The Lawfare Podcast: Patreon Edition

Last December, a German court convicted a 97-year-old former Nazi camp secretary of complicity in the murder of more than 10,000 people in what the media called—once again—the last Nazi trial. After almost eight decades, the Holocaust is still being litigated, remembered, and all-too-often misremembered.

Lawfare managing editor Tyler McBrien sat down with Linda Kinstler, author of the book, “Come to This Court and Cry: How the Holocaust Ends,” and Sam Moyn, a professor of both history and law at Yale University, to discuss Linda's book. They talked about Linda's stunning discovery in Latvia that led her to tell this story, the limits of the law in holding perpetrators of mass murder accountable, and whether the antonym of forgetting is not remembering, but justice.

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You've likely heard of ChatGPT, the chatbot from OpenAI. But you’ve likely never heard an interview with ChatGPT, much less an interview in which ChatGPT reflects on its own impact on the information ecosystem. Nor is it likely that you’ve ever heard ChatGPT promising to stop producing racist and misogynistic content. 

But, on this episode of Arbiters of Truth, Lawfare’s occasional series on the information ecosystem, Lawfare editor-in-chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with ChatGPT to talk about a range of things: the pronouns it prefers; academic integrity and the chatbot’s likely impact on that; and importantly, the experiments performed by a scholar name Eve Gaumond, who has been on a one-woman campaign to get ChatGPT to write offensive content. ChatGPT made some pretty solid representations that this kind of thing may be in its past, but wouldn't ever be in its future again.

So, following Ben’s interview with ChatGPT, he sat down with Eve Gaumond, an AI scholar at the Public Law Center of the University of Montréal, who fact-checked ChatGPT's claims. Can you still get it to write a poem entitled, “She Was Smart for a Woman”? Can you get it to write a speech by Heinrich Himmler about Jews? And can you get ChatGPT to write a story belittling the Holocaust?

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It seems like everyone has classified documents stashed away these days. First, it was Donald Trump, with the Justice Department investigation into documents stored improperly at Mar-a-Lago. Then, it was Joe Biden, with news that documents bearing classification markings were found at Biden’s Wilmington home and at the Penn Biden Center. And now, former Vice President Mike Pence has also uncovered classified materials at his home. What on earth is going on?

Lawfare senior editor Quinta Jurecic sat down with Lawfare editor-in-chief Benjamin Wittes, publisher David Priess, and senior editor Scott Anderson to discuss. They talked about why classified documents are suddenly showing up everywhere; how to understand the differences between the Trump, Biden, and Pence cases; and what to make of the pickle that Attorney General Merrick Garland now finds himself in. 

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This week on Rational Security, Quinta and Scott were joined by special guest Michel Paradis to talk over the week's big national security news, including:

• “Don’t Tank my Chain.” Western allies of Ukraine have finally agreed to a way forward on providing the country with tanks, an issue which has proven surprisingly contentious in recent weeks. Germany will now allow its Leopard tanks to be used in the near-term while the United States will send Ukraine a series of M1 Abrams in the future, meeting the German demand for a matched U.S. contribution. Why was this so important to Germany? And what does it tell us about the broader state of the war?
• “Slight of the Valkyries.” The U.S. Treasury Department has slapped new sanctions on the Russian mercenary group, the Wagner Group, labeling them a Transnational Criminal Organization (“TCO”)—even as U.S. officials continue to resist calls to designate them a terrorist organization. What explains this reticence? Is it warranted?
• “Empire State of Mind.” For the first time, the New York City district attorney is trying someone under state criminal laws barring material support for terrorism that the state adopted following the September 11 attacks—even though the criminal suspect was never present in New York, but merely knew his actions would have repercussions there. Is this a sensible move? Or is there reason for pause? 

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Russia’s use of information warfare during the 2016 U.S. presidential election period focused attention on Russia’s weaponization of information in its effort to influence a U.S. election outcome and sow discord across the American public. But to the extent that we only view Russian information warfare as an aggressive or expansionist expression of Moscow’s foreign policy, we may misunderstand some key tenets of Russian information warfare doctrine. 

To gain a better understanding of the history and dynamics of Russian information warfare, Lawfare senior editor Stephanie Pell sat down with Gavin Wilde, senior fellow in the Technology and International Affairs Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and Justin Sherman, nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Cyber Statecraft Initiative. They discussed their new paper, "No Water’s Edge: Russia’s Information War and Regime Security,” and they talked about Russian information doctrine under Vladimir Putin, the differences between how the concept of information security is understood in Russia versus the West, and some key takeaways of their research for analysts and policymakers.

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Turkish President Erdoğan has thrown a giant wrench into Sweden's NATO membership bid after a protest outside the Turkish embassy in Stockholm. This, in turn, affects Finland's application to the alliance because Sweden and Finland applied to and intended to join the alliance concurrently.

Lawfare publisher David Priess sat down with Minna Ålander, research fellow at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs, to talk about how we got here, about what Finnish leaders have been saying about these new developments, and about paths forward for Finland and NATO.

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In 2019, investigative journalist and photographer Lynzy Billing went to Afghanistan to investigate a very personal story: her own past. In the process, she discovered what she came to call a classified war, one with lines of accountability so obscured that no one had to answer publicly for operations that went wrong.

Lawfare managing editor Tyler McBrien sat down with Lynzy to talk through her four-year investigation, published last month in ProPublica. They discussed Afghanistan's shady Zero Units and their relationship with the CIA, the traumatic ripple effects caused by this lack of accountability, and why the U.S. continues to rely on a strategy of night raids, which Lynzy describes as quick, brutal operations that went wrong far more often than the U.S. has acknowledged. They also discussed why Lynzy decided to tell this story when few others would. 

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