Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota Law School and Lawfare Senior Editor Alan Rozenshtein sits down with Kevin Frazier, Assistant Professor of Law at St. Thomas University College of Law, Co-Director of the Center for Law and AI Risk, and a Tarbell Fellow at Lawfare . They discuss a new paper that Kevin has published as part of Lawfare ’s ongoing Digital Social Contract paper series titled “ Prioritizing International AI Research, Not Regulations .” Frazier sheds light on the curr...
Sep 03, 2024•33 min
From October 28, 2022: There's been a lot of discussion about whether Donald Trump should be indicted. Lately, that discussion has focused on the documents the FBI seized from Mar-a-lago or the Jan. 6 committee's revelations about his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. But what about his speech on the ellipse on Jan. 6 when he told a crowd of thousands to “fight like hell,” and they went on to attack the Capitol? Isn't that incitement? Lawfare executive editor Natalie Orpett sat down w...
Sep 02, 2024•43 min
From October 30, 2020: Laura Rosenberger is the director of the Alliance for Securing Democracy and a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States. She was foreign policy advisor for the Hillary Clinton campaign four years ago, where she had to respond to Russian information operations against the campaign in real time. She has been working on combating foreign interference in U.S. domestic politics ever since, and she is the author of two recent significant articles— one in Fo...
Sep 01, 2024•46 min
From January 8, 2021: The storming of the Capitol on Wednesday was a catastrophic failure of protective law enforcement, as rioters overran Capitol Police barricades and gained access to a building that a lot of police were supposed to be protecting. How did it happen? Who screwed up? And what can be done about it? Benjamin Wittes sat down with Fred Burton, the executive director of the Center for Protective Intelligence at Ontic and a former protective officer; Garrett Graff, a journalist who c...
Aug 31, 2024•48 min
Elliot Jones, a Senior Researcher at the Ada Lovelace Institute, joins Kevin Frazier, Assistant Professor at St. Thomas University College of Law and a Tarbell Fellow at Lawfare , to discuss a report he co-authored on the current state of efforts to test AI systems. The pair break down why evaluations, audits, and related assessments have become a key part of AI regulation. They also analyze why it may take some time for those assessments to be as robust as hoped. To receive ad...
Aug 30, 2024•38 min
This week, Quinta and Scott were joined by Lawfare Managing Editor Tyler "Spicy Tyler" McBrien to talk through the week's big national security news stories, including: “Jack Smith Takes a Mulligan on his Big Swing.” A grand jury has re-indicted former President Trump for his actions relating to the Jan. 6 insurrection, after Special Counsel Jack Smith trimmed and massaged the allegations to accommodate the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on presidential immunity. How different is this indictment?...
Aug 29, 2024•1 hr 8 min
This episode of “Trump's Trials and Tribulations,” was recorded on August 28 in front of a live audience on YouTube and Zoom. Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes spoke to Lawfare Senior Editors Anna Bower, Quinta Jurecic, and Roger Parloff about Special Counsel Jack Smith’s superseding indictment against former President Trump in the Jan. 6 prosecution, how it differs from the original indictment, and more. To receive ad-free podcasts, become a L...
Aug 29, 2024•54 min
On today’s episode, Vanda Felbab-Brown, Director of the Initiative on Nonstate Armed Actors, Co-Director of the Africa Security Initiative, and Senior Fellow in Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institution joins Lawfare Managing Editor Tyler McBrien to help make sense of the recent skirmishes in northern Mali between the junta, separatist groups, Islamists, and Russian mercenaries. They discuss what the recent ambush in Mali portends for Russian and Russian-aligned mercenaries' ...
Aug 28, 2024•38 min
For more than 40 years, Peter Clement has studied Russian political culture and leaders--serving for most of that time as an analyst, manager, and executive at the CIA before his retirement in 2018. He has PhD in Russian history, teaches at Columbia University, and has thought long and hard about what makes Vladimir Putin tick. He joined David Priess to discuss his road to studying Russia as a career, the art of Kremlinology, Putin's rise, Putin's feelings abou...
Aug 27, 2024•1 hr 26 min
On today’s episode, Sherri Goodman, the Secretary General of the International Military Council on Climate & Security and the first Deputy Undersecretary of Defense (Environmental Security) joins Lawfare Managing Editor Tyler McBrien to talk about Sherri’s new book, “Threat Multiplier: Climate, Military Leadership, and the Fight for Global Security.” They discuss Sherri’s career in climate security, beginning at the Senate Armed Services Committee before “climate security” ...
Aug 27, 2024•54 min
Lawfare Fellow in Technology Policy and Law Eugenia Lostri sits down with Esteban Carisimo, a Postdoctoral Researcher at Northwestern University to talk about the digital repression in Venezuela after the recent elections. Carisimo co-authored a recent report on the effects of the Venezuelan crisis on internet infrastructure. They discuss how internet censorship impacts the protests, how Venezuela's infrastructure compares to other countries in the region, and what the path to ...
Aug 26, 2024•37 min
From April 26, 2023: 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 ...
Aug 25, 2024•54 min
From November 1, 2022: In recent weeks, the Biden administration has released a trio of long-awaited strategy documents, including the National Security Strategy , the National Defense Strategy , and the Nuclear Posture Review. But how should we read these documents, and what do they actually tell us about how the Biden administration intends to approach the world? To answer these questions, Lawfare senior editor Scott R. Anderson sat down with Richard Fontain...
Aug 24, 2024•51 min
Richard Albert, William Stamps Farish Professor in Law, Professor of Government, and Director of Constitutional Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, joins Kevin Frazier, Assistant Professor at St. Thomas University College of Law and a Tarbell Fellow at Lawfare , to conduct a comparative analysis of what helps constitutions withstand political pressures. Richard’s extensive study of different means to amend constitutions shapes their conversation about whether the U.S. Constitution has ...
Aug 23, 2024•46 min
This week, Alan and Quinta sat down with Molly Reynolds and Kevin Frazier to talk about the week’s big developments, including: “It can always get worse…” Although President Biden’s replacement by Vice President Kamala Harris at the top of the Democratic ticket has reenergized the Democrats’ bid to retain the White House, the race is still a tossup, and former President Trump could well reenter the White House in 2025. Have we successfully “Trump-proofed” the government in anticipation? “R...
Aug 22, 2024•1 hr 12 min
Anastasiia Lapatina is a Kyiv-based Ukraine Fellow at Lawfare . Leopoldo Lopez is a Venezuelan opposition leader living in exile in Madrid, after escaping prison for leading protests against Nicolás Maduro in 2014. Lapatina and Lopez discuss the results of Venezuela’s recent presidential election, ties between Venezuela’s autocrat Nicolás Maduro and other dictatorships, and the path forward for Venezuela after the rigged election. To receive ad-free podcasts, become a Lawfare Materia...
Aug 22, 2024•25 min
The fallout from the SolarWinds intrusion took a new turn with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) decision to file a cybersecurity-related enforcement action against the SolarWinds corporation and its Chief Information Security Officer (CISO), Timothy G. Brown, in October of 2023. But In July, District Court Judge Paul A. Engelmayer dismissed a number of charges in the SEC’s complaint against SolarWinds and Brown. To talk about this significant development in the case, Ste...
Aug 21, 2024•36 min
It’s January 6, 2025. Congress has convened to certify electoral votes in the presidential election. But members of the U.S. military are in revolt, throwing their support behind the losing candidate. The legitimate president huddles in the Situation Room with his top advisers and Cabinet. They have six hours to prevent violent protests from exploding into civil war. That’s the dire scenario imagined in the new documentary “War Game.” Real-world experts--including former elected officials ...
Aug 20, 2024•1 hr 4 min
For today’s episode, Lawfare Senior Editor Scott R. Anderson and Lawfare Contributing Editor Brandon Van Grack sat down with Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Investment Security Paul Rosen to talk through the groundbreaking new national security-related outbound investment regulations his office is preparing at the direction of President Biden. Together, they discussed what concerns motivated the new regulations’ focus on China and emerging technologies, what exact...
Aug 20, 2024•41 min
As part of Lawfare ’s Security by Design Project , Eugenia Lostri, Lawfare ’s Fellow in Technology Policy and Law, and Justin Sherman, CEO of Global Cyber Strategies, published a new paper , “Security by Design in Practice: Assessing Concepts, Definitions and Approaches.” Lawfare Senior Editor Stephanie Pell talked with Eugenia and Justin about the paper’s exploration of the meaning of security by design, scalability solutions and processes for implementing sec...
Aug 19, 2024•53 min
From August 2, 2023: Over the past eighteen months, Ukraine has served as the stage for a proxy battle between superpowers, with the invading Russians on one side and a U.S.-led coalition of Western allies backing Ukraine on the other. As such, it’s the closest thing we’ve yet seen to what many military strategists believe will be the defining challenge of the next strategic era: a near-peer conflict between two or more technologically sophisticated major powers. In this way, the conflict has se...
Aug 18, 2024•59 min
This episode of “Trump's Trials and Tribulations,” was recorded on August 15 in front of a live audience on YouTube and Zoom. Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes spoke to Lawfare Legal Correspondent and Legal Fellow Anna Bower and Lawfare Senior Editor Roger Parloff about Judge Chutkan’s order granting Jack Smith’s motion for an extension of time, briefs filed in Trump’s appeal to disqualify DA Fani Willis from the Fulton County case, and took audien...
Aug 17, 2024•1 hr 27 min
French politics has had quite a summer. In early June, the French far-right made substantial gains in the European Union Parliament. The same day the results came down, French President Emmanuel Macron called snap elections, saying that the rise of nationalists and demagogues was a danger to France and Europe. It was a shocking and risky move. In the first round of elections, the far-right came in first, but after the second round, they were in third. Much of the media moved on after reporting o...
Aug 16, 2024•59 min
This week, the whole gang—Alan, Quinta, and Scott—got back together to discuss the week's big national security news, including: “In Post-Soviet Russia, Ukraine Invade You!” In an ironic reversal, Ukraine invaded Russia this past week, seizing substantial portions of the oblast of Kursk and surprising both Russian forces and Ukrainian allies in what appears to be its most successful military venture in more than a year. Why did Ukraine take this step? What will it mean in the longer arc of this ...
Aug 15, 2024•1 hr 9 min
Chris Hoofnagle, Visiting Senior Research Fellow at King’s College and Professor of Law in Residence at the UC Berkeley School of Law, joins Kevin Frazier, Assistant Professor at St. Thomas University College of Law and a Tarbell Fellow at Lawfare , and Eugenia Lostri, Lawfare 's Fellow in Technology Policy and Law, to discuss ALL things cybersecurity—its theory, history, and future. Much of their conversation turns on themes expressed in Hoofnagle’s textbook, “ Cybersecurity in Context ,” ...
Aug 15, 2024•38 min
Over the past week, Ukrainian forces have launched a major incursion into Russia proper, occupying 1,000 square kilometers in Kursk Oblast, which borders Ukraine. The operation, which caught both Russia and the United States by surprise, is the first major Ukrainian offensive in more than a year. In this episode, Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes sits down with Lawfare 's Ukraine Fellow Anastasiia Lapatina and Eric Ciaramella of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace to discuss the...
Aug 14, 2024•1 hr 13 min
Gina Bennett had a remarkable intelligence career of more than three decades, focusing on counterterrorism even before the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993 and continuing to apply that expertise long after 9/11. She has written a book about how national security and parenting lessons reinforce each other, taught students at Georgetown University, and mentored women entering national security careers. She joined David Priess to talk about her path into and through the intelligence communi...
Aug 13, 2024•1 hr 34 min
Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes sits down with MSNBC talk show host Rachel Maddow, creator of the new podcast series , Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra, Season II. They discuss the ideological aftermath of World War II on the American far right, the rise of Sen. Joe McCarthy, and the rhetorically incredible cast of characters around him. Why do we remember McCarthy merely as a fierce anticommunist demagogue and not as a neo-Nazi? To receive ad-free podcasts, become a Lawfar...
Aug 13, 2024•1 hr 7 min
Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes sits down with Katie Moussouris of Luta Security to talk bug bounties. Where do they come from? What is their proper role in cybersecurity? What are they good for, and most importantly, what are they not good for? Moussouris was among the hackers who first did bug bounties at scale—for Microsoft, and then for the Pentagon. Now she helps companies set up bug bounty programs and is dismayed by how they are being used. To receive ad-free podcasts,...
Aug 12, 2024•49 min
This episode of “Trump's Trials and Tribulations,” was recorded on August 8 in front of a live audience on YouTube and Zoom. Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes spoke to Lawfare Legal Correspondent and Legal Fellow Anna Bower and Lawfare Senior Editor Roger Parloff about what Judge Chutkan has been up to in D.C., state-level prosecutions of fake electors, and took audience questions from Lawfare material supporters. Support this show http...
Aug 11, 2024•1 hr 22 min
