Helen Toner, Director of Strategy and Foundational Research Grants at Georgetown University's Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET), and Zach Arnold, Analytic Lead at Georgetown University's Center for Security and Emerging Technology, join Kevin Frazier, Assistant Professor at St. Thomas University College of Law and a Tarbell Fellow at Lawfare , to discuss their recent article " AI Regulation's Champions Can Seize Common Ground—or Be Swept Aside. " The trio explore the divide betw...
Sep 13, 2024•38 min
In the debut episode of RatSec 2.1, Scott sat down with his Lawfare colleagues Kevin Frazier, Eugenia Lostri, and Benjamin Wittes to talk over the week’s big national security news, including: “I Have Concepts of a Segment Topic.” On Tuesday, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump faced off in what might end up being the only presidential debate between the two candidates in the 2024 election. What did it tell us about how national security is figuring into this election? “Running Political Interf...
Sep 12, 2024•1 hr 20 min
Without new congressional authorization for its post-Oct. 7 operations in the Middle East, the Biden administration has sought to legally justify its military activities in the region based on the president’s constitutional authority and the application of existing statutory authorities to operations against new adversaries. These executive branch arguments are the outgrowth of similar arguments presidential administrations have made over the last few decades, largely related to the requirements...
Sep 12, 2024•1 hr
On Aug. 8, the international community concluded its final negotiations at the United Nations over an international cybercrime treaty. The negotiation—a Russian proposal—was intended to harmonize global efforts to combat transnational cybercrime. However, the treaty has come under intense criticism from civil society, human rights advocates, and industry. Lawfare Fellow in Technology Policy and Law Eugenia Lostri sits down with Nick Ashton-Hart, Senior Director for Digital Economy Policy f...
Sep 11, 2024•52 min
Council on Foreign Relations fellow, Washington Post columnist, and author of military history books Max Boot has just completed a definitive biography of Ronald Reagan, eleven years after starting his research and writing for it. He joined David Priess to talk all about Reagan, including his appeal as a biography subject, his World War II experience, his speech preparation, his turn from New Deal Democrat to right-wing Republican, his path to electoral politics, his management st...
Sep 10, 2024•1 hr 25 min
For today’s episode, Lawfare General Counsel and Senior Editor Scott R. Anderson sat down with Andrew Miller, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress who was, until recently, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Israeli-Palestinian Affairs. They discussed how the Israeli-Palestinian conflict fit into the Biden administration’s broader foreign policy strategy, how the Oct. 7 massacre and ensuing Gaza war have changed this calculus, and where U.S. policy is likely to go from her...
Sep 10, 2024•1 hr 17 min
Lawfare Fellow in Technology Policy and Law Eugenia Lostri sits down with John Speed Meyers, head of Chainguard Labs, and Paul Gibert, a research scientist at Chainguard Labs to talk about the distinct challenges of securing open source software (OSS). They discuss what sorts of harms OSS compromises can lead to, how Log4J opened a political window for action on OSS security, and how the software liability debate affects OSS developers. Meyers and Gibert authored a Lawfare arti...
Sep 09, 2024•48 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...
Sep 08, 2024•43 min
This episode of “Trump's Trials and Tribulations,” was recorded on September 5 in front of a live audience on YouTube and Zoom. Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes spoke to Lawfare Senior Editors Anna Bower and Roger Parloff Thursday’s hearing in the D.C. case, Judge Chutkan’s scheduling order on the briefing on the immunity issue, Trump’s efforts to remove his New York hush money and election interference case to federal court, and an interesting amicus brief i...
Sep 07, 2024•1 hr 30 min
It’s been a busy week in the world of social media and technology platforms. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg sent an odd letter to the House Judiciary Committee apparently disclaiming some of his company’s past content moderation efforts. Telegram founder Pavel Durov was arrested in France on a wide range of charges involving an investigation into the misuse of his platform. And Elon Musk is engaged in an ongoing battle with Brazilian courts, which have banned access to Twitter ...
Sep 06, 2024•49 min
This week, Alan, Quinta, and Scott celebrated the third anniversary of Rational Security 2.0 with their Lawfare colleagues Molly Reynolds, Natalie Orpett, and Tyler McBrien, who sat in brutal judgment as the three co-hosts pitched them their hottest takes yet, including: Are concerns about judicial ethics overblown? Do ethics require that we open the borders and make whoever wants to become one a citizen? Should we just treat AI systems like the wild animals they are? Which takes are...
Sep 05, 2024•1 hr 11 min
As Robbie Gramer and Amy Mackinnon wrote in Foreign Policy , “If you want to learn more about the U.S. Democratic Party’s foreign-policy vision as the Democratic National Convention (DNC) gets underway this week, you have two options: a webpage that apparently hasn’t been updated in three years or a massive PDF document that is still written as if President Joe Biden, not Vice President Kamala Harris, is the party’s candidate.” In other words, figuring out what a potential Harris administr...
Sep 05, 2024•38 min
Duncan McLaren, Climate Intervention Fellow in Environmental Law and Policy at UCLA, joins Kevin Frazier, a Tarbell Fellow at Lawfare , to discuss geoengineering in light of a recent New York Times article detailing prior efforts to conduct climate interventions, namely the SCoPEx project . This conversation explores the history of geoengineering, different geoengineering techniques, and the opportunity costs associated with further research in the field. To receive ad-free pod...
Sep 04, 2024•40 min
Walt Hickey is the Deputy Editor for Data and Analysis at Insider News, and the author of You Are What You Watch: How Movies and TV Affect Everything . His book explores the power of entertainment to change our beliefs, how we see ourselves, and how nations gain power.He joined Eugenia Lostri, Lawfare 's Fellow in Technology Policy and Law, to talk about how we use media to express our societal apprehensions, the ways in which the military, NASA and the CIA collaborate with Hollywood, and the so...
Sep 03, 2024•1 hr 31 min
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
