all the subpoenas” coming from Congress and has claimed “absolute immunity” for White House advisors. In doing so, he has brought the issue of congressional oversight of the executive branch to the front pages. To talk about that very issue, Margaret Taylor sat down with Austin Evers, the executive director of American Oversight, a non-profit government accountability watchdog; and Michael Stern, who served for many years as the...
Jun 24, 2023•52 min
As large language models like ChatGPT play an increasingly important role in our society, there will no doubt be examples of them causing harm. Lawsuits have already been filed in cases where LLMs have made false statements about individuals, but what about run-of-the-mill negligence cases? What happens when an LLM provides faulty medical advice or causes extreme emotional distress? A forthcoming symposium in the Journal of Free Speech Law tackles these questions, and Alan Rozenshtein, Associate...
Jun 23, 2023•52 min
Since joining Lawfare in November 2021, Roger Parloff has been a constant presence at the January 6th trials. Now based in Washington, D.C, he had, earlier in his career, served as a staff writer for Fortune and American Lawyer Magazine, and has been published in The New York Times, Yahoo Finance, ProPublica, New York, NewYorker.com , and Air Mail News. As a senior editor at Lawfare, he's focused on January 6 related matters, including covering the more than 1,000 federal criminal cases that hav...
Jun 22, 2023•1 hr 2 min
At the United Nations, Russia's obstruction of efforts to respond to its invasion of Ukraine is finally sparking serious interest in an issue that has long simmered in the background of global politics: reform of the UN Security Council to make it a larger and more inclusive body. In contrast to prior U.S. administrations, the Biden administration is at the tip of the spear of this effort and may be preparing to release a reform proposal of its own in the coming weeks. To better understand this ...
Jun 22, 2023•51 min
Carolyn Cole, a Pulitzer-Prize winning staff photographer for the Los Angeles Times, has covered wars and other conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, Kosovo, Liberia, Sudan, Nicaragua, Haiti, and the U.S.-Mexico border. Over the course of her 30 year career, she has been seriously injured on the job precisely once—when members of the Minnesota State Patrol pushed Cole over a retaining wall and pepper sprayed her so badly that her eyes were swollen shut. Cole was in Minneapolis in the summer of...
Jun 21, 2023•47 min
Last November, President Trump became candidate Trump when he formally announced his campaign to retake the White House in 2024. And when, earlier this month, the Department of Justice indicted Trump over his unauthorized possession of classified documents, it gave him another title: defendant Trump. How will all of these roles interact with each other on a legal and logistical level? How will the obligations of defendant Trump interfere with candidate Trump's ability to conduct his presidential...
Jun 20, 2023•50 min
From April 19, 2019: A redacted version of the 448-page Mueller report dropped yesterday, and there’s a lot to say about it. In this Special Edition of the Lawfare Podcast , Bob Bauer, Susan Hennessey, Mary McCord, Paul Rosenzweig, Charlie Savage and Benjamin Wittes discuss what the report says about obstruction and collusion, Mueller’s legal theories and what this all means for the president and the presidency. Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/lawfare . Hosted on Acast. See acast.co...
Jun 19, 2023•1 hr 8 min
This week on Rational Security , Alan, Quinta, and Scott were joined by Lawfare Legal Fellow Anna Bower fresh from the Miami court system to discuss the week's yuge national security news story—and one more for good measure: “Aileen, Aileen, Aileen, Aileen! Please don’t take this case just ‘cuz you can.” Former President Donald J. Trump was arraigned in federal court on Tuesday, the first step in a criminal trial expected to be overseen by none other than our old friend Judge Aileen Cannon. Will...
Jun 18, 2023•1 hr 16 min
From April 28, 2018: On Thursday, former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates hosted a conference at Georgetown Law on the future of American democracy. Matt Axelrod, Bob Bauer, John Bellinger, Jack Goldsmith, and Don Verrilli participated in a panel on the norms that govern contacts between the White House and the Justice Department, how the Trump administration has broken them, and what can be done to protect the Justice Department’s independence in this administration and future ones. Support ...
Jun 17, 2023•46 min
On Monday, 16 young plaintiffs—between the ages of 5 and 22—walked into a packed courtroom in Helena, Montana, to sue their government. At issue is a 1972 amendment to the state constitution guaranteeing that the “state and each person shall maintain and improve a clean and healthful environment in Montana for present and future generations.” 22-year-old Rikki Held and her co-plaintiffs allege that state officials violated that constitutional right. The case, Held v. Montana , now over a decade ...
Jun 16, 2023•29 min
Water, essential to the emergence and endurance of life on Earth, has both spurred technological advances and driven many types of conflict. For the first time in humanity's long history with water, we are starting to suffer the consequences of widespread unsustainable water use, and we soon will face a crucial collective choice about what future generations' interactions with water will look like. Hydroclimatologist Peter Gleick has studied the issues at the intersection of water, climate chang...
Jun 15, 2023•1 hr 17 min
The first 31 counts of the Trump Mar-a-Lago indictment all are under the Espionage Act, which has led to a lot of confusion because Trump is not accused of spying. Heidi Kitrosser is a professor of law at Northwestern University and an expert on the Espionage Act. She wrote a recent piece in Lawfare about the Espionage Act and its history of prosecutions during the Trump Administration. She joined Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes to talk about the law, its history, the problems with it, a...
Jun 15, 2023•47 min
Donald Trump was arraigned Tuesday in Miami, FL, in connection with the Mar-a-Lago indictment. Lawfare 's Fulton County Correspondent Anna Bower was in the courtroom and immediately after the hearing, she joined Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes and Lawfare Senior Editor Quinta Jurecic before a live YouTube audience to debrief on the whole thing. They talked about what happened in the courtroom, Trump's conditions of release, counsel, and what happened in “The Line” getting into the courtr...
Jun 14, 2023•52 min
This weekend, Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes had a conversation on Read With Me , a by-subscription-only podcast associated with Ben’s Substack Dog Shirt Daily. In this episode, Ben went through the indictment of Donald Trump at great length and with particular care with Lawfare Fulton County Court Correspondent Anna Bower and Lawfare Contributing Editor Matt Tait. It's a line-by-line, page-by-page analysis that we thought might be a good resource for people who are trying to make sense...
Jun 13, 2023•1 hr 47 min
The indictment filed last week against former President Donald Trump involves hundreds of classified documents, and the first 31 charges involve mishandling individual classified documents. This raises the specter of the Classified Information Procedures Act, or CIPA, which is the major instrument through which we handle classified material in criminal cases. How do you prove that the former president mishandled classified information without presenting a lot of classified information in open co...
Jun 12, 2023•57 min
This week on Rational Security , Alan, Quinta, and Scott braved the haze to talk through the week’s (very) big national security news stories, including: “Downstream Effects.” The destruction of the Kakhovka Dam in Ukraine promises a new wave of suffering and environmental devastation for Ukrainians living along the Dnipro River. Who is responsible? And what could the ramifications be? “He’s Off to Meet the Wizard, The Wonderful Wizard of Laws.” Over the past few weeks, there has been a steady d...
Jun 11, 2023•1 hr 7 min
From February 26, 2020: Ben Buchanan is a professor at the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service and a scholar on cybersecurity and statecraft. He has a new book out this week: “The Hacker and the State: Cyber Attacks and the New Normal of Geopolitics." Jack Goldsmith sat down with Buchanan to talk about Ben’s new book, about the so-called name-and-shame of Justice Department indictments, and about the various reasons why states engage in offensive cyber operations. Support this show h...
Jun 10, 2023•43 min
On June 8, former President Donald Trump announced on Truth Social that he has been indicted in Special Counsel Jack Smith's investigation into the improper removal of classified documents from the White House to Mar-a-Lago. The indictment is currently under seal, but according to news reports, Trump has been indicted on seven counts relating to the improper retention of classified material and conspiracy to obstruct the special counsel investigation. On Friday, June 9, at 5 p.m. ET, Lawfare Edi...
Jun 09, 2023•1 hr 11 min
The data broker industry and its role in the digital economy is under scrutiny from Congress. Lawfare Senior Editor Stephanie Pell sat down with Justin Sherman, the Founder and CEO of Global Cyber Strategies and a Senior Fellow at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy, to discuss the data broker ecosystem and the recent article he published in Lawfare about two bills from a previous congress that seek to give consumers more control over the information that data brokers collect and s...
Jun 09, 2023•54 min
Shane and David have hosted many former intelligence officers, mostly of the American variety, during more than 80 episodes so far on Chatter . But, until this week, you haven't heard us speak with one who has turned her intelligence experience into a career as a professional genealogist. Lisa Maddox of Family History Investigations has carved out that unique path, and her story reveals much about the nature and wider applicability of analytic skills. David Priess talked to Lisa about her entry ...
Jun 08, 2023•1 hr 19 min
