The Lawfare Podcast: Patreon Edition

A discussion at the Berkman Center: In the wake of the disclosures about government surveillance and the rise of corporate-run applications and protocols, is the idea of an “unowned” Internet still a credible one? The Berkman Center’s Jonathan Zittrain moderates a panel, incluing Yochai Benkler (Harvard Law School), Ebele Okobi (Yahoo!), Bruce Schneier (CO3 Systames), and Benjamin Wittes (Brookings Institution) to explore surveillance, and the potential for reforms in policy, technology, and corporate and consumer behavior. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lawfare's editor in chief, Benjamin Wittes, gives a talk at the Palace of Westminster--sponsored by the Henry Jackson Society--on whether drones are becoming the new Guantanamo. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It’s Lawfare No Bull” with: “For today’s episode of the Lawfare Podcast, we are bringing you a preview of a new podcast Lawfare is launching: Lawfare ‘No Bull,’ which brings you a curated feed of the most essential speeches, testimony, and other found audio relating to national security. Subscribe to the separate Lawfare ‘No Bull’ podcast feed to receive future episodes! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Today, we’re bringing you another episode of Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem.In a 2018 Senate hearing, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg responded to a question about how his company makes money with a line that quickly became famous: “Senator, we sell ads.” And indeed, when you open up your Facebook page—or most other pages on the internet—you’ll find advertisements of all sorts following you around. Sometimes they’re things you might really be interested in buying, even if you’ve never heard of them before—tailored to your interests with spooky accuracy. Other times, they’re redundant or just … weird. Like the aid for a pair of strange plaid pajamas with a onesie-style flap on the bottom that briefly took over the internet in December 2020.Shoshana Wodinsky, a staff reporter at Gizmodo, wrote a great piece explaining how exactly those onesie pajamas made their way to so many people’s screens. She’s one of very few reporters covering the business of online advertisements outside industry publications—so Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke to her this week about what it’s like reporting on ads. How exactly does ad technology work? Why is it that the ad ecosystem gets so little public attention, even as it undergirds the internet as we know it? And what’s the connection between online ads and content moderation? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lawfare Editor-In-Chief Benjamin Wittes sits down with Bruce Reidel of the Brookings Institution to discuss a pair of new articles in Lawfare on his first hand accounts of events in the wake of 9/11. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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More than 11 years ago. Bobby Chesney, Jack Goldsmith and Ben started a national security law blog called Lawfare. Focused, almost exclusively on issues related to the US government's reaction to 9/11 and the reactions to those government policies and the legal justifications for them in its early days, Lawfare was largely unknown to the general public outside of national security lawyers inside the U S government Lawfare didn't even have a podcast.Jack and Ben joined me to talk through these origins of Lawfare, it's intimate connection to 9/11 and its aftermath, and the importance of analyzing these issues at the intersection of national security, law, and policy. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Lawfare's Alan Rozenshtein interviews University of Toronto Professor Kent Roach about his new book, The 9/11 Effect: Comparative Counter-Terrorism. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Marc Polymeropoulos served for 26 years in the CIA. He joined the agency working on Afghanistan in the 1990s and moved on to operational roles across the Middle East, recruiting spies and hunting terrorists. Later, he became a senior officer responsible for operations in Russia, which as you'll hear, led to a fateful trip to Moscow that altered the course of his career and his life. Marc has chronicled all of this and more in a new book, “Clarity in Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the CIA.” It's part memoir, part management handbook. Shane Harris sat down with Marc to talk about his career and to look back at the past 20 years since the 9/11 attacks. Marc talked about what the CIA got right, what it did wrong and how he has come to peace with an unexpected sense of betrayal after he developed symptoms of Havana Syndrome, a mysterious and debilitating brain injury.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Let’s say you’re a freedom-loving American fed up with Big Tech’s effort to censor your posts. Where can you take your business? One option is Parler—the social media platform that became notorious for its use by the Capitol rioters. Another is Gettr—a new site started by former Trump aide Jason Miller.Unfortunately, both platforms have problems. They don’t work very well. They might leak your personal data. They’re full of spam. And they seem less than concerned about hosting some of the internet’s worst illegal content. Can it be that some content moderation is necessary after all?Today, we’re bringing you another episode of our Arbiters of Truth series on the online information ecosystem. Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with David Thiel, the big data architect and chief technical officer of the Stanford Internet Observatory. With his colleagues at Stanford, David has put together reports on the inner workings of both Parler and Gettr. They talked about how these websites work (and don’t), the strange contours of what both platforms are and aren’t willing to moderate, and what we should expect from the odd world of “alt-tech.” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jack Goldsmith sat down with Samuel Moyn, Henry R. Luce Professor of Jurisprudence at Yale Law School and a professor of history at Yale University. The two discussed Professor Moyn’s latest book, “Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War.” The conversation touched on the changing nature of war, the decoupling of conflict from our national conversations and even Tolstoy.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On this premiere episode of Rational Security 2.0, new hosts Alan Rozenshtein, Quinta Jurecic, and Scott R. Anderson are joined by special guest Benjamin Wittes to discuss: the Taliban's new government and the brutal way it seems to be governing (especially in relation to women); the Biden administration's border policies, and why they're facing trouble in the courts; and our summer from hell: are recent heat waves, wildfires, and floods now a permanent part of the American experience, and will this change the political calculus on climate change?For object lessons, Alan testified to the charms of Duluth, Minnesota; Ben talked about his efforts to shrink his carbon footprint, including by building Lawfare a new conference table; Quinta discussed an exciting new line of action figures taking toy stores by storm (pictured below); and Scott explained why the end of the global pandemic may just taste like pumpkin beer. Rational Security is a product of Lawfare. Be sure to visit Rational Security's show page and support Lawfare on Patreon to gain access to ad-free podcast feeds and other benefits. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party. To get more insight into the workings of the CCP, Bryce Klehm sat down with Tony Saich, the director of the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation and Daewoo Professor of International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School. Professor Saich is the author of the new book, “From Rebel to Ruler: One Hundred Years of the Chinese Communist Party.” They talked about a range of subjects, from tracing the thirteen original leaders of the CCP to President Xi Jinping's current policies. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From December 12, 2019: Live from the #NatSecGirlSquad Conference in Washington, DC, on December 12, 2019, Benjamin Wittes sat down with Danielle Citron, professor of law at Boston University, VP of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, and MacArthur Genius Grant Fellow. Ben and Danielle talked about technology, sexual privacy, sextortion, and the previously unexplored intersections of feminism and cybersecurity. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From February 20, 2018: The military has been not been a refuge from the Trump administration's norm-defying nature. Jack Goldsmith speaks to Phil Carter, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, about the history of civil-military relations, episodes that highlight the Trump administration's departure from that tradition, and what that may mean for the future. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From January 29, 2012: Our subject in the podcast's inaugural episode is a remarkable article by journalist Shane Harris entitled "Out of the Loop: The Human-Free Future of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles." Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Many questions involving intelligence and Afghanistan have come up in the past few weeks. Did intelligence prepare policymakers for the rapid collapse of the Afghan forces and the Taliban’s taking of the capital? How unusual is it for a CIA director to visit a de facto war zone—in this case, Bill Burns to travel to Kabul to meet with Taliban leaders? What's the context for intelligence sharing with the Taliban? To tackle these issues, David Priess sat down with Sue Gordon, who for two years during the Trump administration was the principal deputy director of national intelligence after decades of service at the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and John McLaughlin, who served as the acting director of central intelligence and the deputy director during the George W. Bush presidency, after a career as an analyst, manager and executive in the CIA.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week on our Arbiters of Truth series on our online information ecosystem, we’re going to be talking about … disinformation! What else? It’s everywhere. It’s ruining society. It’s the subject of endless academic articles, news reports, opinion columns, and, well, podcasts. Welcome to what BuzzFeed News reporter Joe Bernstein has termed “Big Disinformation.” In a provocative essay in the September issue of Harper’s Magazine, he argues that anxiety over bad information has become a cultural juggernaut that draws in far more attention and funding than the problem really merits—and that the intellectual foundations of that juggernaut are, to a large extent, built on sand. Joe joined Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic to discuss his article and the response to it among researchers and reporters who work in the field. Joe explained his argument and described what it feels like to be unexpectedly cited by Facebook PR. What led him to essentially drop a bomb into an entire discipline? What does his critique mean for how we think about the role of platforms in American society right now? And … is he right? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A privacy and national security threat that goes under-discussed is data brokers, the secretive industry of companies buying, aggregating, selling, licensing and otherwise sharing consumer data. Justin Sherman is a fellow at Duke University's Technology Policy Lab, where he directs the project on data brokers. He also recently wrote a piece for Lawfare about data brokers advertising data on U.S. military personnel. Jacob Schulz sat down with Justin to talk about data brokers and the national security threat that they pose. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jack Goldsmith sat down with national security reporter Spencer Ackerman, the author of the new book, “Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump.” The two discussed the book and the consequences of twenty years of the War on Terror. With the recent developments in Afghanistan, the conversation touches on the complicated history of the United States and the Middle East, a conflict that has now spanned four presidencies, Ackerman argues that America's response to 9/11 paved the way for the rise of political figures like Donald Trump. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Since January, talk about reforming the nearly 20-year-old 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, or AUMF, that provides the legal basis for most overseas U.S. counterterrorism activities, has once again been on the rise. While past efforts have generally failed to yield results, the combination of growing bi-partisan disenchantment with the status quo and a seemingly supportive Biden administration had led some to believe that this is the moment in which reform might finally happen. But now, the collapse in Afghanistan has some wondering whether the Biden administration will still have an appetite for the type of risk that AUMF reform is likely to entail, especially given that President Biden appears to have doubled down on global counterterrorism efforts in recent public remarks. Scott R. Anderson sat down with two leading experts in war powers: Professor Oona Hathaway of Yale Law School and Professor Matt Waxman of Columbia Law School. They discussed where the impetus for reform comes from, what AUMF reforms may be on the table and what recent events mean for the future of reform efforts. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From October 7, 2017: Last month, Lawfare and Foreign Policy hosted an event on lawyering for the Trump presidency. Susan Hennessey spoke with former White House Counsels Bob Bauer, who served in the Obama administration from 2010 to 2011, and A.B. Culvahouse, who served in the Reagan administration from 1987 to 1989, in a lively discussion on providing legal support when your client is the president. They talked about the distinction between a president’s personal counsel and White House counsel, the challenges of defending a president during an investigation, and the quotidian aspects of the role of the White House Counsel. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Much of the world has been watching the rapidly developing situation in Afghanistan with a mix of shock and anguish. Bryce Klehm spoke with five experts to get a sense of how the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan is being perceived around the world. You’ll hear from Madiha Afzal, the David M. Rubenstein Fellow in the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution, on Pakistan; Suzanne Maloney, the vice president and director of the Foreign Policy program at Brookings, on Iran; Yun Sun, the director of the China Program at the Stimson Center, on China; Joy Neumeyer, a writer and historian of Russia and the Soviet Union who has also worked as a journalist in Moscow, on Russia; and Constanze Stelzenmüller, the Fritz Stern Chair on Germany and trans-Atlantic Relations and a senior fellow in the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution, on Germany.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

When the Taliban seized power following the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan this month, major platforms like Facebook and Twitter faced a quandary. What should they do with accounts and content belonging to the fundamentalist insurgency that was suddenly running a country? Should they treat the Taliban as the Afghan government and let them post, or should they remove Taliban content under U.S. sanctions law? If you’re coming at this from the tech sphere, you may have been seeing conversation in recent weeks about how this has raised new and difficult issues for platforms thrust into the center of geopolitics by questions of what to do about Taliban accounts. But, how new are these problems, really? On this week’s episode of our Arbiters of Truth series on our online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Scott R. Anderson, a senior editor at Lawfare and a fellow at the Brookings Institution, whom you might have heard on some other Lawfare podcasts about Afghanistan in recent weeks. They talked about the problems of recognition and sanctions law that platforms are now running into—and they debated whether or not the platforms are navigating uncharted territory, or whether they’re dealing with the same problems that other institutions, like banks, have long grappled with. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jack Goldsmith sat down with John Arquilla, an analyst with the RAND Corporation and professor emeritus with the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School. He's the author of the new book, “Bitskrieg: The New Challenge of Cyberwarfare.” The two discussed the challenges posed by cyber warfare, which John argues have been neither met nor mastered. He offers solutions for protecting against enemies that are often anonymous, unpredictable, and capable of projecting force and influence vastly disproportionate to their size, strength or wealth.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Bryce Klehm spoke with Geoffrey Cain, an investigative journalist and the author of the new book, “The Perfect Police State: An Undercover Odyssey into China's Terrifying Surveillance Dystopia of the Future.” They had a wide-ranging discussion about the Chinese government's use of surveillance technology to suppress its Uyghur population, the history of Xinjiang since 9/11, the development of China's tech industry and much more. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

All across the world, citizens of liberal democracies are justifying their rejection of democratic norms and traditions as a protest against a cast of elite villains. It comes in different flavors around the world, but the underlying trend seems to be the same.While most observers are focusing on the impact of globalization or the activities of these very elites, Tom Nichols is placing responsibility somewhere else: the citizens themselves. Tom Nichols is professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College and the author of “The Death of Expertise,” and most recently, “Our Own Worst Enemy: The Assault from within on Modern Democracy.” He's also a five-time undefeated Jeopardy champion and has over half a million followers on Twitter, where he rages about everything from rock music, to Indian food, to national security. He sat down with David Priess for a wide-ranging conversation about democratic decline, its causes and effects, the tough process of looking in the mirror and related issues, from civil military affairs to the current Afghan crisis. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From March 7, 2020: We ask a lot of questions about foreign policy on this podcast. Why do certain countries make certain decisions? What are the interests of the players in question? What are the consequences and, of course, the legality of foreign policy choices. In a new book, Joseph Nye, professor emeritus and former dean of the Harvard Kennedy School, asks another question about foreign policy. Do morals matter? Jack Goldsmith sat down with Nye to discuss his new book, 'Do Morals Matter?: Presidents and Foreign Policy from FDR to Trump.' They discussed the ethical and theoretical factors by which Nye judged each president before going through many of the cases he focuses on in the book. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From February 2, 2016: Barak Mendelsohn comes on the Jihadology Podcast to discuss his new book, “The al-Qaeda Franchise: The Expansion of al-Qaeda and Its Consequences.” Some of the topics covered include:How organizations expandWhy AQ decided to branch out and the strategy behind that decisionAQ’s choices on where to expandCase studies on AQ’s different branches Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The city of Kabul’s international airport has become the unlikely focal point of an unprecedented humanitarian effort as U.S. soldiers and diplomats seek to maintain control of their airport facility while facilitating the evacuation of thousands of Americans and foreign nationals, as well as at least some vulnerable Afghans. Meanwhile, on the outside, an improvised network of veterans, former diplomats, humanitarian workers and civil society groups has been desperately working to help vulnerable Afghans evade the Taliban, get into the airport and onto a flight to safety before it is too late. Scott R. Anderson sat down with three people who have been closely involved in this latter effort: Susannah Cunningham of the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, Camille Mackler of the Truman Center for National Policy and the Immigrant Advocates Response Collaborative, and Chris Purdy of Human Rights First. They discussed what's happening on the ground at Kabul airport, what’s likely to come next for those who make it through and what the Biden administration needs to do to save more lives while there's still time. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In October 2020, Facebook sent a cease and desist letter to two New York University researchers collecting data on the ads Facebook hosts on its platform, arguing that the researchers were breaching the company’s terms of service. The researchers disagreed and kept up with their work. On August 3, after months of failed negotiations, Facebook shut off access to their accounts—an aggressive move that journalists and scholars denounced as an effort by the company to shield itself from transparency. For this week’s episode of our Arbiters of Truth series on our online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Alex Abdo, the litigation director at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University (where, full disclosure, Evelyn will soon join as a senior research fellow). The Knight Institute is providing legal representation to the two NYU researchers, Laura Edelson and Damon McCoy—and Alex walked us through what exactly is happening here. Why did Facebook ban Edelson and McCoy’s accounts, and what does their research tool, Ad Observer, do? What’s the state of the law, and is there any merit to Facebook’s claims that its hands are tied? And what does this mean for the future of research and journalism on Facebook? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Earlier this month, Tucker Carlson, whose nightly news show on Fox has become the most popular show in U.S. cable news history, traveled to Budapest to record a special version of his show. The centerpiece of his visit was an interview with Hungary's authoritarian leader, Viktor Orbán. But far from criticizing Orbán or questioning him on Hungary's increasing move away from liberal democracy, Carlson was all compliments, praising the fence that Hungary has built along its border and allowing Orbán to lash out against his critics at home and abroad. Carlson is not the only one with kind words for Hungary's would-be strongman. In the past months, an increasing number of conservative media and intellectual elites have praised Hungary, as well as earlier models like Portugal under the post-World War II right-wing dictator António Salazar, for what they view as its willingness to use state power to fight for conservative social, cultural and religious values.To discuss what this embrace of foreign authoritarianism means for the American conservative movement, Alan Rozenshtein spoke with Zack Beauchamp, a senior correspondent at Vox, who has written about the right’s embrace of Orbánism and what it means for the future of American democracy. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This past Sunday, Americans woke up to a new reality in the country of Afghanistan—the Afghan government that the United States and its allies have supported for the last two decades is gone. In its place is a resurgent Taliban, now firmly in control of nearly the entire country. Meanwhile, the U.S. presence has been reduced to Kabul’s international airport where soldiers and diplomats are working 24-7 to safely evacuate U.S. and allied personnel, U.S. and foreign civilians, and at least some vulnerable Afghans and their families, even as the rest of the country sits and waits to find out what life will be like under the new Taliban regime.To discuss these unprecedented events, Scott R. Anderson sat down with Afghanistan policy experts Madiha Afzal of the Brookings Institution, Laurel Miller of the International Crisis Group and Jonathan Schroden of CNA. They discussed the state of play in Afghanistan, how we got here and what we should expect next. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The United States government has been wrestling with what to do about a particular type of cyber threat—ransomware—that holds a victim's data and computer systems hostage until they pay, usually in the form of cryptocurrency, to an anonymous recipient. Recent ransomware attacks have threatened everything from hospitals to the media industry, with payment being the main way that most companies are choosing to get back online. But what does giving into such demands mean for broader U.S. efforts to prevent and deter ransomware attacks? Scott R. Anderson sat down on Lawfare Live with Lawfare editor-in-chief Benjamin Wittes and Lawfare fellow in cybersecurity law Alvaro Marañon, who together recently authored a piece for Lawfare entitled, “Ransomware Payments and the Law.” They argue that stemming the flow of payments is essential to deterring ransomware attacks and argue that the United States should adopt a policy banning such payments in all but the most serious cases. They discussed the threat that ransomware poses to the U.S. economy, how payments should be dealt with, and what Congress and the Biden administration seem to be doing about it. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From August 4, 2018: Technologies that distort representations of reality, like audio, photo, and video editing software, are nothing new, but what happens when these technologies are paired with artificial intelligence to produce hyper-realistic media of things that never happened? This new phenomenon, called "deep fakes," poses significant problems for lawyers, policymakers, and technologists.On July 19, Klon Kitchen, senior fellow for technology and national security at the Heritage Foundation, moderated a panel with Bobby Chesney of the University of Texas at Austin Law School, Danielle Citron of the University of Maryland Carey School of Law, and Chris Bregler, a senior computer scientist and AI manager at Google. They talked about how deep fakes work, why they don't fit into the current legal and policy thinking, and about how policy, technology, and the law can begin to combat them. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From April 19, 2014: Benjamin Wittes had meant to have a book review of former CIA lawyer John Rizzo's new book, Company Man: Thirty Years of Controversy and Crisis in the CIA, ready to run along with this episode of the podcast. But he was still working on the review, which will be up shortly, and he didn't want to hold up the podcast while he finished it.Ben caught up with Rizzo at a recent conference at Pepperdine University Law School. They talked about the book, some of its major themes, the persistence of the interrogation controversies and their latest manifestations. They also talked about the growth of lawyering at the CIA and why all the lawyers in the world can't seem to keep the agency out of trouble. And they talked about a career that, in many ways, tells the story of the modern CIA and the effort to do intelligence and covert action under law—from the Church Committee to the post 9/11 scandals. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Two of the biggest controversies in tech are how to stop the spread of child pornography and other exploitation material, and whether encryption prevents legitimate law enforcement investigations. In an announcement last week, Apple dropped a bomb into both of these debates.Apple announced that future versions of its iPhone operating system would scan photos its users post to the cloud and automatically detect if those photos contain child exploitation material. If so, Apple would notify the government. While many in law enforcement and in organizations devoted to child safety have hailed Apple's announcement, it has proven hugely controversial among many technologists, security researchers and digital civil society advocates. They worry that Apple’s system will harm privacy and civil rights, especially if governments demand that it be used to scan for content other than child exploitation. To help make sense of all of this, Alan Rozenshtein sat down with Mayank Varia, a cryptographer at Boston University, and Riana Pfefferkorn, a research scholar at the Stanford Internet Observatory.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We live in the Disinformation Age. The internet has revolutionized our information ecosystem and caused disruption totally unprecedented in human history, and democracy may not survive. ... Just like it didn’t survive the television, radio, telegram and printing press before it. Right?When it comes to talking about the internet, all too often history is either completely ignored with bold claims about how nothing like this has ever happened before—or it’s invoked with simple analogies to historical events without acknowledging their very different contexts. As usual, the real answer is more complicated: talking about history can inform our understanding of the dilemmas we face today, but it rarely provides a clear answer one way or another to contemporary problems. This week on our Arbiters of Truth series on our online information ecosystem, Quinta Jurecic spoke with Heidi Tworek, an associate professor at the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs and History at the University of British Columbia. In a recent essay, she made the case for how a nuanced view of history can better inform ongoing conversations around how to approach disinformation and misinformation. So how do current discussions around disinformation leave out or misinterpret history? What’s the difference between a useful historical comparison and a bad one? And why should policymakers care? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

You've probably heard about the craziness around the Biden administration’s new eviction moratorium. They consulted outside law professors instead of the Justice Department. Or did they? The president said he didn't have the authority to do it, and then he did it anyway. Lawfare has published two big articles on the subject in the last couple of days—one of them by Lawfare senior editor Alan Rozenshtein, and the other by Lawfare founding editor Jack Goldsmith. They both joined Benjamin Wittes to talk it all through. What exactly did the Biden administration say? What exactly did it do? Where was the Justice Department? And did any of this violate the law? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The spread of misinformation is one of the biggest challenges facing social media platforms. A standard approach is to label suspicious posts or links so as to warn users that what they're engaging with is not reputable, but warnings, despite their wide use, haven't proven to be particularly successful. So what's a social media platform to do? Two Princeton University computer scientists, Ben Kaiser, a PhD student, and Professor Jonathan Mayer, think they've found a better way. Instead of warning users about misinformation, they propose putting roadblocks between users and the misinformation they're tempted to click on. Alan Rozenshtein spoke with Ben and Jonathan about their research and about a piece they and Dr. J. Nathan Matias wrote recently for Lawfare entitled, "Warnings that Work: Combating Misinformation Without Deplatforming." Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Olympics ended yesterday after more than two weeks of exciting international competition in Tokyo. On this episode of the podcast, we're taking a look back at some of the security and international affairs issues that you might have noticed in this year's games and in Olympic history. Rohini Kurup sat down with author Roy Tomizawa to talk about the last time that Japan hosted the Summer Olympics in 1964 and the similarities with this year's games. Bryce Klehm spoke with Libby Lange, a former speech writer for Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen, about the tense relations between China and Taiwan on display at the Olympics. Jacob Schulz spoke with ​Ethan Scheiner, a professor at UC Davis, about the history of violence at the Olympics. And Bryce talked with Claire Collins, an Olympic rower and a member of the U.S. national team, about participating in this year's games and some of the security challenges that followed. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It's been a busy few weeks at the Justice Department. There was a major indictment of the chair of the former president's inaugural committee. There have been new policies promulgated on subpoenas to media organizations and on Justice Department White House contacts. There's been a decision not to defend a member of Congress for his role in the Jan. 6 uprising, and there are questions about what positions the Justice Department is going to take as the Jan. 6 committee begins its work. To talk about it all, Lawfare executive editor Scott R. Anderson sat down with Lawfare editor-in-chief Benjamin Wittes, former Justice Department official Carrie Cordero, now with the Center for a New American Security, and Chuck Rosenberg, who served at both DOJ and FBI. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

There have been a thousand hot takes about the Facebook Oversight Board, the Supreme Court-like thing Facebook set up to oversee its content moderation. The Board generated so much press coverage when it handed down its decision on Donald Trump’s account that Kaitlyn Tiffany at The Atlantic called the whole circus “like Shark Week, but less scenic.” Everyone weighed in, from Board Members, to lawmakers, academics, critics and even Lawfare podcast hosts. But there’s a group we haven’t heard much from: the people at Facebook who are actually responsible for sending cases to the Board and responding to the Board’s policy recommendations. Everyone focuses on the Board Members, but the people at Facebook are the ones that can make the Board experiment actually translate into change—or not. So this week for our Arbiters of Truth series on our online information environment, in light of Facebook’s first quarterly update on the Board, Evelyn Douek talked with Jennifer Broxmeyer and Rachel Lambert, both of whom work at Facebook on Facebook’s side of the Oversight Board experiment. What do they think of the first six or so months of the Oversight Board’s work? How do they grade their own efforts? Why is their mark different from Evelyn’s? And, will the Oversight Board get jurisdiction over the metaverse? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The U.S. raid on the compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, that brought Osama bin Laden to ultimate justice also recovered nearly half a million files. In 2017, these files were publicly released, but few people have the expertise, the experience and the time to go through those materials, as well as interview family members of bin Laden and former associates to try to paint a full picture of the man. One person who fits that description is Peter Bergen, the author or editor of eight books, including "Holy War, Inc.," the definitive early study of bin Laden and al-Qaeda. Peter is also a vice president at New America and a national security analyst for CNN. Most recently, he is author of "The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden," a cradle-to-grave biography that takes advantage of a lot of this new material. David Priess sat down with Peter to talk about bin Laden's evolution from a shy, humble, religious young man to the leader of a global terrorist network bent on killing thousands of civilians. They talked about the development of al-Qaeda as an organization and the U.S. response to al-Qaeda attacks, but they focused especially on what Peter learned from the 470,000+ files and his interviews that made him change his mind about a few things regarding al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman is the Pritzker Military Fellow at the Lawfare Institute, a former NSC staffer, and of course, an impeachment witness in the first impeachment of Donald J. Trump. He is also the author of the new book, "Here, Right Matters: An American Story." He joined Benjamin Wittes to talk about the book and the ground it covers—from Vindman's immigration as a small child, to his departure from the Army, the decision he made to report what he heard Donald Trump say to President Zelensky of Ukraine and the fallout, positive and negative. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The president's interactions with intelligence and public comments about intelligence are dramatically different in the first six months of the Biden administration than they were during the last presidency. To talk about those differences and why they matter for intelligence and national security, David Priess sat down with Sue Gordon and John McLaughlin. Sue Gordon, for two years during the Trump administration, was the principal deputy director of national intelligence, after decades of service at CIA and at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, or NGA. John McLaughlin served as the acting director of central intelligence during the Bush 43 administration, after a career as an analyst, manager and executive in the CIA. They talked about the differences between the Trump administration and the Biden administration when it comes to intelligence focused on the presidents themselves. And they talked about President Biden's recent comments at Liberty Crossing in McLean, Virginia, the home of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the National Counterterrorism Center, what he said and what he didn't say, and what it all reveals about intelligence and policymaking in the Biden years. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

For the past decade, Tunisia's democracy has stood out as one of the few remaining bright spots of the Arab Spring. But earlier this week, it entered its own crisis as President Kais Saied declared a state of emergency, suspended parliament and stated his intent to move forward with widespread prosecutions as part of a long-promised anti-corruption effort. Some argue that Saied's strong-arm tactics are exactly what's needed to break the stagnation that's been plaguing Tunisia's economic and political systems, but others fear that it may be the beginning of the end for Tunisian democracy as we know it. To discuss these developments, Scott R. Anderson sat down with Sarah Yerkes, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and an expert on Tunisia. They discussed the context for Saied's actions, how other actors in Tunisia and the region have reacted, and what the international community can and should do about it. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The attempted insurrection on January 6 is back in the headlines. This week, the House select committee investigating the Capitol riot began its work with its very first hearing. So for our Arbiters of Truth series on our online information environment, Evelyn Douek interviewed Quinta Jurecic about social media’s role in warning of the riot. Specifically, they talked about an essay Quinta wrote in Lawfare on the FBI’s failure to examine social media posts announcing plans to storm the Capitol—and how FBI Director Christopher Wray’s explanations don’t hold water.So why does Quinta think Wray has been misleading in his answers to Congress on why the FBI didn’t review those posts from soon-to-be-rioters? What about the First Amendment issues raised by the U.S. government refreshing your Twitter feed? What role is social media playing in the Jan. 6 prosecutions—and what does that say about how tech companies should preserve online evidence of wrongdoing, rather than just taking it down? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.