Itsiq Benizri, counsel in WilmerHale’s Brussels office, joins Kevin Frazier, Assistant Professor at St. Thomas University College of Law and a Tarbell Fellow at Lawfare , to review the shocking and significant resignation of former European Commissioner Thierry Breton. Breton served as the EU’s commissioner for the internal market and played a major role in shaping and enforcing the EU’s digital regulations. To receive ad-free podcasts, become a Lawfare Material Supporter at ww...
Sep 25, 2024•34 min
The explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger in January 1986 riveted millions of Americans, who watched the horrific event live on television. What they didn’t know then was that the tragedy was largely preventable, a disastrous result of hubris and “magical thinking” as much as flawed engineering. Journalist Adam Higginbotham’s new book, “Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space,” is a definitive account of what went wrong, and how NASA failed to le...
Sep 24, 2024•1 hr 23 min
Israel and Hezbollah seem to be headed for a major war. Over the past several weeks, Israel has taken a series of escalatory steps along its northern border, targeting major Hezbollah figures, blowing up pagers used by thousands of Hezbollah operatives, and—most recently—hitting targets all over southern Lebanon associated with Hezbollah. Will it lead to all-out war? Lawfare ’s Editor-in-Chief, Benjamin Wittes, sat down with Senior Editor Scott R. Anderson and Foreign Policy Editor Daniel Byman ...
Sep 24, 2024•56 min
Lindsay Chervinsky is the Executive Director of the George Washington Library at Mount Vernon. She is also the author of a much celebrated new book on the John Adams presidency that is focused primarily on the national security decision-making of the second president and how it set norms for the conduct of the presidency and its powers with which we still live today. She sat down with Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes to talk about how Adams defended presidential power while it was under a...
Sep 23, 2024•1 hr 8 min
From: January 5, 2022: Two years ago this week, the head of the Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, Qassem Soleimani, was killed in an American strike. At the time, we convened a group of Brookings and Lawfare experts to talk about the potential benefits and risks of the strike, and two years later, we got the gang back together. Benjamin Wittes sat down with Suzanne Maloney, the head of Foreign Policy program at Brookings and an Iran specialist; Dan Byman, terro...
Sep 22, 2024•52 min
This episode of “Trump's Trials and Tribulations,” was recorded on September 19 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 about Judge McAfee’s order dismissing 3 counts from the Fulton County indictment, what filings we are waiting on in D.C., a recent New York Times story on the Supreme Court’s handling of this term’s Trump cases, and more. Learn ...
Sep 21, 2024•1 hr 22 min
Bob Bauer, Professor of Practice and Distinguished Scholar in Residence at New York University School of Law, and Liza Goitein, Senior Director of Liberty & National Security at the Brennan Center, join Kevin Frazier, Assistant Professor at St. Thomas University College of Law and a Tarbell Fellow at Lawfare , to review the emergency powers afforded to the president under the National Emergency Act, International Emergency Economic Powers Act, and the Insurrection Act. The trio also inspect ...
Sep 20, 2024•47 min
This week, Scott sat down with Lawfare team members Alan Rozenshtein, Tyler McBrien, and RatSec newbie Anastasiia "Nastya" Lapatina to talk through the week's national security headlines, including: “A Shot Across the Rubicon.” Reports indicate that President Biden and his U.K. allies may be on the verge of giving Ukraine approval to use their advanced weapons systems to strike deep into Russia, despite Russian President Vladimir Putin’s threat that doing so would be seen as an act o...
Sep 19, 2024•1 hr 13 min
On April 14, 2022, New York Times technology reporters Kate Conger and Ryan Mac woke up to a stunning four-word tweet from Elon Musk’s Twitter account: “I made an offer.” Having long covered the technology and social media beat, they read Musk’s terse post as the “unbelievable but inevitable culmination of two storylines we had pursued for a decade as journalists in Silicon Valley.” On today’s episode, Lawfare Managing Editor Tyler McBrien spoke to Conger and Mac about the cloak-and-...
Sep 19, 2024•42 min
Science journalist Sarah Scoles has written extensively about astronomy and the UFO community, including in her 2021 book They Are Already Here . She joined David Priess to discuss how scientists look at ETs, pop cultural takes on first contact with extraterrestrials, the incredible influence of Carl Sagan's Contact , the Allan Hills meteorite, the evolution over time of beliefs about aliens contacting humans, how the Roswell myth emerged, the International U...
Sep 18, 2024•1 hr 11 min
Jane Bambauer, Professor at Levin College of Law; Ramya Krishnan, Senior Staff Attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute and a lecturer in law at Columbia Law School; Alan Rozenshtein, Associate Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota Law School and a Senior Editor at Lawfare , join Kevin Frazier, Assistant Professor at St. Thomas University College of Law and a Tarbell Fellow at Lawfare , to break down the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals’ hearing in TikTok v. Garland , in whi...
Sep 18, 2024•42 min
For today’s episode, Lawfare senior editor Scott R. Anderson sat down with Joel Braunold, Managing Director of the S. Daniel Abraham Center for Middle East Peace, for a deep dive on the current state of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in these last few weeks before what could be a pivotal U.S. election. They discussed the state of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing coalition, recent developments relating to al-Haram al-Sharif and the West Bank, the state of Israel’s ...
Sep 17, 2024•1 hr
It's been a rough couple of weeks in Ukraine, as Russian forces have hit major cities with intense bombardments, killing an unusually large number of people. Moreover, the front in Donetsk continues to erode. On the other hand, Ukrainian forces are still in Kursk, occupying about 500 square miles of Russian territory, in an embarrassing show of forces to the Russians, and discussions continue with Western governments about relaxing restrictions on Ukrainian use of long-range missiles inside of R...
Sep 17, 2024•46 min
Gharun Lacy has an unusual job. He’s the head of cybersecurity at the State Department, responsible for securing computers and their users in every embassy and consulate and responsible for making sure senior diplomats can communicate securely even in the most forbidding overseas environments. In a wide-ranging conversation, he sat down with Lawfare ’s Benjamin Wittes to talk about the challenging work of the Diplomatic Security Service generally and its work in the cyber and technology security...
Sep 16, 2024•50 min
From December 24, 2016: Whatever the President-elect might say on the matter, the question of Russian interference in the presidential election is not going away: calls continue in the Senate for an investigation into the Kremlin's meddling, and the security firm Crowdstrike recently released new information linking one of the two entities responsible for the DNC hack with Russia's military intelligence agency. So how should the United States respond? In War on the Rocks, ...
Sep 15, 2024•47 min
In a live recording on September 10, Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes moderated a panel discussion featuring Lawfare Senior Editor and Brookings Fellow Scott R. Anderson, Co-Founder and Chairman of Silverado Policy Accelerator Dmitri Alperovitch, American Enterprise Institute Senior Fellow Kori Schake, and the Center for Middle East Policy Director and Brookings Senior Fellow Natan Sachs. They discussed Harris’s policy positions on U.S. military and eco...
Sep 14, 2024•1 hr 39 min
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
