The Lawfare Podcast: Patreon Edition

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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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