Mark Pomar served as assistant director of the Russian Service at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, director of the USSR Division at the Voice of America, executive director of the Board for International Broadcasting. He joined David Priess to talk about the origins of US government-funded international broadcasting, differences between RFE/RL and VOA, tensions between strategists and purists over the radios' content, the impacts of detente and of Reagan's more hawkish approach, KGB...

Alan Rozenshtein, Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota Law School and Senior Editor at Lawfare, sits down with David Kris, founder of Culper Partners and the former Assistant Attorney General for National Security in the Obama administration, to talk about a new paper that David has published as part of Lawfare's ongoing Digital Social Contract series, entitled "A Data Proxy for Clients of Cloud Service Providers.” Kris argues that cloud storage offers significant benefits for...

Aram Gavoor, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at GW Law, joins Kevin Frazier, Senior Research Fellow in the Constitutional Studies Program at the University of Texas at Austin and a Tarbell Fellow at Lawfare, to summarize and analyze the first-ever national security memo on AI. The two also discuss what this memo means for AI policy going forward, given the impending election. To receive ad-free podcasts, become a Lawfare Material Supporter at www.patreon.com/lawfare. You can also...

From April 10, 2023: On March 23, 2023, an Indian court found Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s principal opposition leader, Rahul Gandhi, guilty of defaming the Prime Minister and the Modi surname. He was sentenced to two years in prison and expelled from Parliament in what journalists and pro-democracy groups view as yet another inflection point of democratic decline under Modi’s leadership.  To understand the challenges facing Indian society and the current deterioration of India’s...

This episode of “Lawfare Live: “Trump’s Trials and Tribulations” was recorded on October 24 in front of a live audience on Youtube and Zoom. Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes spoke to Lawfare Senior Editors Quinta Jurecic and Roger Parloff about the recently released redacted appendices in the Jan. 6 case, where the various state-level fake elector cases stand, and more. Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/lawfare. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hunter Marston, PhD candidate at the Australian National University and Southeast Asia Associate at 9DashLine, joins Kevin Frazier, Assistant Professor at St. Thomas University College of Law and a Tarbell Fellow at Lawfare, to explore the economic and geopolitical significance of the South China Sea. Hunter leans on his extensive knowledge of Southeast Asian politics and history to paint a comprehensive picture of why the next Administration should pay close attention to this geographical...

This week, Scott was joined by his Lawfare colleagues Tyler McBrien and Anna Hickey and special guest Georgetown University professor and CSIS Senior Fellow (as well as Lawfare Foreign Policy Editor) Dan Byman to talk over the week’s big national security news, including: “Some Vacancies in Management.” Israeli forces unintentionally hit their number one target last week when an Israeli military patrol in Gaza stumbled across and killed Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, who is widely believed to be...

Eugenia Lostri, Senior Editor at Lawfare, sits down with Sam Kessler, Deputy Managing Editor for Tech and Protocols at CoinDesk, to talk about his recent investigation into how North Korean IT workers are infiltrating the crypto industry. They talked about the red flags that companies should be looking out for, why the crypto industry is particularly vulnerable, and the connection between these workers and the North Korean hacking arm. To receive ad-free podcasts, become a Lawfare Material...

Mark Chinen, Professor at Seattle University School of Law, joins Kevin Frazier, Assistant Professor at St. Thomas University College of Law and a Tarbell Fellow at Lawfare, to discuss his recent work on international human rights law as a framework for AI governance. Professor Chinen explores the potential of IHRL to address AI-related challenges, the implications of recent developments like the Council of Europe AI treaty, and the intersection of philosophy, divinity, and AI governance. To...

Professor Sanford Levinson has written extensively about the fragility of the Constitution. A likely contested election, AI, and ongoing gridlock makes his long-stemming concerns all the more relevant. In this episode of Chatter, Kevin Frazier, a Tarbell Fellow at Lawfare, sat down with Sandy, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law to explore how Sandy's thinking about the need for a wholesale revision of the Constitution has evolved, whether or not the Supreme Court...

For today's episode, Lawfare Senior Editor Scott R. Anderson sat down with Sarah Yerkes, Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and Sabina Henneberg, the Soref Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Peace, to discuss recent elections in Tunisia, which saw increasingly authoritarian President Kais Saied returned to office with a purported 91% of the vote. They discussed the elections' lack of credibility, how they have been received by U.S. and other foreign...

The journalist Atossa Araxia Abrahamian begins her new book, “The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World,” in her hometown: Geneva, Switzerland. She writes, “I began this book about the world on a lifelong hunch: there was something strange about the place where I grew up…I am, and will always be, a part of this world apart—a place defined by a certain placelessness.”  It turns out that Geneva is just one entrepôt of many on the hidden globe, which Abrahamian describes as a network of...

From July 7, 2022: The United States Secret Service has many important missions, the most public of which is protecting the president of the United States. And in this mission, its motto is "Zero Fail." There is no window for them to let their guard down when it comes to protecting the commander-in-chief. And yet, the past several decades of the Secret Service's protection have seen gaps, mistakes and exposures of some fundamental problems within the Secret Service itself. Carol Leonnig is a...

This episode of “Lawfare Live: National Security and the 2024 Election” was recorded on October 15 in front of a live audience on Youtube and Zoom. Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes spoke to Lawfare Senior Editors Quinta Jurecic, Eugenia Lostri, and Alan Rozenshtein, Lawfare Tarbell Fellowin Artificial Intelligence Kevin Frazier, and Associate Professor of Law at St. John's University Law School Kate Klonick. They discussed former President Trump and Vice President Harris’s positions on...

Following Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s speech to the Ukrainian Parliament outlining his victory plan, Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Lawfare Ukraine Fellow Anastasiia Lapatina and Eric Ciaramella of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. They talked about the components of the plan, the reaction from the United States and other allies, and what the plan says about the state of Ukraine's war effort. To receive ad-free podcasts, become...

This week, Scott sat down with his Lawfare colleagues Benjamin Wittes, Anastasiia Lapatina, and Eugenia Lostri to try to make sense of the week’s biggest national security news stories, including: “Kursked.” This week, even as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky rolls out his “Victory Plan” to Western allies, Russian forces have made progress reclaiming what some have described as a key part of that plan: the region of Kursk within Russia, which Ukrainian forces seized earlier this year....

Jonathan Zittrain, Faculty Director of the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard Law, joins Kevin Frazier, Assistant Professor at St. Thomas University College of Law and a Tarbell Fellow at Lawfare, to dive into his recent Atlantic article, “We Need to Control AI Agents Now.” The pair discuss what distinguishes AI agents from current generative AI tools and explore the sources of Jonathan’s concerns. They also talk about potential ways of realizing the control desired by Zittrain. For those eager...

In early September, the U.S. Justice Department released a trove of information about the Russian influence campaign known as “Doppelganger”—a Kremlin-backed effort that created faux versions of familiar news websites and seeding them with fake material. Just a few weeks later, the German publication Süddeutsche Zeitung reported that it had received a tranche of hacked materials from inside the Doppelganger operation.  Thomas Rid, a professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced...

The Earth's oceans differ from its land areas in many ways, including the historically powerful norm of "freedom of the seas." David Priess hosted David Bosco, Executive Associate Dean and Professor at Indiana University's Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies, for a discussion about the origins and core principles of the freedom of the seas concept, Hugo Grotius, the practice of maritime commerce from ancient times until now, the three mile "cannon-shot" rule of...

What are the antitrust implications of AI systems? At a recent conference co-hosted by Lawfare and the Georgetown Institute for Law and Technology, Lawfare Senior Editor Alan Rozenshtein sat down with David Lawrence, the Policy Director at the the Department of Justice's Antitrust Division to talk about how competition law applies to the makers and users of AI models. To receive ad-free podcasts, become a Lawfare Material Supporter at www.patreon.com/lawfare. You can also support Lawfare by...

From March 8, 2023: A few weeks ago, Human Rights Watch released a report on the forced expulsion of the Chagossian people, whom the United Kingdom deported from their island homes in the Indian Ocean about 60 years ago to make way for the United States to build a military base called Diego Garcia. The report recommends reparations for the Chagossian people and a trial for individuals responsible for these crimes against humanity—the very first time the group has laid such a charge at the...

From September 14, 2023: It’s been another brutal summer with seemingly constant natural disasters precipitated by climate change. The United States and other countries have rightfully begun thinking of climate change as a security issue. But extreme weather is not the only challenge we must contend with. There’s also the problem of climate change’s victims, many of whom are forced to leave their homes.  Lawfare Executive Editor Natalie Orpett sat down with Erin Sikorsky, Director of the...

This episode of “Trump’s Trials and Tribulations,” was recorded on Oct. 10 in front of a live audience on YouTube and Zoom. Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes spoke with Harvard Law School professor Jack Goldsmith and Lawfare Senior Editors Anna Bower and Roger Parloff. They discussed Jack’s recent op-ed in the New York Times—in which he argued that the Justice Department’s recent filing in the Jan. 6 case is in tension with department policy, and that the department should publicly...

Following the devastation of Hurricane Helene in western North Carolina, rumors and conspiracy theories about the disaster quickly began spreading online—some of them outrageous and bizarre, and some of them legitimate efforts to make sense of a confusing and frightening situation. With Hurricane Milton moving through Florida, the confusion seems unlikely to let up anytime soon. The volume of rumors circulating “is absolutely the worst I have ever seen,” FEMA Administrator Deanne...

This week, Scott sat down with his Lawfare colleagues Molly Reynolds, Kevin Frazier, and Katherine Pompilio to talk over the week's big national security news stories, including: “The Fourth Law of Robotics is, You Don’t Talk About the First Three Laws of Robotics.” California Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed SB 1047 this past week, a measure that would have imposed the first set of meaningful safety regulations on the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI)—measures industry leaders said...