The Lawfare Podcast

From January 20, 2018: This week on the Lawfare Podcast, the Guardian's Moscow correspondent Shaun Walker joined special guest host Alina Polyakova to discuss his new book "The Long Hangover: Putin's New Russia and the Ghosts of the Past." They discussed Putin's use of Russian history as political strategy, the pulse of Russian politics as its elections approach in March, the changing landscape of Russia's lesser-known cities since the 1990s, and much more.

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From the birth of the republic, American presidents have communicated with the public in one form or another. The frequency and exact nature of such efforts have varied quite a bit over time due to variables ranging from the extent of partisanship in the media to each commander in chief's personal preference to travel technology. Political scientist Anne Pluta has explored this history deeply, including extensive analysis of contemporary newspaper accounts back to the late 18th century. And her insights, contained in writings like the book ?Persuading the Public: The Evolution of Popular Presidential Communication from Washington to Trump,? provide plenty of surprises and even challenge some conventional wisdom about the presidency.

David Priess chatted with her about her favorite presidents and her assessment of the best communicators among them; the precedents set by George Washington; Thomas Jefferson's State of the Union delivery method; changes in the communication environment during the Andrew Jackson era; Abraham Lincoln's exceptional presidency; the importance of train travel for presidential contact with the public; Rutherford Hayes's underappreciated importance in presidential communication; Theodore Roosevelt as a speaker; Woodrow Wilson's decision to deliver the State of the Union address in person; the importance for presidential communication of radio, television, and the availability of Air Force One; the relatively brief period of national, "objective" media; the late 20th century shift to splintered media; Donald Trump's social media use; Joe Biden's communication practices; and more.

Among the works mentioned in this episode:

The play HamiltonThe TV show John AdamsThe movie LincolnThe book Persuading the Public by Anne PlutaThe TV show The West WingThe TV show VeepThe movie The American PresidentThe movie Air Force OneThe movie Independence DayThe TV show ScandalThe book The Devil's TeethThe book Twelve Days of TerrorThe book The Wave

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 April 16, 2019: Since November, Lawfare Contributor Michelle Melton has run a series on our website about Climate Change and National Security, examining the implication of the threat as well as U.S. and international responses to climate change. Melton is a student a Harvard Law school. Prior to that she was an associate fellow in the Energy and National Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, where she focused on climate policy.

She and Benjamin Wittes sat down last week to discuss the series. They talked about why we should think about climate change as a national security threat, the challenges of viewing climate change through this paradigm, the long-standing relationship between climate change and the U.S. national security apparatus, and how climate change may affect global migration.

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Thursday was sentencing day for some senior Oath Keepers, and Lawfare Senior Editor Roger Parloff spent the day in court listening to and watching the sentencing of Elmer Stewart Rhodes III and Kelly Meggs, two Oath Keepers chieftains who were convicted of seditious conspiracy in connection with the Jan. 6 insurrection. They got a lot of time: Rhodes got 18 years; Meggs got 12. They also got a terrorism enhancement. It was a bad day if you're an Oath Keeper and a really bad day if you're a Proud Boy. 

After the sentencing, Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Roger to talk through it all. What does it mean for future Oath Keeper sentencing? What does it mean for Proud Boy sentencing? When are we finally going to see the white collar defendants as well as the blue collar defendants in Jan. 6 cases? And can we finally begin to predict what Jack Smith may be up to regarding Jan. 6?

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At 9:02 a.m. on April 19, 1995, a bomb built by Timothy McVeigh exploded in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City. One hundred sixty-eight people died and hundreds more were injured in what remains the deadliest act of domestic terrorism in U.S. history.

Jeffrey Toobin has a new book about the bombing and trial called, ?Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism.? Toobin joined Jack Goldsmith to discuss the new and revealing information his book draws on concerning McVeigh?s motivations and trial strategy, Attorney General Merrick Garland's consequential role in the McVeigh trial, and the long-tail impact of the trial on right-wing domestic terrorism in the United States, including the Jan. 6 attacks on Congress.

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The Supreme Court last week issued the biggest opinion in the history of the internet?except that it didn?t. Rather, it issued an opinion in a case involving the Anti-Terrorism Act (ATA) and the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA), finding there was no cause of action and thus dismissed for further consideration the biggest case in the history of the internet.

Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Lawfare Senior Editors Scott R. Anderson,  Alan Rozenshtein, and Quinta Jurecic to talk about Section 230, Taamneh v. Twitter, and Gonzalez v. Google.

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Hacking and cybersecurity are evergreen issues, in the news and on Lawfare. Scott Shapiro, the Charles F. Southmayd Professor of Law and Professor of Philosophy at Yale Law School, has a new book on how and why hacking works and what to do about it, called ?Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks.?

Scott joined Jack Goldsmith to talk about how his pre-law-professor obsession with computers combined with his recent work in international law led him to write the book. They also discussed the lessons that the five hacks discussed in the book teach, including the limits of technology and solving cybersecurity problems, the importance of the human dimension to cybersecurity, and why we shouldn't be panicked about the state of cyber insecurity.

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In November 1919, President Woodrow Wilson came out in opposition to a compromise that would have resulted in Senate ratification of the Versailles Treaty and thereby put the nail in the coffin of an international agreement that he had spent months negotiating and would have secured U.S. participation in one of his greatest legacies, the League of Nations.

Wilson's self-defeating decision shocked many who had been involved in the treaty negotiation, including a young diplomat and journalist named William Bullitt. Deciphering what about Wilson's psychology led to such a monumental decision became an obsession for Bullitt, one he pursued with an unlikely partner, Sigmund Freud, the father of modern psychoanalysis. Yet the original text they authored on the subject remained unpublished for decades, as Bullitt pursued a career in diplomacy and politics, until it was finally unearthed in 2014 by scholar Patrick Weil. Weil's new book, ?The Madman in the White House,? tells the unlikely story of the Bullitt-Freud analysis of President Wilson and the lies it intersected with.

Weil joined Lawfare Senior Editor Scott R. Anderson to discuss Bullitt?s exceptional life and career, what he and Freud truly thought of one of our most complex and controversial former presidents, and what it tells us about how we should think about the role psychology plays in the modern presidency. 

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This week on Rational Security, Alan and Scott were joined by co-host emeritus (and Washington Post star reporter) Shane Harris to talk over the week's news! Including:

?Flight of the Valkyries.? Recently leaked U.S. intelligence reports allege that Wagner Group owner Yevgeniy Prighozin?who has privately and publicly feuded with the Russian military leadership in recent weeks and even threatened to pull his mercenary troops from the conflict?has been in contact with Ukrainian intelligence and offered to share Russian troop positions in exchange for concessions around the disputed city of Bakhmut. Is Prighozin trying to find a path to retreat? What do his actions tell us about the conflict??Jerkiye Boy.? Twitter owner Elon Musk has come under criticism for the company?s latest bad call: censoring certain content at the request of the Erdogan government in Türkiye, just prior to national elections there. How should Twitter have responded to the demands of Turkish officials? And how has Musk?s erratic leadership affected the company?s approach to such issues??BootLichter.? CNN and its CEO Chris Licht are experiencing blowback from the decision to host a town hall with former President Donald Trump before an audience of his supporters, at which he repeated an array of lies about the 2020 election results, the recent judgment finding him liable for sexual battery, and his potential legal exposure for retaining classified documents, among other items. Was CNN in the wrong? How should it handle Trump (and other candidates)?

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From September 9, 2020: It was a big week for manipulated video and audio content. In just 36 hours, senior republicans or people associated with the Trump campaign tweeted, posted or shared manipulated audio or video on social media three times, prompting backlash from media and tech companies. Last week, Lawfare's managing editor, Quinta Jurecic, and associate editor, Jacob Schulz, wrote a piece analyzing these incidents. To talk through issues of deep fakes and cheap fakes, Benjamin Wittes spoke with Quinta, Jacob and Danielle Citron, a professor of law at the Boston University School of law. They talked about who posted what on Twitter and other social media, how the companies responded, what more they could have done and whether posting manipulated video is still worth it, given how companies now respond.

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Over the past two weeks, the Department of Justice has issued two press releases announcing disruption efforts it has taken against malicious cyber actors. One operation involved the disruption of Russia?s so-called Snake Malware Network, and the other involved the indictment of a Russian national for ransomware attacks on critical infrastructure. 

To talk about these disruption efforts, Lawfare Senior Editor Stephanie Pell sat down with Alex Iftimie, Partner at the law firm Morrison Foerster, and a former federal prosecutor in the National Security and Cyber Crimes Units in the U.S. Attorney?s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia. They talked about the operational details and sophistication of some aspects of these disruption operations, the significance and relationship of these operations to other disruption efforts, and how these recent efforts fit into the broader picture of the DOJ?s and the U.S. government?s efforts to disrupt malicious cyber actors. 

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On April 13, 2022, in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes conducted his first ?special military operation? at the Russian embassy in Washington, DC. It involved 14 theater stage lights that Wittes and other activists used to project images of the Ukrainian flag onto embassy walls. Since then, Wittes?s special military operations have garnered increased attention and become more complex?technically and diplomatically. 

In his conversation with Katherine Pompilio, one of Lawfare?s associate editors and this week?s Chatter guest host, Wittes talks about the genesis of these special military operations, what it?s like conducting international negotiations with Russian diplomats via the U.S. Secret Service, the international law of light protests, how a paper mache washing machine is involved in all of this, his career, his other projects, and more.

Works mentioned in this episode:

Ben?s Substack Dog Shirt Daily

The video Defect and Repent: A Laser Poem

The video "It's Almost Like the Russians Don't Negotiate in Good Faith": A Video Parable.

The video U.S. Ukrainian Activists Presents Umbrella Boy

The podcast #LiveFromUkraine: Katya Savchenko Survived Bucha?and Wrote About It

The Washington Post article ?Activists train spotlight of Ukrainian flag on Russian Embassy?

The video of the spotlight cat and mouse game

The work of Robin Bell

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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Think about the world. You might be picturing a globe in a classroom, with its patchwork of multi-colored nations. Or perhaps you have an image of a 2-D map in your head, the famous Mercator projection, a static jigsaw puzzle of borders and countries. From elementary school classrooms to the Olympic stage, the globe and the map tell a story of how the world works, one in which state sovereignty reigns supreme, from the Treaty of Westphalia until now. 

But what if that?s only part of the story? As Quinn Slobodian writes, ?The modern world is pockmarked, perforated, tattered and jagged, ripped up and pinpricked. Inside the containers of nations are unusual legal spaces, anomalous territories and peculiar jurisdictions..?

Lawfare Managing Editor Tyler McBrien spoke with Quinn, Professor of History at Wellesley College, to discuss his new book, ?Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy.? They talked about some of these sites of exception?the city-states, havens, enclaves, free ports, high-tech parks, duty-free districts, and other spaces Quinn calls zones; why states give up these slivers of sovereignty; and how the world actually works, as Quinn sees it. 

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The House?s select committee on Jan. 6 may have wound down its work at the end of December 2022, but questions about why law enforcement, including the U.S. Capitol Police, were unprepared for the possibility of an insurrection remain. A new report from the Project on Government Oversight sheds some light on the role that dysfunction in the department?s intelligence division played in leaving the force ill-equipped for what happened on that day.

Molly Reynolds, Senior Fellow at Brookings and Senior Editor of Lawfare, and Lawfare Senior Editor Quinta Jurecic sat down with the report?s author, Nick Schwellenbach, to discuss mismanagement in the intelligence division preceding Jan. 6, its consequences, and what?s changed since.

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In recent years, the Supreme Court's non-merits ?shadow docket? has become a topic of contestation and controversy, especially the Court's emergency orders rulings on issues ranging from immigration to abortion to Covid-19 restrictions.

To discuss these issues, Jack Goldsmith sat down with Stephen Vladeck, the Charles Alan Wright Chair in Federal Courts at the University of Texas School of Law, who is the author of a new book entitled, ?The Shadow Docket: How the Supreme Court Uses Stealth Rulings to Amass Power and Undermine the Republic.? They discussed the origins of the contemporary shadow docket in some 1973 emergency orders related to the bombing of Cambodia, why the Court?s shadow docket has grown in prominence in recent years, what's wrong with the shadow docket, and how to fix it.

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Though the threat of climate change has come sharply into focus in recent decades, humans have long endeavored to shape and reshape the natural world, carving it up and making sense of it through technological innovations. In just one example, projects of reclamation have increased Singapore?s total land area by 25 percent. The Changi airport sits on land that was once ocean. 

As Surabhi Ranganathan discusses in her recent article, ?The Law of the Sea? for The Dial, this poses a unique challenge for international law. Surbahi writes, ?The shifting relation between land and sea reflects the scale of human impact on the environment. This unstable relation forces us to confront the consequences of climate change, as the fixed certainties?soil, resources, infrastructure?that have for so long governed our imagination of land begin to fall apart.?

Lawfare Managing Editor Tyler McBrien sat down with Surabhi, a Professor of International Law at the University of Cambridge, to discuss her article and what shipwrecks, fragile ports, sinking states, continental shelves, trash islands, seasteading, undersea cables, and oceanic vents can tell us about how international law must adapt to better address our uncertain climate future. 

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Olivia Nuzzi gets Washington in a way many journalists don?t. As the Washington correspondent for New York magazine, she has written perceptive, piercing, and enduring portraits of Donald Trump and the bizarre characters in his orbit. Now she?s turning her reporter?s eye to history, hosting a companion podcast to HBO's ?White House Plumbers,? a five-part series that imagines the Watergate scandal through the lives of two notorious Nixon operatives, E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy.  

Olivia came up as a journalist writing about politics in New Jersey. She began covering Trump at The Daily Beast, where she worked with Shane Harris. They discussed her career, what fascinates her about politics, and the prospects for the 2024 presidential campaign, where Trump appears likely to be the Republican nominee. 

They also discussed Hollywood and Washington?s mutual fascination with each other, and why they?d both rather live in L.A. than New York. 

Olivia?s work at New York magazine: https://nymag.com/author/olivia-nuzzi/ 

The White House Plumbers podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/white-house-plumbers-podcast/id1682542231 

The White House Plumbers series on HBO: https://www.hbo.com/white-house-plumbers 

Olivia on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Olivianuzzi?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor 

Garrett Graff?s new book on Watergate, which serves as a history companion to the podcast and was just named a Pulitzer Prize finalist: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Watergate/Garrett-M-Graff/9781982139179  

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

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From May 7, 2021: Over its first 100 days in office, the Biden administration has faced a difficult set of policy challenges at America's southern border, ranging from new waves of individuals driven to try to cross the border by the effects of the global pandemic, to the often difficult legacy left by some of his predecessor's draconian immigration policies. As a candidate, Biden channeled Democrats' outrage with former President Trump's actions on immigration and pledged to reverse them. But now that he is in office, will Biden find more common ground with his predecessor than expected, or will he turn over a new page on America's immigration policies? 

Scott R. Anderson sat down with ProPublica immigration reporter Dara Lind to discuss what drives immigration to the United States, how the Biden administration has responded thus far and what it may all mean for the future of immigration policy in the United States.

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Earlier this year, Brian Fishman published a fantastic paper with Brookings thinking through how technology platforms grapple with terrorism and extremism, and how any reform to Section 230 must allow those platforms space to continue doing that work. That?s the short description, but the paper is really about so much more?about how the work of content moderation actually takes place, how contemporary analyses of the harms of social media fail to address the history of how platforms addressed Islamist terror, and how we should understand ?the original sin of the internet.? 

For this episode of Arbiters of Truth, our occasional series on the information ecosystem, Lawfare Senior Editor Quinta Jurecic sat down to talk with Brian about his work. Brian is the cofounder of Cinder, a software platform for the kind of trust and safety work we describe here, and he was formerly a policy director at Meta, where he led the company?s work on dangerous individuals and organizations.

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The term ?spyware? refers to software that's designed to infiltrate, monitor, and extract sensitive information from a user's device without their knowledge or consent. Perhaps the most infamous example of the harm that spyware can do is the 2018 killing of Saudi dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi government operatives, who used spyware to track Khashoggi before luring him to the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, where he was murdered. But spyware use is not just limited to repressive autocracies. It's frequently both developed and used by liberal democracies, a practice that has generated increasing concern over the past few years.

To talk about spyware and its potential regulation under international law, Alan Rozenshtein, Associate Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota and Senior Editor at Lawfare, spoke with Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, a Regents Professor and the Robina Chair in Law, Public Policy, and Society at the University of Minnesota Law School, where she also directs the Human Rights Center. Most importantly for this conversation, she's also the United Nation's Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism, a position she's held since 2017. As part of that role, she recently published a report on the Global Regulation of the Counter-Terrorism Spyware Technology Trade. Alan spoke with Fionnuala about her findings and what, if anything, can be done to make spyware compliant with human rights.

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Since 2012, Germany has accepted more refugees than any other country in Europe aside from Turkey. The German government has dispersed these asylum seekers and other immigrants throughout the country, a policy roundly celebrated by refugee activists and governments alike. But as reporter Ali Breland recently wrote in the New Republic, ?[T]hese seemingly well-intentioned policies have created dangerous situations where people of color are forced to reside in regions that may be hostile to their presence, and where they face greater threats from neo-Nazis and fascists.?

Lawfare Managing Editor Tyler McBrien sat down with Ali, a reporter at Mother Jones covering internet disinformation, technology, race, and politics, to discuss his article and reporting trip to Germany. They discussed the roots of the current neo-Nazi resurgence there, the dark side of Germany?s lauded refugee resettlement program, and why the country might be a warning sign for the rest of Europe. They also discussed parallels between the far right movements in Germany and the United States. 

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Since March 2022, El Salvador has been under a state of exception as its President Nayib Bukele seeks to crack down on the country?s powerful gangs. Bukele, who once described himself on Twitter as the ?world?s coolest dictator,? has engaged in a prolonged attack on El Salvador?s democratic institutions. And the crackdown has resulted in a range of human rights abuses. At the same time, Bukele really does seem to have been successful in curbing gang violence, and his popularity is sky high. 

To understand the situation in El Salvador, Lawfare Senior Editor Quinta Jurecic spoke with Manuel Meléndez-Sánchez, a PhD candidate in Political Science at Harvard University who has written about Bukele on Lawfare. They discussed why Bukele?s crackdown on the gangs seems to be working, why it might fall apart in the long term, and what Bukele?s rise means for democracy in El Salvador and around the world.

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The Constitution specifies only one process for making international agreements?Article II gives the president the power to make treaties provided that two-thirds of the senators present concur. The treaty process has been on a long, slow path to obsolescence, having been replaced by various forms of binding and non-binding executive agreements. 

To assess the causes and impact of the United States? declining use of treaties, Jack Goldsmith sat down with Jeffrey Peake, a political scientist at Clemson University, who is the author of the book, ?Dysfunctional Diplomacy: The Politics of International Agreements in an Era of Partisan Polarization.? They discussed how domestic politics explains the decline of the treaty power, the adverse impact this decline has on U.S. foreign relations, and why executive agreements of various sorts are not full substitutes for treaties on the international stage. 

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This week on Rational Security, a Quinta-less Alan and Scott were joined by Lawfare legal fellow Saraphin Dhanani to talk through the week's big national security news, including:

?Seoul Authority.? South Korea and the United States recommitted themselves to their close security relationship this past week, including through a state dinner and a new Washington Declaration that confirms that the United States will respond to any nuclear attack on South Korea with overwhelming force. What drove this public showing? And what impact will it have on the nuclear threat posed by North Korea??The Uncanny X-Date.? The debate over raising the debt ceiling took on new urgency this week, when Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen announced that the United States might meet the ?X-Date? at which it defaults on its obligations as soon as June 1. Yet there are few signs of a compromise, as House Republicans have dug in on a proposal that demands deep spending cuts while the Biden administration continues to push for a clean raise. Where will this debate lead??Washington Contentious.? National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan gave remarks at our own Brookings Institution this past week, laying out a new approach to international economic policy. What should we make of this new ?Washington Consensus??

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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 2001The movie 2010The movie The MartianThe TV show The ExpanseThe movie ArrivalQueen guitarist Brian May's work on the New Horizons missionThe Chatter podcast episode Satellites, Space Debris, and Hollywood with Aaron BatemanThe 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 M?noa, 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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