The Lawfare Podcast

From July 7, 2020: David Priess is a former CIA briefer for the Attorney General and the FBI director, and he's the author of "The President's Book of Secrets: The Untold Story of Intelligence Briefings to America's Presidents." The president's daily brief has been in the news of late because of the Russia bounties story and the question of whether President Trump is actually internalizing the intelligence he is given in his daily briefing. Benjamin Wittes spoke with David about the history of the president's daily brief, how different presidents have gotten intelligence information and whether President Trump's behavior in this regard is exceptional or not.

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Yesterday was verdict day for the Proud Boys. Mid-morning, the jury notified Judge Tim Kelly that it had reached a partial verdict, and that partial verdict was “guilty of seditious conspiracy” for four of the five defendants. 

It was a big day for the Justice Department. To go over everything that happened, Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down for a live recording of the podcast with Lawfare Senior Editor Roger Parloff, who live-tweeted 61 days of the Proud Boys trial.

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Private equity firms rank among the largest employers in the United States and invest many billions of dollars in a wide variety of industries. Yet the public understanding of how private equity works and its impact on myriad areas of American life, including national security, remains limited.

Brendan Ballou is trying to change that. A federal prosecutor who works in the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice, he has written a new book, Plunder: Private Equity's Plan To Pillage America. David Priess spoke at length with him about his previous work in the Justice Department's National Security Division, his current role working antitrust issues, the origins of his interest in private equity, the business model of private equity, its effect on industries from mortgages to nursing homes, private equity's link to the SolarWinds hack, foreign involvement in private equity, the impact of private equity on U.S. competitiveness, and more.

Among the works mentioned in this episode:

The book Other People's Money and How the Bankers Use It by Louis Brandeis

The book Plunder: Private Equity's Plan To Pillage America by Brendan Ballou

The movie This Is Spinal Tap

The book Why the Innocent Plead Guilty and the Guilty Go Free by Jed Rakoff

The movie Alien

Chatter is a production of Lawfare and Goat Rodeo. This episode was produced and edited by Cara Shillenn of Goat Rodeo. Podcast theme by David Priess, featuring music created using Groovepad.

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At the core of the regulatory state is the notice and comment process. Agencies propose what they're going to do, the public gets to comment, and agencies have to respond to those comments. It's an imperfect system, to be sure, but it's fundamental to making sure that agencies act with good information and with democratic legitimacy.

So what happens when those comments start being made not by people, but by ChatGPT or other large language models? Or how about when agencies themselves use these AI tools to analyze the comments they receive, or even perhaps to write the regulations themselves?

To talk through these issues, Alan Rozenshtein, Associate Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota and Senior Editor at Lawfare, spoke with Bridget Dooling and Mark Febrizio, both of the George Washington University Regulatory Studies Center. They spoke about their recent Brooking Institution report on the issue and how they think the regulatory state should deal with generative AI.

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Risks associated with the rapid development and deployment of artificial intelligence are getting the attention of lawmakers. But one issue that may not be getting adequate attention by policymakers or by the AI research and cybersecurity communities is the vulnerability of many AI-based systems to adversarial attack. A new Stanford and Georgetown report, “Adversarial Machine Learning and Cybersecurity: Risks, Challenges, and Legal Implications,” offers a stark a reminder that security risks for AI-based systems are real and recommends actions that developers and policymakers can take to address the issues. 

Lawfare Senior Editor Stephanie Pell sat down with two of the report’s authors, Jim Dempsey, Senior Policy Advisor for the Program on Geopolitics, Technology, and Governance at the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, and Jonathan Spring, Cybersecurity Specialist at the Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). They talked about how AI-based systems are vulnerable to attack, the similarities and differences between vulnerabilities in AI-based systems and traditional software vulnerabilities, and how some of the challenges and problems with AI security may be social as much as they are technological.

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Generative AI products have been tearing up the headlines recently. Among the many issues these products raise is whether or not their outputs are protected by Section 230, the foundational statute that shields websites from liability for third-party content.

On this episode of Arbiters of Truth, Lawfare’s occasional series on the information ecosystem, Lawfare Senior Editor Quinta Jurecic and Matt Perault, Director of the Center on Technology and Policy at UNC-Chapel Hill, talked through this question with Senator Ron Wyden and Chris Cox, formerly a U.S. congressman and SEC chairman. Cox and Wyden drafted Section 230 together in 1996—and they’re skeptical that its protections apply to generative AI. 

Disclosure: Matt consults on tech policy issues, including with platforms that work on generative artificial intelligence products and have interests in the issues discussed.

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David Cohen is the Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, a position he held also during the Obama administration. He's also been Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence in the Department of the Treasury and a partner at the WilmerHale law firm.

David Kris, Lawfare contributor and former Assistant Attorney General for the National Security Division, and Bryan Cunningham, Lawfare contributor and Executive Director of the University of California, Irvine’s Cybersecurity Policy & Research Institute, sat down with David to talk about his career, including taking the same job twice; the coming debate about the FISA Amendments Act reauthorization; relationships between CIA and other U.S. government elements, particularly in cyber; the new CIA Transnational and Technology Mission Center; and the strategic competition between the United States and the People's Republic of China.

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As satellites around the planet proliferate, the tug they feel from international tensions seems to rival the gravitational pull exerted by the Earth itself. On issues from Space Traffic Management to scientific data sharing, the need for global cooperation is high but rarely easy.

Dr. Mariel Borowitz is head of the Program on International Affairs, Science, and Technology at Georgia Tech's Sam Nunn School of International Affairs, where she is an Associate Professor, and author of “Open Space: The Global Effort for Open Access to Environmental Satellite Data,” which dives deeply into the history of government agencies' and international organizations' tough choices about when and how to share scientific information collected by various orbiting platforms.

David Priess chatted with her about space diplomacy as a domain; auroras and satellites; the Artemis crew; the Space Force; the James Webb Space Telescope; working at NASA headquarters; the changing nature of satellite constellations; Starlink; Space Situational Awareness and Space Traffic Management; countries' choices about making data from satellites freely available; the evolution of LANDSAT; the history of satellite data sharing by entities in the United States, Europe, Russia, China, Japan, and India; the inhibiting effects of Russia's war in Ukraine; commercialization of satellite systems; how to grow space diplomats; and more.

Among the works mentioned in this episode:

• The movie 2001
• The movie 2010
• The movie The Martian
• The TV show The Expanse
• The movie Arrival
• Queen guitarist Brian May's work on the New Horizons mission
• The Chatter podcast episode Satellites, Space Debris, and Hollywood with Aaron Bateman
• The movie Gravity

Chatter is a production of Lawfare and Goat Rodeo. This episode was produced and edited by Cara Shillenn of Goat Rodeo. Podcast theme by David Priess, featuring music created using Groovepad.

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From May 13, 2020: Scott R. Anderson sat down with Elizabeth Shackelford, a former foreign service officer whose late 2017 resignation became a sign of growing discontent with the Trump administration within the diplomatic corps. They talked about her new book, "The Dissent Channel," out this week, which discusses her experience as a young diplomat living through a period of crisis in South Sudan, and the lessons it taught her about diplomacy, human rights and the role of the United States in the world.

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In 2018, news broke that Facebook had allowed third-party developers—including the controversial data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica—to obtain large quantities of user data in ways that users probably didn’t anticipate. The fallout led to a controversy over whether Cambridge Analytica had in some way swung the 2016 election for Trump (spoiler: it almost certainly didn’t), but it also generated a $5 billion fine imposed on Facebook by the FTC for violating users’ privacy. Along with that record-breaking fine, the FTC also imposed a number of requirements on Facebook to improve its approach to privacy. 

It’s been four years since that settlement, and Facebook is now Meta. So how much has really changed within the company? For this episode of Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, Lawfare Senior Editors Alan Rozenshtein and Quinta Jurecic interviewed Meta’s co-chief privacy officers, Erin Egan and Michel Protti, about the company’s approach to privacy and its response to the FTC’s settlement order.

At one point in the conversation, Quinta mentions a class action settlement over the Cambridge Analytica scandal. You can read more about the settlement here. Information about Facebook’s legal arguments regarding user privacy interests is available here and here, and you can find more details in the judge’s ruling denying Facebook’s motion to dismiss.

Note: Meta provides support for Lawfare’s Digital Social Contract paper series. This podcast episode is not part of that series, and Meta does not have any editorial role in Lawfare.

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The Proud Boys trial has gone to the jury. It is the longest Jan. 6 case to date and the third case to involve seditious conspiracy charges against senior Proud Boys and folks who ended up being the pointy end of the spear on Jan. 6, 2021. Two reporters have sat through the entire case: Lawfare Senior Editor Roger Parloff, and Brandi Buchman, who covered the case for the emptywheel site. Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with them to go over the trial, what case the government presented against Enrique Tarrio and his colleagues, the defenses, the holes in the case, and what we can reasonably expect from the jury.

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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 models, and the companies that make them, accountable for false statements they make? And what's the best way to deal with this problem: private lawsuits or government regulation?

On this episode of Arbiters of Truth, our series on the information ecosystem, Alan Rozenshtein, Associate Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota and Senior Editor at Lawfare, discussed these questions with First Amendment expert Eugene Volokh, Professor of Law at UCLA and the author of a draft paper entitled "Large Libel Models.”

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April is Sexual Assault Awareness and Prevention month. It’s a time—recognized by civilian and U.S. military communities—intended to promote the prevention of sexual violence, especially in U.S. armed forces. In light of Sexual Assault Awareness and Prevention month, Lawfare Associate Editor Katherine Pompilio sat down with author and attorney Ashley Merryman, who previously served at the Pentagon as Special Advisor for the Department of the Navy’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office. They discussed the prevalence of sexual assault and harassment at U.S. military academies, the dangerous shortcomings of the Pentagon's “lowest level” policy to address sexual harassment, how the policy came to be and why it persists, and policy recommendations for the future.

Listener discretion is advised. This episode contains discussion of sexual harassment and assault.

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Evan Gershkovich has been in Russian detention for the last several weeks. He is a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, and he’s the latest American taken hostage by the Vladimir Putin regime. His good friend Polina Ivanova is a reporter for the Financial Times, a colleague of Evan’s in Russia, and has been an outspoken advocate for his release. 

She joined Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes from Berlin to talk about Evan: who he is, why he has been detained by the Russians, what we know about his conditions in prison, and what it will take to get him home. 

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This week on Rational Security, Alan, Quinta, and Scott were joined by law professor extraordinaire Jed Shugerman to talk over his controversial take on the New York district attorney's case against former President Trump, among other items in the week's national security news, including:

• “If You Come at the King, You Best Not Whiff.” Former President Trump’s indictment on 34 counts of falsifying business records in the first degree under New York state law earlier this month has triggered a firestorm of controversy, with several commentators accusing New York district attorney Alvin Bragg of advancing a weak or flawed case. What should we make of Bragg’s case based on what we know so far? And what more information should we be looking for?
• “Factual Malice.” Fox News has settled the defamation lawsuit being pursued against it by Dominion Voting Systems for a record $787.5 million—but without having to make an on-air acknowledgement of its false statements. Does this settlement deal do justice? Should Dominion have proceeded differently?
• “Secret Chinese Agents, Huh?” Federal prosecutors have arrested two individuals in Brooklyn for operating a “secret police station” on behalf of the People’s Republic of China’s internal security forces, aimed at investigating and intimidating dissidents and other disfavored individuals. How should the United States and other governments approach these China-backed presences? Is criminal prosecution the right tool?

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From April 20, 2021: Jack Goldsmith sat down with Lee Bollinger, the president of Columbia University, and Geoffrey Stone, the Edward H. Levy Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago Law School, to discuss their new book, "National Security, Leaks and Freedom of the Press: The Pentagon Papers Fifty Years On." They discussed the holding and legacy of the Pentagon Papers case, as well as some of the many challenges of applying the Pentagon Papers regime in the modern digital era that is characterized by massive leaks and a very different press landscape than the one that prevailed in 1971.

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Over the past decade, North Korea has taken on an exceptional global role: a sovereign state believed to be at the head of an unprecedented international criminal network—one that is particularly active in cyberspace, where the North Korea-backed Lazarus Group is believed to have been responsible for several of the largest and most audacious incidents of hacking, ransomware, and outright theft of the modern era. 

Journalists Jean Lee and Geoff White have been documenting the Lazarus Group’s activities for the BBC. The second season of their podcast, “The Lazarus Heist,” is now available. Lawfare Senior Editor Scott R. Anderson sat down with them to discuss how this second season builds on the first, what the Lazarus Group has been up to, and what it all tells us about North Korea’s international position. They also gave us permission to share a preview for you, which plays after the discussion.

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In the last few months we've seen an explosion of new AI products, especially those built around large language models. And in response, we've also heard calls for far more aggressive government regulation. But what does it mean to regulate AI?

Margot Kaminski is an Associate Professor of Law at University of Colorado Law School. She's just published a paper for Laware's ongoing Digital Social Contract research paper series, in which she argues that the emerging law of artificial intelligence is converging around risk regulation. Alan Rozenshtein, Associate Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota and Senior Editor at Lawfare, spoke with Margot about what risk regulation means in the AI context and why she thinks that it has some serious drawbacks.

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Early this month, the Republican supermajority in the Tennessee House of Representatives voted to expel two Democratic lawmakers who had participated in a protest against gun violence on the House floor. The GOP also narrowly failed to expel a third Democrat. 

The two legislators who were expelled, Reps. Justin Pearson and Justin Jones, have now returned to the House. But the incident turned national attention on Tennessee’s struggling democracy. To discuss, Lawfare Senior Editor Quinta Jurecic spoke with Samar Ali, Research Professor of Political Science and Law at Vanderbilt University and Co-Chair of Vanderbilt’s Project on Unity & American Democracy, and Sekou Franklin, Professor of Political Science at Middle Tennessee State University, and the author—with Ray Block—of the book “Losing Power: African Americans and Racial Polarization in Tennessee Politics.” They explained how the expulsions should be understood as part of a larger process of democratic backsliding and misgovernment in Tennessee, and how that backsliding is itself part of a larger trend of democratic erosion at the subnational as well as the national level. 

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Chris Fonzone is the General Counsel of ODNI and has worked in senior legal roles at the Defense Department, the National Security Council, and the Department of Justice, and in the private sector as a partner at the Sidley Austin law firm. Laura Galante is the Intelligence Community's Cyber Executive and Director of ODNI’s Cyber Threat Intelligence Integration Center (CTIIC). She worked previously in a position that involves supporting Ukrainian government agencies on cyber defense in the Defense Intelligence Agency and in the private sector at Mandiant.

David Kris, Lawfare contributor and former Assistant Attorney General for the National Security Division, and Bryan Cunningham, Lawfare contributor and Executive Director of the University of California, Irvine’s Cybersecurity Policy & Research Institute, sat down with Chris and Laura to talk about their careers, the intra- and interagency issues in cyber policy and operations, the new National Cyber Strategy, and more.

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The Republic of Vanuatu, a small island nation in the South Pacific, just won a big victory in New York City. At the end of March, the UN General Assembly voted to adopt the request for an advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice on the obligations of states with respect to climate change.

To talk through what Vanuatu's general counsel called, “a diplomatic feat of Herculean proportions,” Lawfare Managing Editor Tyler McBrien sat down with Melissa Stewart, Assistant Professor of Law Designate at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa, and the author of a recent Lawfare article on the advisory opinion request and its potential risks and rewards. They discussed how an idea that began in an environmental law class in Fiji made it to the highest court in the world, what the ICJ might clarify or not, other efforts in international law to address climate change, and how territorial loss and other destructive effects from climate change could upend our traditional conception of statehood as we know it.

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Nancy Youssef has reported on war and conflict around the world and from Washington. As a young journalist, she went to Iraq and sensed early on that a war most presumed would be over quickly was only just beginning. Her career has taken her to Afghanistan, Egypt, and into the center of power at the Pentagon. Nancy is now a national security correspondent for The Wall Street Journal. 

In her conversation with Shane Harris, Nancy talks about her Journal colleague, Evan Gershkovich, who was arrested last month in Russia and accused of spying, charges that his family, his employer, and the U.S. government vociferously deny. Like Nancy, Evan is the child of immigrants. She says she admired his reporting for giving voice to the Russian people at a time of war. Nancy has seen other colleagues taken prisoner amid conflict and shared her thoughts about the risks that journalists face both in war zones and from states that see information as a weapon.  

Shane and Nancy are old friends and worked together at The Daily Beast, where they covered U.S. national security and foreign policy. 

Nancy’s work at The Wall Street Journal:  https://www.wsj.com/news/author/nancy-a-youssef 

Nancy on Twitter: https://twitter.com/nancyayoussef  

A recent profile on Evan Gershkovich from The Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/04/08/evan-gershkovich-russia-wsj-journalist-arrested-profile/ 

More on Austin Tice, a friend of Nancy’s who went missing in Syria: https://www.austinticefamily.com/ 

Chatter is a production of Lawfare and Goat Rodeo. This episode was produced and edited by Cara Shillenn of Goat Rodeo. Podcast theme by David Priess, featuring music created using Groovepad.

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From September 17, 2019: Tensions in the Middle East are at a high point. Over the weekend, large Saudi oil facilities were attacked. The Yemeni Houthis jumped in to claim responsibility. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo blamed Iran. President Trump tweets that the U.S. is 'locked and loaded' and ready for potential response. But what has actually happened in the Arabian Peninsula? What does the future hold for conflict between the Saudis and the Iranians? And what role will the United States have?

To talk it all through, Benjamin Wittes spoke with Gregory Johnsen, a researcher on Yemen and Middle East conflict; Suzanne Maloney, a Brookings senior fellow whose research centers on Iran; Samantha Gross, a fellow in the Cross-Brookings Initiative on Energy and Climate; and Scott R. Anderson, a fellow at the Brookings Institution and senior editor at Lawfare. They talked about what we know about what happened over the weekend, the geopolitical context for the attack, potential American responses, and the legal authorities that could justify American military action.

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Over the past few years, TikTok has become a uniquely polarizing social media platform. On the one hand, millions of users, especially those in their teens and twenties, love the app. On the other hand, the government is concerned that TikTok's vulnerability to pressure from the Chinese Communist Party makes it a serious national security threat. There's even talk of banning the app altogether. But would that be legal? In particular, does the First Amendment allow the government to ban an application that’s used by millions to communicate every day?

On this episode of Arbiters of Truth, our series on the information ecosystem, Matt Perault, director of the Center on Technology Policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Alan Z. Rozenshtein, Lawfare Senior Editor and Associate Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota, spoke with Ramya Krishnan, a staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, and Mary-Rose Papendrea, the Samuel Ashe Distinguished Professor of Constitutional Law at the University of North Carolina School of Law, to think through the legal and policy implications of a TikTok ban.

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A few weeks ago, China made headlines for brokering a deal between Iran and Saudi Arabia to thaw diplomatic relations after seven years of cutting ties and even more years of tense relations. Since then, we've already begun to see some downstream effects of this deal with significant movement on the war in Yemen and the reopening of Iran's embassy in Saudi Arabia.

This is a story with two major strands—one about the potential effects of a successful normalization between Saudi Arabia and Iran, and another about how China, and not the U.S., seems to have made it happen. To understand what all of this might mean for the region, Lawfare Associate Editor Hyemin Han talked to Lawfare Senior Editor Scott Anderson and CNAS Middle East Security Program Director Jonathan Lord about the contours of the deal, China's involvement in the process, and what to look out for as this deal ripens.

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Thomas Rid is a Professor of Strategic Studies at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. Aric Toler is the Director of Research and Training at Bellingcat. Both have been writing about the latest megaleak out of the U.S. national security establishment, a story that the New York Times reported on last week and that gets weirder and weirder every day that passes. Rid has been tweeting about the subject, and Toler is the author of a major investigation for Bellingcat on it.

Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with them to talk about the strange details of the leak: the Discord servers, the Minecraft servers, the weird group of gamers who are by their own account a bit racist, the huge damage to both U.S. and Ukrainian national security interests, and that the leak appears to be a big win for Russia, even though Russia doesn't appear to be behind it. 

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Document leaking has been in the news lately—and not just stories about the leaking of U.S. intelligence documents. On March 30, 2023, the Washington Post published a series of stories about the Vulkan files, an international investigative project based on thousands of pages of leaked documents from a Russian company that reveal new details about how Russian intelligence agencies seek to operate disinformation campaigns and enhance their ability to launch cyberattacks with the help of contractors. 

To talk about the Vulkan files, Lawfare Senior Editor Stephanie Pell sat down with Craig Timberg, Senior Editor for Collaborative Investigations at the Washington Post, who, along with his colleague Ellen Nakashima, has bylines on these stories. They talked about how the Washington Post got involved in this investigation, what the documents revealed about Russian cyber conflict, and what Craig considered to be some of the biggest takeaways from the documents.

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On March 23, 2023, an Indian court found Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s principal opposition leader, Rahul Gandhi, guilty of defaming the Prime Minister and the Modi surname. He was sentenced to two years in prison and expelled from Parliament in what journalists and pro-democracy groups view as yet another inflection point of democratic decline under Modi’s leadership. 

To understand the challenges facing Indian society and the current deterioration of India’s democracy, Lawfare Legal Fellow Saraphin Dhanani sat down with Debasish Roy Chowdhury an Indian journalist based in Hong Kong and Calcutta, who has written extensively on Indian politics, society, and geopolitics. He co-authored a book titled “To Kill a Democracy: India’s Passage to Despotism,” which paints a chilling history and reality of the state of Indian democracy. They discussed the Rahul Gandhi case, the spillover of Hindu nationalism into mainstream politics under Modi’s leadership, and the future of India’s democracy. 

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This week on Rational Security, Quinta and Scott were joined by Lawfare Managing Editor Tyler McBrien to celebrate the return of the complete media madhouse and talk through the week’s big stories, including:

• I’m So Indicted and I Just Can’t Fight It.” Donald Trump became the first former president to be indicted this past week—and he celebrated with a speech from his Mar-a-Lago estate that painted the charges against him as a partisan witch-hunt. How big a step is this? And where is it likely to lead?
• “(Re)Press Pass.” Russia has jailed Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and is preparing to prosecute him on espionage charges. What appears to be driving Russia’s decision? And how should the rest of the world respond?
• “Crossing the Finnish Line.” Finland became NATO’s newest member this week, doubling the alliance’s shared border with Russia. What does an expanding NATO mean for security in Europe?

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From August 2, 2014: This week, Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes asked three of his colleagues—all from the Brookings Center on Middle East Policy—to chat about Gaza: Natan Sachs is a specialist in Israeli politics; Khaled Elgindy has served as an advisor to the Palestinian leadership on final status negotiations; and Tamara Cofman Wittes directs the center and served as deputy assistant secretary of state during the Arab Spring. (She is also, by the way, married to someone somehow connected to this site.) It's a great discussion: informative, not shrill, depressing, yet constructive.

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Rob Joyce is the Director of the Cybersecurity Directorate at the National Security Agency. He's been NSA's top cryptologic representative in the United Kingdom and has also worked in the U.S. National Security Council. 

David Kris, Lawfare contributor and former Assistant Attorney General for the National Security Division, and Bryan Cunningham, Lawfare contributor and Executive Director of the University of California, Irvine’s Cybersecurity Policy & Research Institute, sat down with Rob to talk about his career trajectory, the quantum decryption threat, strategic competition in cyber with the People's Republic of China, and cooperation between the private sector and the government in cyberspace.

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Finland is in NATO. This week, the ratification was made complete, and the country joined the North Atlantic alliance. To talk through how it got there, Lawfare Publisher David Priess sat down with two research fellows at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs in Helsinki: Henri Vanhanen, who has also served as a foreign policy advisor to the National Coalition Party, which recently won the most seats in the Finnish parliament and is in the process of forming a government, and Minna Ålander, a research fellow who, like Henri, has recently written for Lawfare and has been on the podcast previously to talk about Finnish security issues. They talked about the long road to get to NATO membership for Finland, what Finland brings to NATO, and what NATO brings to Finland.

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The grand jury indictment of Donald Trump in the Supreme Court of the State of New York has been unsealed. It involves Stormy Daniels, Karen McDougal, David Pecker, the famous doorman, Trump Tower, and a lot of salacious stuff—and 34 counts of falsified business records with intent to facilitate other crimes.

On this emergency edition of the Lawfare Podcast, Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down to unpack it all with Rebecca Roiphe of the New York Law School, Lawfare Senior Editor Quinta Jurecic, Lawfare's Fulton County correspondent Anna Bower, and Lawfare Legal Fellow Saraphin Dhanani.

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Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has tested the international legal order like never before. For many, the fact that a nuclear power and member of the U.N. Security Council would commit unveiled aggression against another state seemed like it might be the death knell of the international system as we know it. 

But last week, in the annual Breyer Lecture on International Law at the Brookings Institution, Oona Hathaway, the Gerard C. and Bernice Latrobe Professor of International Law at Yale Law School, argued that international law and institutions responded more robustly than many initially anticipated—and may yet emerge from the Ukraine conflict stronger than before.

In this episode, we are bringing you the audio of Professor Hathaway’s lecture, followed by a question and answer session with Constanze Stelzenmüller, the Director of the Center on the United States and Europe and the inaugural holder of the Fritz Stern Chair on Germany and trans-Atlantic Relations at the Brookings Institution. Lawfare Senior Editor Scott R. Anderson then moderated a panel discussion that included Professor Hathaway, as well as Professor Rosa Brooks of Georgetown University Law Center; Karin Landgren, the Executive Director of Security Council Report; and Ambassador Martin Kimani, Kenya’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations. 

More information on the Breyer Lecture is available on the Brookings Institution’s website.

A video recording of Professor Hathaway’s lecture is available at https://www.brookings.edu/events/russias-aggression-against-ukraine-and-the-international-legal-order/.

The text of Professor Hathaway’s lecture has been published at https://www.brookings.edu/on-the-record/how-russias-invasion-of-ukraine-tested-the-international-legal-order/.

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Hosted by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation Cyber Initiative and Aspen Digital, Verify 2023 brings together journalists and cyber and tech policy experts to discuss critical issues in cybersecurity. For this live recording of the Lawfare Podcast, Benjamin Wittes sat down at Verify 2023 with Alex Stamos of the Stanford Internet Observatory; Nicole Perlroth, formerly of the New York Times and the author of a recent book on zero days; and Dave Willner, the Head of Trust & Safety at OpenAI, the company that produces ChatGPT. They talked about cybersecurity and AI, the threats to AI algorithms, the threats from AI algorithms, and the threats from humans misusing large language models. 

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Misperceptions about nuclear proliferation attempts abound, particularly when we find authoritarian leaders involved. It is easy to picture these determined owners of nuclear weapons as omnipotent, unconstrained micromanagers—willing and able to do whatever is necessary to take their country over the threshold.

Political scientist Målfrid Braut-Hegghammer disagrees. She conducted extensive research in IAEA and other archives as well as in-depth interviews with senior scientists and regime officials from Iraq and Libya, including Muammar Gaddafi's son Saif Al-Islam Gaddafi. What she discovered led her to question much conventional wisdom about the Iraqi and Libyan nuclear programs, and about proliferation writ large. Her book “Unclear Physics”—which borrows its title from a typo in an Iraqi report from the late 1960s that characterized well the vague objectives of the early Iraqi nuclear program—presents intriguing information and insight on all of this.

David Priess speaks with Braut-Hegghammer about her interest in WMD proliferation, how she researched secretive nuclear programs, the value of archives, Iraq's quest for the bomb, the impact of Israel's strike on the Osirak reactor in 1981, how close Iraq was to breaking out when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, the origins of Libya's nuclear program, Gaddafi's turn to the A.Q. Khan network for the equipment and blueprints needed, implications for the potential proliferation paths of countries from North Korea and Iran to Saudi Arabia and South Korea, the rising salience of nuclear weapons in Arctic security debates, and Norwegian views on nuclear deterrence in today's evolving strategic environment.

Chatter is a production of Lawfare and Goat Rodeo. This episode was produced and edited by Cara Shillenn of Goat Rodeo. Podcast theme by David Priess, featuring music created using Groovepad.

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From January 8, 2019: The Russian government's recent arrest of American Paul Whelan and its charges against him have many politicians and pundits speculating about the possibility of an intended spy swap for Maria Butina. There's a lot going on here, but there's also a lot of misunderstanding about the history of spy swaps, what they are, and what they aren't.

Earlier this week, David Priess sat down with his former CIA colleague John Sipher to talk about it all. They discussed the history of spy swaps, the current case involving Paul Whelan, and prospects for some kind of a release.

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On March 27, the Biden administration issued an Executive Order on Prohibition on Use by the United States Government of Commercial Spyware that Poses Risks to National Security. The Executive Order, as the title says, limits executive departments and agencies from using commercial spyware if they determine that its use would present a counterintelligence or security risk to the U.S., or if it poses significant risks of improper use by a foreign government or person. 

To talk about the new executive order and its impact, Eugenia Lostri, Lawfare’s Fellow in Technology Policy and Law, sat down with Winnona DeSombre Bernsen, nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council. They talked about why this executive order is a welcomed development, how spyware companies might adjust their behavior in response, and what remains to be done to limit the misuse of these technologies.

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For months, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been promising a set of legal reforms favored by partners in his far-right coalition government that many fear would spell the end of liberal democracy in the state of Israel. But this week, these efforts hit a roadblock in the form of an unprecedented degree of popular resistance—one that ultimately led Netanyahu to put his reform proposals on hold, at least for the moment.

On Wednesday, Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Natan Sachs convened a panel of experts to discuss these fast-moving developments, including his Brookings colleagues Amos Harel, a leading Israeli military and defense expert, and Shibley Telhami, the Anwar Sadat Professor of Peace and Development at the University of Maryland, and leading Israeli journalist and legal expert Ilana Dayan. To give you some additional background, Lawfare Senior Editor and Brookings Fellow Scott R. Anderson sat down with Natan separately to lay out recent developments and their significance. That conversation will come first, and the panel discussion will follow.

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Tatyana Bolton is a Security Policy Manager working on cybersecurity at Google, and Dave Kleidermacher is the Vice President of Android Security & Privacy at Google. They are among the people at Google who are thinking about IoT, that is, Internet of Things security and privacy. They sat down with Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes to talk about Google's thinking on how to create a secure environment for all those little things that we have traveling with us, connected to our computers, running our houses, all connected to the internet, and all using different standards of security. How do we prevent them from being hijacked and turned into botnets? How do we prevent them from spying on us? How do we get them observing similar standards of security, and how do we do this across dozens of different countries, jurisdictions and regulatory environments, and platforms?

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States are increasingly turning to artificial intelligence systems to enhance their national security decision-making. The real risks that states will deploy unlawful or unreliable national security AI make international regulations seem appealing, but what's the right model for them?

Ashley Deeks is the Class of 1948 Professor of Scholarly Research in Law at the University of Virginia Law School. She's just published a paper for Laware's ongoing Digital Social Contract research paper series, in which she argues that, instead of looking to nuclear arms control as the model for national security AI regulation, states should look to how cyber operations are regulated. Lawfare Senior Editor Alan Rozenshtein spoke with Ashley about her research and what a successful regulatory regime for national security AI would look like.

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On the latest episode of Arbiters of Truth, Lawfare's series on the information ecosystem, Quinta Jurecic and Alan Rozenshtein spoke with Ravi Iyer, the Managing Director of the Psychology of Technology Institute at the University of Southern California's Neely Center.

Earlier in his career, Ravi held a number of positions at Meta, where he worked to make Facebook's algorithm provide actual value, not just "engagement," to users. Quinta and Alan spoke with Ravi about why he thinks that content moderation is a dead-end and why thinking about the design of technology is the way forward to make sure that technology serves us and not the other way around.

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This week on Rational Security, Alan, Quinta, and Scott waited for a big shoe to drop by talking over the week's big national security news, including:

• “What Else Can I Get Away With on Fifth Avenue...” Donald Trump is expected to become the first former president to be indicted on criminal charges this week—if, that is, local authorities are not deterred by the public protests Trump’s supporters are preparing to hold in New York City at his request. What will this move mean for the country? And how might it end? 
• “Territorial Refute.” After weeks of avoiding the issue, likely 2024 Republican presidential contender Ron Desantis adopted the position that supporting Ukraine—which he described as being involved in a “territorial dispute”—is not a vital U.S. interest, bringing him into alignment with former President Trump and signaling a strong lean towards isolationism in the 2024 Republican field. What will this mean for the likely candidates? And for U.S. support for Ukraine moving forward?
• “The ‘Blood, Treasure, and Regret’ Anniversary.” This past week marked the 20th anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, which set out to remove a dictator and welcome a new wave of democracy in the Middle East—but has instead resulted in an Iraq that is still recovering from years of sectarian violence and increasingly under Iran’s influence. What is the legacy of the decision to invade? And what does it mean for U.S. foreign policy moving forward?

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From April 28, 2021: The Biden administration has now responded to two major cyberattacks—one from Russia, the SolarWinds attack, and the other from China, the so-called Hafnium Microsoft Exchange Server attack. Recently, Lawfare has run articles on both of these incidents—a piece from Dmitri Alperovitch, the co-founder and former CTO of CrowdStrike, and a piece from Alex Iftimie, a former Justice Department official and a lawyer at Morrison & Foerster. They joined Benjamin Wittes to discuss the Biden administration's response to the attacks. Were they appropriate, both in absolute terms and in relation to each other? Do they send the right messages to the countries in question? Do they go far enough? And what more do we want to see?

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Last month, the Government Accountability Office released its latest report on the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, focusing on the failures of several government agencies to fully process and share information about a potential attack in the days and weeks leading up to January 6, 2021.

Lawfare Senior Editor and Brookings Senior Fellow Molly Reynolds sat down with NBC News Justice Reporter Ryan Reilly, who's reported broadly on law enforcement issues related to Jan. 6, and Lawfare Senior Editor Quinta Jurecic. They discussed what we know about how and why law enforcement struggled in the lead-up to the insurrection and the challenges for the road ahead.

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The open nature of the internet has allowed malicious actors to abuse technology. Information operations, offensive cyber, and IP theft are just some examples of this misuse. The Biden administration has pursued an industrial policy that hopes to counter the weaponization of globalized systems. This approach includes technology subsidies, export controls, and rethinking supply chains. But this approach could undermine efforts to advance global rules and values.

To discuss how the United States can push back while bolstering democracy and human rights, Eugenia Lostri, Lawfare’s Fellow in Technology Policy and Law, sat down with former Ambassador Karen Kornbluh, Managing Director of the Digital Innovation and Democracy Initiative and Senior Fellow with the German Marshall Fund. Ambassador Kornbluh is the lead author on the new GMF report “The New American Foreign Policy of Technology.” They discussed why there’s a need to rethink American foreign policy, how to center democratic values, and the crucial role of a multistakeholder approach.

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On December 31, 2023, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) will expire unless it is reauthorized by Congress. Section 702 authorizes the U.S. government, in order to obtain foreign intelligence information, to target foreigners who are reasonably believed to be outside of the U.S. and collect their communications inside the U.S. without a warrant—even when such surveillance may involve the incidental collection of communications of U.S. persons. Privacy and civil liberties advocates have long raised concerns about the government's ability to conduct so-called backdoor searches of U.S. person information acquired incidentally through the collection of the communications of foreigners. U.S.government officials have argued that it is imperative for Congress to reauthorize Section 702. 

To talk about Section 702 and its reauthorization, Lawfare Senior Editor Stephanie Pell sat down with Travis LeBlanc, a Member of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board and a partner at Cooley LLP. They discussed his concerns with the way the government may search or use U.S. person information incidentally collected under Section 702, the aspects of the government's position on reauthorization on which he may agree, and how he believes Congress should reform Section 702. 

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By many accounts, the United States is living through a new era of competition—not just between major powers and strategic rivals, but between ideologies. Around the world, many authoritarian governments seem to be on the rise, even as many liberal democracies are facing a crisis of confidence, including, by some accounts, here in the United States.

In a new book entitled, “Defeating the Dictators,” Charles Dunst, a former journalist and current deputy director of research and analytics at The Asia Group, lays out what he sees as the right strategy for making democracies more effective and defeating the appeal of authoritarian government. Lawfare Senior Editor Scott R. Anderson sat down with him to discuss his new book, the importance he places on Singapore as a case study, and how the domestic remedies he focuses on translate into foreign policy.

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Twenty years ago today, the United States invaded the nation of Iraq, intent on removing the regime of dictator Saddam Hussein and installing a stable democratic government. What followed instead was two decades of political instability and horrible sectarian violence that has yielded a modern Iraqi state that remains plagued with corruption and other problems, and is increasingly under immense pressure from the nearby regime in Iran.

To gain perspective on the legacy of the U.S. invasion of Iraq and how it continues to shape the relationship between the two countries today, Lawfare Senior Editor Scott R. Anderson sat down for conversations with two individuals whose personal and professional lives have been intimately tied up in the last two decades of the U.S.-Iraq relationship. First, Scott sat down with Ambassador Doug Silliman, who is now the president of the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, and who previously served in numerous capacities in Iraq, including as ambassador, over his decades-long career as a U.S. diplomat. Scott then sat down with Salem Chalabi, an individual who has held numerous positions across several administrations in the Iraqi government over the past two decades, most recently serving as the head of the Trade Bank of Iraq until January of this year. In each conversation, they discuss the legacy of the U.S. invasion, how it impacts the bilateral relationship today, and the central role Iran has come to play in the country.

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The Academy loves a good spy flick, and so do we! This week, Shane Harris talks with Washington Post culture critic Alyssa Rosenberg about the enduring power of espionage on the big screen. 

Movies like Zero Dark Thirty, the Mission: Impossible franchise, and this year’s Top Gun: Maverick and All Quiet on the Western Front, which both took home Oscars, help us understand global conflict as they wrestle with questions of personal morality. How do the stories of James Bond and George Smiley help us make sense of the fate of nations? And why is Hollywood finding it nearly impossible to tell stories about great power competition between the U.S. and China? 

Shane and Alyssa go way back, and this is a fun, lively conversation about spy stories that have resonated through the decades. Alyssa has written for years about popular culture, books, and more recently parenting. 

Chatter is a production of Lawfare and Goat Rodeo. This episode was produced and edited by Cara Shillenn of Goat Rodeo. Podcast theme by David Priess, featuring music created using Groovepad.

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