The Lawfare Podcast

From March 3, 2012: Missy Cummings, Director of the Humans and Automation Laboratory and a professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT, sat down with Ritika Singh for the fifth episode of the Lawfare Podcast to talk about robots on our battlefields.

Cummings is a bit of a force of nature. In addition to designing unmanned weapons systems, she was one of the Navy's first female fighter pilots—an experience she chronicles in her book “Hornet's Nest.” 

There are currently around 20,000 robots deployed in U.S. theaters of operation. These robots, which are getting cheaper and easier to make, are characterized by increasing capability and increasing miniaturization. Missy and Ritika discussed the many issues to which these developments give rise, as well as where the science and engineering in weapons systems is likely to go in the future.

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The Lawfare Podcast isn't Lawfare’s only podcast offering. Each week, Scott R. Anderson, Quinta Jurecic, Alan Rozenshtein and a special guest sit down on the podcast Rational Security to have a more casual and freewheeling conversation about national security stories in the news. Today, we thought we'd share one of our favorite Rational Security episodes from the past year, originally released on October 13. This episode features Washington Post reporter Shane Harris, himself a former co-host of the earlier iteration of Rational Security and current cohost of Lawfare’s newest podcast offering: the long-form interview show Chatter. They talked about spies, peanut butter, what spies do with peanut butter, and how the Queen feels about nicking bent coppers.

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We're giving you something a bit different for today's Lawfare Podcast. It's an episode of Lawfare’s new podcast, Chatter, in which Shane Harris or David Priess, or occasionally both of them, have extended, one-on-one conversations with fascinating people working at the creative edges of national security.

In this episode, Shane talks with Noah Shachtman, the editor-in-chief of Rolling Stone, who got there in part from his work as a national security journalist.

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Despite being isolated from much of the rest of the international community, North Korea has emerged as an unexpected powerhouse in the realm of cybercrime, with affiliated hackers pulling off some of the most daring heists in cyberattacks of the past decade.

Scott R. Anderson sat down with journalists Jean Lee and Geoff White, who have put together a podcast series entitled “The Lazarus Heist” for the BBC that explores how North Korea came to play this role. Through the lens of the podcast, they discussed the origins of North Korea's interest in both conventional and cybercrime, what they tell us about North Korea's role in the world, and the ways in which they have been used as part of North Korea's broader international agenda.

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This past weekend marked the 30th anniversary of the collapse of the Soviet Union. To discuss the collapse and its implications, Bryce Klehm sat down with Vladislav Zubok, professor of international history at the London School of Economics and author of the new book, “Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union.” They covered a range of topics, including Mikhail Gorbachev’s economic and political reforms, Professor Zubok’s experience reading Solzhenitsyn for the first time, and the Russian military’s recent buildup along Ukraine's borders.

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From October 17, 2015: Last week, the Center for Strategic and International Studies hosted Ben, along with Laura Donohue of Georgetown Law School, former NSA Director Michael Hayden, and Robin Simcox of the Henry Jackson Society, to discuss the future of surveillance reform in a post-Snowden world. What have we learned about NSA surveillance activities and its oversight mechanisms since June 2013? In what way should U.S. intelligence operations be informed by their potential impact on U.S. on economic interests? What privacy interests do non-Americans have in U.S. surveillance? And domestically, has the third-party doctrine outlived its applicability? Tom Karako of CSIS moderated the panel.

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From July 28, 2019: In the 1950s and 1960s, the Central Intelligence Agency had a major problem. The streets of Moscow were a virtually impossible operating environment due to heavy KGB surveillance and other operational difficulties. Through a series of trial and error, and a whole lot of ingenuity, along came the "Moscow rules," a series of technical advancements in the area of disguise and communications technology, and some different operating tradecraft that allowed CIA case officers to get the information they needed from Soviet sources to help the Cold War stay cold.

Jonna Mendez is a former CIA Chief of Disguise, who is also a specialist in clandestine photography. Her 27-year career, for which she earned the CIA's Intelligence Commendation Medal, included operational disguise responsibilities in the most hostile theaters of the Cold War, including Moscow, and also took her into the Oval Office. She is the co-author, with her late husband Tony Mendez, of "The Moscow Rules: The Secret CIA Tactics that Helped America Win the Cold War." David Priess spoke with Jonna about the experiences that she and her husband had at CIA, evolving the Moscow Rules, and applying these new disguises and technologies in the service of national security.

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From August 23, 2014: News broke yesterday that the Russian military has moved artillery units inside of Ukraine and that Russian troops are actively using them against Ukranian forces---a move with dramatic escalatory potential. At the same time, Ukraine appears to be closing in on the last Russian-backed rebel strongholds. As the crisis unfolds and the United States seeks to isolate Russia using a network of sanctions, important questions have arisen about Russia's future role in the region and its relationship with the West. What is Russian President Vladimir Putin's ultimate goal? Why, after so much effort to integrate into the global economy, is Putin choosing another path? Is Russia actually attempting to free itself of the Western dominated world order?

Earlier this week, the Brookings Institution hosted a panel discussion on the future of Russia’s place in the international order in the light of recent more aggressive turns in its foreign policy. Thomas Wright, fellow with the Project on International Order and Strategy (IOS), moderated the conversation with Brookings President Strobe Talbott, Senior Fellow Clifford Gaddy of Brookings’s Center on the United States and Europe (CUSE) and Susan Glasser, editor at Politico Magazine. They describe Putin's worldview and subsequent strategy, and lay out the potential consequences of continued tensions for the global economy, coordinated counter-terrorism efforts, and the increasingly stressed non-proliferation regime.

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 In 2018, a group of academics and free expression advocates convened in Santa Clara, California, for a workshop. They emerged with the Santa Clara Principles on Transparency and Accountability in Content Moderation—a high level list of procedural steps that social media companies should take when making decisions about the content on their services. The principles quickly became influential, earning the endorsement of a number of major technology companies like Facebook.

Three years later, a second, more detailed edition of the principles has just been released—the product of a broader consultation process. So what’s changed? This week on Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with David Greene, senior staff attorney and civil liberties director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. At EFF, he’s been centrally involved in the creation of version 2.0 of the principles. They talked about what motivated the effort to put together a new edition and what role he sees the principles playing in the conversation around content moderation. And they discussed amicus briefs that EFF has filed in the ongoing litigation over social media regulation laws passed by Texas and Florida.

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President Biden recently authorized the release of almost 1,500 documents related to the JFK assassination. But ten times that number still have had their release deferred. What might be in them? What's holding them back from release? And how did we get here? 

David Priess spoke with journalist and bestselling author Gerald Posner, who wrote the Pulitzer finalist “Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy,” and attorney Mark Zaid, who apart from representing government whistleblowers and representing current and former U.S. government officials trying to publish their stories or remediate illegal employment actions, has also been very active in the JFK assassination documents area for some 30 years. They talked about the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act, the work of the review board that the legislation set up, what is in these new documents and what comes next. 

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Merrick Garland has been getting a lot of criticism these days, and a lot of it is less than entirely fair, or at least it's premature. But Andrew Kent, Quinta Jurecic and Benjamin Wittes argue in a Lawfare piece published today that there is at least one matter on which Garland's decision-making is ripe for criticism: He is not speaking enough.

Garland has modeled himself after Attorney General Ed Levi, the first post-Watergate attorney general, and in their article entitled, “Merrick Garland Needs To Speak Up,” Kent, Jurecic and Wittes argue that Levi actually used public speaking as a big part of his strategy to rejuvenate confidence in the Justice Department. Garland, by contrast, has been very quiet. Kent, Jurecic and Wittes hold the two up against one another and argue that Garland should make more of a case for what he's doing than he has so far. This episode is a reading of that article.

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In 2006, al-Qaeda-trained operatives planned and nearly executed an operation to destroy passenger aircraft over the Atlantic Ocean. Because it was discovered and stopped, it did not accomplish its purpose: killing thousands of people in the air and possibly hundreds or thousands on the ground.

Aki Peritz is a former CIA intelligence officer and current adjunct professor at American University who has researched and written all about this transatlantic airliner plot. He has recently published a new book about it all called, “Disruption: Inside the Largest Counterterrorism Investigation in History.” David Priess sat down with Aki to talk about the conspiracy and the heroic efforts by the intelligence services of the United States, Great Britain and even Pakistan to uncover and crush it.

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From May 21, 2016: Four years ago, Anwar al Awlaki—an American citizen—was killed in an American drone strike in Yemen, marking the first targeted killing of a U.S. citizen by the U.S. government. While the attack occurred almost four years ago, the legality, morality and prudential nature of the strike, and others like it that occur nearly daily in a scattershot of countries around the world, remain a subject of much debate.

Last week, Jefferson Powell joined Lawfare’s Jack Goldsmith at the May Hoover Book Soiree for a discussion of Targeting Americans: The Constitutionality of U.S. Drone War, a new book that takes a deep look into the constitutionality of the program. Powell is a Professor of Law at Duke University, and over the hour, he argues that the killing of Anwar al Awlaki under the 2001 AUMF was constitutional, but that the Obama administration’s broader claims of authority are not. He also asserts that American citizens acting as combatants in al Qaeda are not entitled to due process protections. Yet constitutional claims should not be confused with what is moral, or indeed, what is legal under international norms. Those answers, Powell suggests, must be examined through means other than constitutional law.

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From September 18, 2018: Security technologist Bruce Schneier's latest book, "Click Here to Kill Everybody: Security and Survival in a Hyper-connected World," argues that it won't be long before everything modern society relies on will be computerized and on the internet. This drastic expansion of the so-called 'internet of things,' Schneier contends, vastly increases the risk of cyberattack. To help figure out just how concerned you should be, last Thursday, Benjamin Wittes sat down with Schneier. They talked about what it would mean to live in a world where everything, including Ben's shirt, was a computer, and how Schneier's latest work adds to his decades of advocacy for principled government regulation and oversight of 'smart devices.'

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On November 2, the Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai publicly accused on social media a former vice-premier of China of sexual assault. Chinese authorities responded by taking down her posts and engaging in a mass campaign of censorship on Chinese social media. Later on, Peng disappeared from public view, prompting many tennis stars, athletes and others to demand answers about where she was. It's a long saga that ended with the Women's Tennis Association suspending all tournaments in China in a major move that cut against the trend of Western companies ignoring abuses committed at the hands of the Chinese government. Jacob Schulz sat down with Julian Ku, the Maurice A. Deane Distinguished Professor in Constitutional Law and Professor of Law at Hofstra University, and Katrina Northrop, a reporter at The Wire China, to talk through what's happened to Peng Shuai and what to make of it. 

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On this show, we’ve discussed no end of proposals for how to regulate online platforms. But there’s something many of those proposals are missing: data about how the platforms actually work. Now, there’s legislation in Congress that aims to change that. The Platform Accountability and Transparency Act, sponsored by Senators Chris Coons, Rob Portman and Amy Klobuchar, would create a process through which academic researchers could gain access to information about the operation of these platforms—peering under the hood to see what’s actually happening in our online ecosystems, and perhaps how they could be improved. 

This week on Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with the man who drafted the original version of this legislation—Nate Persily, the James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford Law School. He’s been hard at work on the draft bill, which he finally published this October. And he collaborated with Coons, Portman and Klobuchar to work his ideas into the Platform Accountability and Transparency Act. They talked about how Nate’s proposal would work, why researcher access to data is so important and what the prospects are for lasting reforms like this out of Congress.

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The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals last week issued a surprisingly under-discussed opinion in the case of Trump v. Thompson, which involves the production of the executive branch and White House records to the January 6 committee. The opinion of a three-judge panel is a decisive rejection of Trump's assertions of executive privilege after leaving office. It also has potential implications for the witnesses who are refusing to testify before the committee. To chew it all over, Benjamin Wittes sat down with Lawfare congressional guru Molly Reynolds, Lawfare contributor and University of Kentucky College of Law professor Jonathan Shaub, and Lawfare senior editor Scott R. Anderson. They talked about the opinion itself, what it holds and what it means, what it means for the witnesses who were holding out, whether it will stand, and how the committee is doing in general.

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Syria’s decade-long civil war has left the state and economy shells of their former selves. But a new industry is stepping in to fill the void: the manufacture and export of illicit drugs, specifically Captagon, a type of amphetamine that has a growing global market. To better understand Syria’s emerging role in the global Captagon trade, Scott R. Anderson sat down with Caroline Rose of the Newlines Institute, who has been tracking this industry's development for several years and is preparing to release a major report on the topic. They discussed the origins of Captagon, how it came to Syria, and how it is being used by the Assad regime, its allies and their proxies across the region.

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Barton Gellman is a long-time national security reporter for the Washington Post, for The Atlantic and elsewhere. His latest article and Atlantic cover story is entitled, “Trump's Next Coup has Already Begun.” He joined Benjamin Wittes on Lawfare Live to talk about the article; about what the Republican party is doing to position itself to overturn, if necessary, the results of an adverse election in 2024; about why Trump is oddly better positioned to do this now than in 2020 when he held the powers of the presidency; and about what, if anything, can be done to stop it.

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From May 15, 2018: In her new book, "Habeas Corpus in Wartime: From the Tower of London to Guantanamo Bay," Amanda Tyler presents a comprehensive account of the legal and political history of habeas corpus in wartime in the Anglo-American legal tradition. On Monday, Benjamin Wittes sat down with Tyler at the Hoover Book Soiree for a wide-ranging discussion of the history of habeas corpus, where its origins really lie in English law, and how it has changed over the years in the United States, from the Founding to modern cases of counterterrorism.

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From June 3, 2017: With the impending sunset of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in December 2017, debate is heating up over how the crucial intelligence-gathering provision will be reauthorized by Congress—and even if it will be reauthorized at all. At the Hoover Institution, Benjamin Wittes sat down with former Director of the National Counterterrorism Center Matt Olsen to talk about the intelligence community's perspective on 702 and what lies ahead for it in these turbulent times.

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On March 18, 2019, the U.S. conducted an airstrike in Baghuz, Syria, as part of its battle against the Islamic State. Two bombs were dropped killing dozens of people, as many as 80 according to U.S. Central Command, the majority of whom seem to have been civilians. But the American public had never heard of the strike until last month when a New York Times investigation revealed not only the fact of the strike, but also the troubling government response that led to its being concealed from public view for more than two years.

Natalie Orpett sat down with Dave Philipps, co-author of the Times article and a veteran national security reporter, and Luke Hartig, a fellow in New America's International Security Program and executive editor at Just Security. They talked about what we know and don't know about the incident itself, the legal and policy framework around airstrikes, allegations of war crimes, and what's been happening within the U.S. government in the years since the strike. 

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We talk a lot about how content moderation involves a lot of hard decisions and trade-offs—but at the end of the day, someone has to make a decision about what stays on a platform and what comes down. This week on Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with “The Decider”—Nicole Wong, who earned that tongue-in-cheek nickname during her time at Google in the 2000s. As the company’s deputy general counsel, Nicole was in charge of decisionmaking over what content Google should remove or keep up in response to complaints from users and governments alike. Since then, she moved on to roles as Twitter’s legal director of products and the deputy chief technology officer of the United States under the Obama administration. In that time, the role of social media platforms in shaping society has grown enormously, but how much have content moderation debates really changed? Quinta and Evelyn spoke with Nicole about her time as the Decider, what’s new and what’s stayed the same since the early days of content moderation, and how her thinking about the danger and promise of the internet has changed over the years.

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For the past year, the country of Ethiopia has been embroiled in a brutal civil war. At the center of it is Tigray, a region that has played a prominent role in the evolution of Ethiopia's modern ethnofederalist state. Just weeks ago, rebels seemed to be on the verge of seizing the capital city of Addis Ababa, leading foreign governments to urge their nationals to evacuate the country as soon as possible. Today, the city remains in government hands, and rebel forces appear to be on the retreat, though how long they will stay that way is anyone's guess. To put this dynamic conflict in context and give us a sense of where it may be headed, Scott R. Anderson spoke with Professor Michael Woldemariam of the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University and Professor Hilary Matfess of the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver. They discussed the origins of Ethiopia's ongoing civil war, what it's meant for civilians living there and how it might shape the country's future.

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COVID-19 has shown us all that pandemics aren’t just a public health issue, but a national security one as well. Are America’s national security institutions prepared to address this threat? And what role should the intelligence community play in addressing pandemics?  

To address these questions, Lawfare’s David Priess moderated a live recording of the Lawfare Podcast featuring a discussion with Congressman Eric Swalwell, who represents California’s 15th congressional district and sits on the House Intelligence Committee; Dr. Julie Gerberding, who served as director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from 2002 to 2009 and now is a senior leader at the pharmaceutical company Merck; and Matt Berrett, a former CIA assistant director and head of its Global Issues Mission Center, and now cofounder of the Center for Anticipatory Intelligence at Utah State University. The event was held in conjunction with two programs at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy & Government: the biodefense program and the Michael V. Hayden Center for Intelligence, Policy, and International Security.

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It's a scary time along the Ukrainian-Russian border these days. Russian troops are amassing in alarming numbers, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky declared recently that there had been a coup planned against him by Russian-aligned forces. How bad is it? Is it going to be another war? Is an incursion imminent? To go over all the questions, Benjamin Wittes sat down on Lawfare Live with Lt. Col. (ret.) Alexander Vindman, the Pritzker Military Fellow at Lawfare, and Dominic Cruz Bustillos, research assistant to Lt. Col. (ret.) Vindman at Lawfare. They talked about the Russian military buildup, the purported coup attempt and what, if anything, the United States can do to head off a coming disaster.

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From May 27, 2017: Amidst the hurricane of news coming out of the White House in recent weeks, one question has surfaced again and again: why isn't White House Counsel Don McGahn stopping Donald Trump from doing all this? This week on the podcast, Benjamin Wittes sat down with Bob Bauer, former White House Counsel for Barack Obama, to talk about the Office of the White House Counsel and how President Trump can and can't be restrained.

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From May 6, 2017: Three months into the Trump presidency, where does the relationship between the President and the intelligence community stand? Donald Trump is no longer quite so regularly combative in his tweets and public comments about the various intelligence agencies, but the White House-intelligence community relationship is still far from normal under this very unusual presidency. Here to ponder the question are former NSA and CIA director General Michael Hayden, former acting and deputy director of CIA John McLaughlin, and former deputy national security advisor for combating terrorism Juan Zarate, who spoke with the Washington Post’s David Ignatius in a recent event at the Aspen Institute.

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Late last month, Apple sued the Israeli technology firm NSO Group under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. That's the federal law that criminalizes computer hacking and provides a civil cause of action for hacking victims. NSO Group is primarily known for its Pegasus spyware software, which it provides to many governments for their law enforcement and national security investigations. Apple is suing NSO Group because many of the devices that Pegasus is used against are Apple iOS devices. Apple's lawsuit is just the latest in what has been several bad years for NSO Group, which has come under increasing scrutiny, most notably for the use of its software in the killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi by the Saudi government, and for allegations that its products are used to commit a wide range of human rights abuses by authoritarian governments around the world. 

To talk through the merits of Apple's lawsuit, as well as its implications for the spyware industry and cybersecurity norms more generally, Alan Rozenshtein spoke with Orin Kerr, professor of law at the UC Berkeley School of Law, and Asaf Lubin associate professor of law at the Indiana University Maurer School of Law. 

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This week on Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with some of the people behind the app that, by this point in the pandemic, you’re probably sick of: Zoom. Quinta and Evelyn sat down with Josh Kallmer, Zoom’s head of global public policy and government relations, and Josh Parecki, Zoom’s associate general counsel and head of trust and safety.

Most of us have used Zoom regularly over the last few years thanks to COVID-19, but while you’re likely familiar with the platform as a mechanism for work meetings and virtual happy hours, you may not have thought about it in the context of content moderation. Josh and Josh explained the kinds of content moderation issues they grapple with in their roles at Zoom, how their moderation and user appeals process works, and why Zoom doesn’t think of itself like a phone line or a mail carrier, services that are almost entirely hands-off when it comes to the content they carry. 

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The CIA has opened a window into former president Donald Trump's always interesting and frequently contentious relationship with the intelligence community. A newly published history confirms a lot of what we already knew about Trump's preferences—like that he didn't actually read his daily top secret briefing—but it also shows Trump as privately more appreciative of career intelligence professionals than his public broadsides against their deep-state bosses might suggest. 

Shane Harris sat down with Lawfare’s David Priess, the man who wrote the book about the President's Daily Brief, to chew over a new chapter in the “Getting to Know the President” series by John L. Helgerson, a retired CIA officer and former inspector general. The understated title, “Donald J. Trump—A Unique Challenge,” gives you a hint that as with all things Trump, his relationship to the intelligence community was anything but business as usual. 

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Cybersecurity is the responsibility of everyone. A cyber attack is no longer confined to the digital realm and can have real impact on various industries like food, gas and medicine. But despite these challenges, there is an opportunity for a new whole-of-society approach to defend against the mounting cyber threats emanating from places like Russia, China and North Korea. One approach advocates that the United States already has a non-governmental model for citizen involvement to adopt for cyberspace. 

Alvaro Marañon sat down with Mark Grzegorzewski and Margaret Smith, who, along with Barnett Koven, are the authors of “Cyber Privateering: A New Model for Cyber Civic Engagement,” a paper they presented at the 2021 Cybersecurity Law and Policy Scholars Conference. They discussed the details around the Estonian model that inspired this paper, the role for Civil Air Patrol and the impact a local civil cyber organization could play in the community. 

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Dominic Cruz Bustillos sat down with Timothy Frye, the Marshall D. Shulman Professor of Post-Soviet Foreign Policy within the Department of Political Science at Columbia University, editor of “Post-Soviet Affairs” and co-director of the International Center for the Study of Institutions and Development at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. Professor Frye is the author of the new book, “Weak Strongman: The Limits of Power in Putin's Russia,” which draws on cutting-edge social science research to emphasize Russia's similarities to other autocracies and highlight the difficult trade-offs that confront the Kremlin. They discussed Frye’s challenges to the conventional wisdom on Putin's Russia, Russia's handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, the European energy crisis, the recent State Duma elections, U.S.-Russia relations and more. 

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From February 28, 2015: On Thursday of this week, Lawfare’s Benjamin Wittes and Bobby Chesney, along with General Jack Keane, appeared before the House Armed Services Committee to provide “Outside Perspectives on the President’s Proposed Authorization for the Use of Military Force Against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.”

The hearing grappled with a number of difficult and vitally necessary questions: What exactly does "enduring ground combat operations" mean? Should the AUMF sunset after three years? And, does a new AUMF accomplish anything if it is not tied to the existing authorities present in the 2001 AUMF? The discussion delved deeply into the President’s proposed AUMF, its merits and its flaws, and how those failings can be addressed.

Note: The Podcast has been edited for length and content; only the most relevant parts of the discussion are included.

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From April 2, 2016: This week, Adam Segal of the Council on Foreign Relations joins Jack Goldsmith at a Hoover Book Soiree for a discussion of his new book, “The Hacked World Order: How Nations Fight, Trade, Maneuver, and Manipulate in the Digital Age.” Segal begins at what he calls “year Zero”—sometime between June 2012 and June 2013—explaining that the events in that year ushered in a new era of geopolitical maneuvering in cyberspace, with great implications for security, privacy and the international system. These changes, he suggests, have the potential to produce unintended and unimaginable problems for anyone with an internet connection.

In March, George Washington University's Henry Farrell reviewed “The Hacked World Order” for the Lawfare Book Review.

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Last month marked the 75th anniversary of the end of the Nuremberg Trials. To better understand the trials and their legacy, Bryce Klehm sat down with Francine Hirsch, Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Hirsch is the author of the book, “Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg: A New History of the International Military Tribunal after World War II.” They covered a range of topics, including the Nuremberg Trials from the Soviet perspective and the trials’ legacy 75 years later.

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For Thanksgiving, we’re bringing you something a little different—an episode of Rational Security, our light, conversational show about national security and related topics. This week, Alan, Quinta and Scott were joined by special guest, Quinta's co-host of the Arbiters of Truth series on the Lawfare podcast feed Evelyn Douek! They sat down to discuss:

—“Getting Rittenhoused”: A jury recently acquitted 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse of murder charges for shooting two men in what he claimed was self-defense during last summer’s unrest. What does his trial and its aftermath tell us about the intersection of politics with our criminal justice system?

— “Now That’s a Power Serve”: A global pressure campaign by professional tennis players has forced Chinese officials to disclose the location of Chinese tennis player Peng Shuai, who disappeared after publicly accusing a former senior official of sexual assault. Is this a new model for dealing with Chinese human rights abuses?

— “Duck Say Quack and Fish Go Blub—But What Did Fox Say?”: Two prominent conservative commentators have resigned from Fox News over its release of a Tucker Carlson film that they say spreads misinformation and promotes violence. Will this be enough to force the network to curb its behavior?

For object lessons, Quinta endorsed her favorite pie dough recipe. Alan in turn made an unorthodox recommendation of what to put in that dough: sweet potato pie. Scott encouraged listeners to follow up that big meal with a cup of coffee, made on his beloved Aeropress with a Prismo filter attachment. And if that doesn't work, Evelyn suggested folks tuck in for a nap with her favorite weighted blanket from Bearaby. 

Be sure to visit our show page at www.lawfareblog.com and to follow us on Twitter at @RatlSecurity. 

And Rational Security listeners can now get a committed ad-free feed by becoming a Lawfare material supporter at www.patreon.com/lawfare!

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On November 3, the Commerce Department added four foreign companies to what is often referred to as the “Entity List,” for engaging in activities that are contrary to the national security or foreign policy interests of the United States. One of those additions was the Israeli company NSO Group, which sells software—often called spyware—that once remotely installed on a phone can steal things like passwords, photos, communications and web searches. It can also activate cameras and microphones without the knowledge of the user. Companies placed on the Entity List are subject to U.S. government licensing and sanctions requirements. The NSO Group was added to the list based on evidence that it developed and supplied spyware to foreign governments that use these tools to target government officials, journalists, activists, academics and embassy workers. 

To talk about the global spyware problem, Stephanie Pell sat down with David Kaye, a professor of law at the University of California, Irvine, and the former United Nations Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression. In this former role, he produced a report that called for a moratorium on the sale and transfer of spyware. They discussed the nature of the global spyware problem, what might be done to address it and the important role both civil society groups and journalists have played in exposing it. 

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Jack Goldsmith sat down with Noah Feldman, the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard University, to discuss his new book,”The Broken Constitution: Lincoln, Slavery, and the Refounding of America.” They discussed the evolution of Lincoln's constitutional thought on slavery, compromise and war, from the time he was a young man through his most difficult of presidencies. Was Lincoln a great constitutional thinker? If so, why? They also discussed the moral standing of the Constitution at different times in American history, whether constitutional compromise is good or bad, and what these issues teach about current constitutional controversies. 

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Alexander Vindman sat down with Dr. Mary Sarotte, the author of the new book, “Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate,” to discuss the 1990s and NATO expansion. They discussed how respective decisions by America, Russia and the European Union impacted NATO expansion and today’s geopolitical environment. 

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From May 28, 2019: From the Washington Post’s February report that U.S. Cyber Command took a Russian disinformation operation offline on the day of the 2018 midterms to fight election interference, to the Pentagon’s announcement last year that it would take more active measures to challenge adversaries in cyberspace, recent news about cyber operations suggests they are playing an increasingly important role in geopolitics. So how should the public understand how the United States deploys its cyber tools to achieve its goals?

To help answer that question, at the 2019 Verify Conference, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation hosted a panel discussion featuring former CIA Deputy Director Avril Haines, former Pentagon chief of staff Eric Rosenbach, and New York Times national security correspondent David Sanger. They talked about how the U.S. projects power in cyberspace, the difficulties of developing norms to govern state behavior in that domain, and more.

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From August 9, 2014: Washington was abuzz this week as more than 50 African leaders were in town for the first U.S.-Africa Summit. On August 8, Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, the President of Somalia, spoke at Brookings on the future of his country. In his talk, President Mohamud addresses the challenges to democracy that Somalia faces, and how Somalia, the African Union, and other international partners can work together to ensure security, foster development, and promote stable state-building in the country. President Mohamud also addresses the challenges his state faces in its ongoing battle against Al-Shabab militants—a mission that the U.S. has contributed more than half a billion dollars to since 2007. President Mohamud provides a realistic assessment of that threat, while highlighting the efforts his country is taking to bring democracy to Somalia. Michael E. O’Hanlon, Senior Fellow in Foreign Policy at Brookings, provides introductory remarks and moderates the conversation.

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Alexander Vindman sat down with Dr. Fiona Hill, the Robert Bosch senior fellow in the Center on the United States and Europe in the Foreign Policy program at Brookings, and the author of the new book, “There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century.” They talked about Russia's military buildup along Ukraine, immigration and opportunities in the 21st century.

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It’s been roughly a year since the Facebook Oversight Board opened its doors for business—and while you may mostly remember the board from its decision on Donald Trump’s suspension from Facebook, but there’s been a lot going on since then. So we thought it was a good time to check in on how this experiment in platform governance is faring. In October, the Board released its first transparency report, and Facebook—now Meta—has published its own update on how it’s been responding to the Board’s decisions and recommendations. Meanwhile, Lawfare is keeping track of developments on our Facebook Oversight Board Blog, run by the inimitable Tia Sewell. 

On this episode of Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic talked about what the data shows about what cases the Board is taking, how the Board’s role seems to be evolving, and, of course, whether we’re going to have to start calling this the Meta Oversight Board, thanks to Facebook’s name change.

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Hannah Bloch-Wehba is an associate professor of law at the Texas A&M School of Law. She’s also the author of a recent Lawfare post, entitled “Alternative Channels for Police Transparency.” She sat down with Jacob Schulz to talk about her Lawfare piece, the law review article that inspired it, trends in police transparency and what to do about it. What are the different sources that inhibit public access to police practice? And what trends in the second half of the 20th century left police transparency in the state that it’s in today?

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Lawfare has a new podcast: Chatter! Hosted by none other than David Priess, publisher of Lawfare and the Lawfare Institute's chief operating officer, and Shane Harris, intelligence reporter from the Washington Post, Chatter focuses on culture, science and national security issues through long-form interviews with cool people. They joined Benjamin Wittes to talk about what they're doing with the show, what they're planning to do with the show and what sort of people they're going to bring on it. 

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Roger Parloff is a senior editor at Lawfare and the author of the recent article, “What Do—and Will—the Criminal Prosecutions of the Jan. 6 Capitol Rioters Tell Us?” It is a deep dive on the demographics, the charges and the adjudications of the Capitol riot cases so far. Roger sat down with Benjamin Wittes on Lawfare Live to talk about who the Capitol rioters were, why some of them have been allowed to plead out to misdemeanors, what characterizes the misdemeanor pleas and who is left among the bigger fish.

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From February 20, 2012: Joel Brenner, who served as inspector general of the National Security Agency and as the national counterintelligence executive in the DNI's office, joined Jack Goldsmith to discuss his new book, America the Vulnerable: Inside the New Threat Matrix of Digital Espionage, Crime, and Warfare. Benjamin Wittes reviewed the book here.

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From November 22, 2014: Earlier this month, the ABA Standing Committee on Law and National Security held its “24th Annual Review of the Field of National Security Law CLE Conference.” As part of the conference, the group held a particularly strong panel discussion on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act—featuring Bob Litt, general counsel to the DNI, Jameel Jaffer of the ACLU, and Bill Banks of Syracuse University law school. The discussion was moderated by Laura Donohue of Georgetown law.

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Majid Khan pled guilty in a military commission at Guantanamo eight years ago, but he has been back in the news of late. At a sentencing hearing at Guantanamo recently, he gave graphic testimony about his torture and treatment at the hands of the CIA and the military. He also took responsibility and showed remorse for his own conduct. His speech in the military commission was sufficiently moving that several members of the jury wrote a letter to the convening authority asking for clemency for Majid Khan. 

To talk about the dramatic events, the history of the case, and the CIA program’s treatment of Majid Khan, Benjamin Wittes sat down with Michel Paradis, an appellate lawyer for the Office of Military Commissions Defense Counsel. They talked about what Majid Khan did, his history in al-Qaeda after a childhood in Baltimore, what was done to him, and whether with all this water under the bridge, something like justice could ever come from a trial.

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