One of the gravest threats to U.S. national security today—and also one of the newest—is the risk of cyberattacks. They come in many forms, and they can incapacitate companies, institutions, and even the government. To better understand these threats—and how the government is responding to them— Lawfare Executive Editor Natalie Orpett and Lawfare Contributing Editor Brandon Van Grack sat down with Brett Leatherman, Deputy Assistant Director for Cyber Operations at the FBI. They discussed ...
Mar 28, 2024•54 min
Benjamin Nathans is a professor of Russian and Soviet history at the University of Pennsylvania, with a particular specialty in the history of Russian and Soviet dissidents. He joined Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes to talk about the legacy of Alexei Navalny, his life and death, and how Navalny was similar to and different from other dissidents, both recent and historic. They talked about how his death was related to the sham elections in Russia and the protests that he earned in respons...
Mar 27, 2024•49 min
In February, Special Counsel Robert Hur released a report declining to prosecute President Biden for his handling of classified material. Earlier this month, Hur testified before the House Judiciary Committee answering questions from irritated members on both sides of the aisle who were critical of Hur’s work. Hur’s report and its fallout have reignited long-simmering questions about the usefulness of the special counsel as an institution. Lawfare Research Fellow Matt Gluck sat down with a...
Mar 26, 2024•51 min
One year ago, Elizabeth Tsurkov, a graduate student at Princeton University, was abducted by the terrorist organization Kata'ib Hezbollah in Baghdad, where she was doing fieldwork. Since that day, her sister, Emma Tsurkov, has been campaigning for and seeking her release. On Thursday, Emma Tsurkov held a rally outside the Iraqi embassy, demanding action to free her sister. Afterward, she sat down with Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes to discuss her sister's very upsetting case. Who ...
Mar 25, 2024•51 min
This week on Rational Security , Alan and Quinta were joined by Lawfare Managing Editor Tyler McBrien and Lawfare Legal Fellow and Courts Correspondent Anna Bower to talk through the week's big national security news, including: “No v. Wade.” The long saga of the personal relationship between Fani Willis, the Fulton County District Attorney prosecuting Donald Trump for election interference, and Nathan Wade, the prosecutor Willis put in charge of the case, hit an inflection point when Judge Scot...
Mar 24, 2024•1 hr 7 min
It's another episode of “Trump's Trials and Tribulations,” recorded on March 21 in front of a live audience on YouTube and Riverside. Lawfare Senior Editor Quinta Jurecic sat down with Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes and Lawfare Senior Editor Roger Parloff to talk about Trump's SCOTUS brief in his presidential immunity appeal and recent evidentiary rulings from Judge Merchan in the New York criminal case against Trump. They also discussed Judge Cannon's odd proposed jury instru...
Mar 23, 2024•1 hr 21 min
From May 16, 2022: In order to tell you this story, we need to start at the beginning, just before the U.S. invasion. After 9/11, the CIA set their sights on al-Qaeda’s base in Afghanistan. After a military invasion that fall, people up and down the chain of command learned that in order to fight this war the U.S. needed local partners to help. Allies is a podcast about America’s eyes and ears over 20 years of war in Afghanistan. This show will take you from the frontlines of the war to the hall...
Mar 23, 2024•36 min
Today, we’re bringing you an episode of Arbiters of Truth , our series on the information ecosystem. Last week the House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a bill that would require ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns the popular social media app TikTok, to divest its ownership in the platform or face TikTok being banned in the United States. Although prospects for the bill in the Senate remain uncertain, President Biden has said he will sign the bill if it comes to his desk...
Mar 22, 2024•51 min
Charlie Sykes recently stepped down as host of the Bulwark Podcast. He's a regular commentator on MSNBC, and has written a number of books. He tells the story here of his political journey, from being a page for the Wisconsin delegation at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, to being a working journalist increasingly disenchanted with conventional liberalism, to finding a home in Reagan Republicanism and becoming more of a political warrior than he ever meant to be--and then leav...
Mar 21, 2024•1 hr 17 min
Today, we’re bringing you an episode of Arbiters of Truth , our series on the information ecosystem. On March 18, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Murthy v. Missouri , concerning the potential First Amendment implications of government outreach to social media platforms—what’s sometimes known as jawboning. The case arrived at the Supreme Court with a somewhat shaky evidentiary record, but the legal questions raised by government requests or demands to remove online content are real. To ...
Mar 21, 2024•52 min
Since World War II, the United States and its currency, the dollar, have come to play a central role in the broader global economy. And in recent decades, policymakers have used this role as a weapon, cutting off access to malign actors and punishing those who act contrary to U.S. national security interests. But cultivating such primacy has proven to be a double-edged sword, with more complicated ramifications for many Americans. In her new book “Paper Soldiers: How the Weaponization of t...
Mar 20, 2024•54 min
Last May, Microsoft announced that a Chinese state-sponsored hacking group, Volt Typhoon, appeared to be targeting U.S. critical infrastructure and entities abroad in part through establishing a presence in a malware-infected network, or botnet, consisting of old devices located in the United States. At the end of January, the Justice Department announced it had removed the botnet from hundreds of American devices. Cybersecurity experts Timothy Edgar and Paul Rosenzweig both wrote articles...
Mar 19, 2024•55 min
Friday morning in Fulton County, Georgia, Judge Scott McAfee issued an opinion in the matter of the disqualification of District Attorney Fani Willis. It was not a complete victory for anybody. The defense didn't get Fani Willis booted from the case, but they did get Nathan Wade booted from the case. And Fani Willis has to contend with the loss of her special prosecutor, as well as some scorching criticism from the judge. Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes discussed it all on a live ...
Mar 18, 2024•49 min
This week on Rational Security , Alan, Quinta, and Scott got together for the last time before Scott’s paternity leave to talk over the week’s big national security news, including: “Kitchen Table Issues.” President Biden delivered a feisty State of the Union last week, one that took aim at both those worrying about his age and his apparent 2024 rival, former President Donald Trump. But what does his handling of key national security issues, ranging from Ukraine to Gaza, tell us about where...
Mar 17, 2024•1 hr 17 min
It's another episode of “Trump's Trials and Tribulations,” recorded on March 14 in front of a live audience on YouTube and Riverside. Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Lawfare Senior Editor Roger Parloff and Lawfare Legal Fellow and Courts Correspondent Anna Bower to talk about the Thursday hearing in the Mar-a-Lago case and everything Judge Cannon still needs to rule on. They also discussed how Judge McAfee may rule in whether to disqualify Fulton County DA Fani Wi...
Mar 16, 2024•1 hr 25 min
From November 10, 2018: With the firing of Jeff Sessions and his replacement with former U.S. attorney Matthew Whitaker, all eyes this week are focused on whether Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election and possible coordination between the Trump campaign and the Russians will get to run its full course. But even before the Sessions firing, Benjamin Wittes and Paul Rosenzweig had inquiries into the presidency on their minds. On Tuesday morning,...
Mar 16, 2024•32 min
Tim Mak is the editor, writer, and entrepreneur behind the Substack site, The Counteroffensive , which covers the Ukraine-Russia war through personal stories on the ground in Ukraine. He has been in Ukraine since the beginning of the full-scale invasion when he was an NPR reporter, and he has done some of the best English-language reporting from that country. Lawfare Editor-in-Chef Benjamin Wittes spoke with Mak, who is reporting from the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv. They talked about two years of...
Mar 15, 2024•46 min
If you’re listening to this podcast, chances are you’ve heard stories about the CIA’s experiments with drugs, particularly LSD, during the infamous MKUltra program. But you may not know that the characters involved in that dubious effort connect to one of the 20th Century’s most famous and revered scientists, the anthropologist Margaret Mead. Shane Harris talked with historian Benjamin Breen about this new book, Tripping on Utopia , which tells the story of how Mead and her clos...
Mar 14, 2024•1 hr 24 min
On March 13, Judge McAfee released an order quashing six counts in the Fulton County electoral interference indictment against former President Trump and his numerous co-defendants. These charges were related to alleged solicitation of violations of oath of office, and Judge McAfee quashed the charges due to insufficient evidence. To talk over the order and its implications, Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Lawfare Legal Fellow Anna Bower and Anthony Michael Kreis for a live...
Mar 14, 2024•44 min
On February 28, the Biden administration issued an Executive Order (EO) entitled “Preventing Access to Americans’ Bulk Sensitive Personal Data and United States Government-Related Data by Countries of Concern.” Lawfare Senior Editor Stephanie Pell sat down with Devin DeBacker and Lee Licata, the Chief and one of the Deputy Chiefs of the Foreign Investment Review Section in the National Security Division at the Department of Justice, to talk about this new EO and the ways in which it attempts to ...
Mar 13, 2024•44 min
Progress in deepfake technology and artificial intelligence can make manipulated media hard to identify, making deepfakes an appealing tool for governments seeking to advance their national security objectives. But in a low-trust information environment, balancing the risks and rewards of a government-run deepfake campaign is trickier than it may seem. To talk through how democracies should think about using deepfakes, Lawfare 's Fellow in Technology Policy and Law, Eugenia Lostri, was joined by...
Mar 12, 2024•57 min
On March 4, the Supreme Court ruled in Trump v. Anderson , holding that states cannot disqualify Donald Trump from appearing on the presidential ballot under Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment. Section 3 bars former officeholders who have since engaged in insurrection from taking future public office—and in recent months, a slew of lawsuits from voters and advocacy groups have pointed to the provision in seeking to strike Trump from the ballot in various states for his conduct on Jan. 6. The ...
Mar 11, 2024•49 min
This week on Rational Security , Lawfare Managing Editor Tyler McBrien joined Alan, Quinta, and Scott to discuss the week's big national security news, including: “Operation Humbled Drop.” After months of unsuccessfully pushing the Israeli government to allow more aid into besieged Gaza, the Biden administration has taken matters into its own hands and begun airlifting it in itself. But are its efforts just for show, or a sign that it is abandoning its “bear hug” approach to Israeli ...
Mar 10, 2024•1 hr 16 min
It's another episode of “Trump's Trials and Tribulations,” recorded on March 7 in front of a live audience on YouTube and Riverside. Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Lawfare Senior Editor Roger Parloff and Lawfare Legal Fellow and Courts Correspondent Anna Bower to talk about recent filings in the Southern District of Florida and what Judge Cannon needs to rule on. They also discussed motions filed in Fulton County, the Supreme Court's ruling overturning the Colora...
Mar 09, 2024•1 hr 24 min
From September 28, 2019: At the Texas Tribune Festival in Austin, Texas, Benjamin Wittes sat down in front of a live audience with Judge John Bates, a senior district judge on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. Bates has served on the court since 2001, and from 2009 to 2013, he served as the presiding judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) Court. Wittes and Judge Bates talked about the role of the FISA Court, its procedures and caseload, its recent prominence in...
Mar 09, 2024•1 hr 1 min
The practice of surveillance capitalism—the widespread private collection and commodification of personal data—is well understood. Less well understood is the extent to which the U.S. government purchases this data in the commercial marketplace to use it for intelligence and law enforcement purposes. Byron Tau, when he was a reporter with The Wall Street Journal, did more than anyone to bring this practice to public light. Jack Goldsmith sat down recently with Tau to discuss his new book o...
Mar 08, 2024•38 min
Jonna Mendez advanced in her Central Intelligence Agency career to become Chief of Disguise despite the many institutional challenges to women's promotions. And now she has written a memoir, In True Face , about it all. David Priess spoke with Jonna about career options for women at CIA in the early Cold War, her own start there in the 1960s, how photography classes set her on a path that ultimately led to service as Chief of Disguise, her interactions over the decades with Tony Mendez, the tand...
Mar 07, 2024•1 hr 27 min
Everyone agrees that the United States has a serious cybersecurity problem. But how to fix it—that's another question entirely. Over the past decade, a consensus has emerged across multiple administrations that NIST—the National Institute of Standards and Technology—is the right body to set cybersecurity standards for both the government and private industry. Alan Rozenshtein, Associate Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota and Senior Editor at Lawfare , spoke with Bryan Choi, who argu...
Mar 07, 2024•45 min
Executive branch constraints and the posture of the media have shifted in significant ways over the past two decades. Lyrissa Lidsky and Christina Koningisor, law professors at the University of Florida and the University of California San Francisco, respectively, argue in a forthcoming law review article that these changes—including the erosion of certain post-Watergate reforms and the decline of local news—have created a First Amendment disequilibrium. They contend that the twin as...
Mar 06, 2024•51 min
In mid-February, Chinese cybersecurity firm i-Soon appeared to suffer a massive data leak, which offered unprecedented insight into the operations of the company, known to contract for many Chinese government agencies. The more than 500 documents include conversations between employees, sales pitches, and internal documents, and expose the firm’s hacking methods, tools, and victims. They also show in what ways the offensive cyber industries in China and the U.S. are surprisingly similar. Eugenia...
Mar 05, 2024•37 min
