The Lawfare Podcast: Patreon Edition

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On May 31, by a five-four vote, the Supreme Court blocked a Texas law from going into effect that would have sharply limited how social media companies could moderate their platforms and required companies to abide by various transparency requirements. We’ve covered the law on this show before—we recorded an episode right after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit allowed Texas to implement the law, in the same ruling that the Supreme Court just vacated. But there’s enough interesting stuff in the Supreme Court’s order—and in Justice Samuel Alito’s dissent—that we thought it was worth another bite at the apple. 

So this week on Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic invited Genevieve Lakier, professor of law at the University of Chicago and Evelyn’s colleague at the Knight First Amendment Institute, to walk us through just what happened. What exactly did the Supreme Court do? Why does Justice Alito seem to think that the Texas law has a decent chance of surviving a First Amendment challenge? And what does this suggest about the possible futures of the extremely unsettled landscape of First Amendment law?

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The business of offensive cyber operations and intelligence gathering increasingly requires the military and intelligence community to exploit networks, hardware, and software owned or produced by American companies and used by American citizens. Sometimes this exploitation occurs with the use of zero-day vulnerabilities. In order to determine when zero-day vulnerabilities should be exploited versus disclosed to the relevant vendor so that the vulnerability can be patched, the United States government engages in an interagency process known as the Vulnerabilities Equities Process or VEP.

Stephanie Pell sat down with Dr. Lindsey Polley, director of defense and national security at Starburst Aerospace, to talk about her recently defended dissertation, “To Disclose or Not to Disclose, That Is the Question: A Methods-Based Approach for Examining & Improving the US Government's Vulnerabilities Equities Process.” They discussed the purpose of the VEP, how it is structured to operate, and how its current state and structure impedes its ability to promote longer-term social good through its vulnerability adjudications. They also talked about some of Lindsey's recommendations to improve the VEP. 

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This week on Chatter, Shane Harris talks with journalist Jamie Kirchick about his new book Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington. Kirchick’s story unfolds over several decades and reveals the secret history of gays and lesbians in the capital, as well as the history of secrecy in which they played pivotal roles. 

The book is a set of personal stories as well as an exploration of the national security bureaucracy at the heart of power and influence in Washington. And Kirchick explores a provocative idea: Were gays and lesbians, already accustomed to living secret lives, well-suited to work as intelligence officers? 

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. Learn more and subscribe to Chatter.

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In May, news came out that the U.S. government was thinking of putting the Chinese video surveillance company Hikvision on the Treasury Department’s Specially Designated Nationals list, otherwise known as the SDN list. The move would have huge impacts on Hikvision’s business prospects in the U.S. and around the world and would represent yet another escalation in the way that the U.S. government handles Chinese technology companies. 

To talk through the news and why it's so significant, Jacob Schulz sat down with Katrina Northrop, a reporter at The Wire China who wrote a story about the Hikvision saga, and Alex Iftimie, a partner at Morrison & Foerster and a former official within the National Security Division at the Justice Department.

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As transparency reporting about content moderation enforcement has become standard across the platform industry, there's been growing questions about the reliability and accuracy of the reports the platforms are producing. With all reporting being entirely voluntary and the content moderation industry in general being very opaque, it’s hard to know how much to trust the figures that companies report in their quarterly or biannual enforcement reports. As a result, there's been growing calls for independent audits of these figures, and last month, Meta released its first ever independent audit of its content moderation reporting systems. 

This week on Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek sat down with someone who actually knows something about auditing: Colleen Honigsberg, an associate professor of law at Stanford Law School, whose research is focused on the empirical study of corporate and securities law. They talked about how auditors work, the promises and pitfalls of auditing in other contexts and what that might teach us for auditing in the content moderation context, and whether this is going to be a useful regulatory tool. 

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Non-Fungible Tokens, or NFTs, have captured the attention of thousands over the past few weeks and months. This technology's use has encompassed various forms of digital art such as the popular depictions of cartoon apes. But, one country has begun looking beyond NFT’s use as a digital asset toward using it for the creation of a more centralized and restrictive internet ecosystem.

Lawfare fellow in cybersecurity law Alvaro Marañon sat down with Yaya Fanusie, an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, to speak about the China government’s vision for the next iteration of the internet. Yaya is an expert on the national security implications of cryptocurrencies and recently has written Lawfare posts analyzing China’s NFT and national digital currency initiatives. 

They broke down an NFT and the other technical acronyms, what the Chinese government’s aspirations are with its national blockchain project, and what the strategic risk to nation-states is if China can implement its technological vision. 

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