The Lawfare Podcast: Patreon Edition

From April 22, 2017: Over the past year, Lawfare has expended a great deal of ink on the problem of sextortion, a form of online sexual assault in which perpetrators obtain explicit images or video of their victims and use those images to extort further explicit content. We even brought Mona Sedky, a Justice Department prosecutor who focuses on sextortion cases, onto the podcast to discuss her work. Now, we’re pleased to feature Mona on the podcast once again with audio of her talk at the George Washington University Law School on prosecuting sextortion.

If you’re interested in reading our Brookings Institution reports on sextortion, you can find them here and here.

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From March 3, 2012: Missy Cummings, Director of the Humans and Automation Laboratory and a professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT, sat down with Ritika Singh for the fifth episode of the Lawfare Podcast to talk about robots on our battlefields.

Cummings is a bit of a force of nature. In addition to designing unmanned weapons systems, she was one of the Navy's first female fighter pilots—an experience she chronicles in her book “Hornet's Nest.” 

There are currently around 20,000 robots deployed in U.S. theaters of operation. These robots, which are getting cheaper and easier to make, are characterized by increasing capability and increasing miniaturization. Missy and Ritika discussed the many issues to which these developments give rise, as well as where the science and engineering in weapons systems is likely to go in the future.

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We're giving you something a bit different for today's Lawfare Podcast. It's an episode of Lawfare’s new podcast, Chatter, in which Shane Harris or David Priess, or occasionally both of them, have extended, one-on-one conversations with fascinating people working at the creative edges of national security.

In this episode, Shane talks with Noah Shachtman, the editor-in-chief of Rolling Stone, who got there in part from his work as a national security journalist.

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Despite being isolated from much of the rest of the international community, North Korea has emerged as an unexpected powerhouse in the realm of cybercrime, with affiliated hackers pulling off some of the most daring heists in cyberattacks of the past decade.

Scott R. Anderson sat down with journalists Jean Lee and Geoff White, who have put together a podcast series entitled “The Lazarus Heist” for the BBC that explores how North Korea came to play this role. Through the lens of the podcast, they discussed the origins of North Korea's interest in both conventional and cybercrime, what they tell us about North Korea's role in the world, and the ways in which they have been used as part of North Korea's broader international agenda.

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From July 28, 2019: In the 1950s and 1960s, the Central Intelligence Agency had a major problem. The streets of Moscow were a virtually impossible operating environment due to heavy KGB surveillance and other operational difficulties. Through a series of trial and error, and a whole lot of ingenuity, along came the "Moscow rules," a series of technical advancements in the area of disguise and communications technology, and some different operating tradecraft that allowed CIA case officers to get the information they needed from Soviet sources to help the Cold War stay cold.

Jonna Mendez is a former CIA Chief of Disguise, who is also a specialist in clandestine photography. Her 27-year career, for which she earned the CIA's Intelligence Commendation Medal, included operational disguise responsibilities in the most hostile theaters of the Cold War, including Moscow, and also took her into the Oval Office. She is the co-author, with her late husband Tony Mendez, of "The Moscow Rules: The Secret CIA Tactics that Helped America Win the Cold War." David Priess spoke with Jonna about the experiences that she and her husband had at CIA, evolving the Moscow Rules, and applying these new disguises and technologies in the service of national security.

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From August 23, 2014: News broke yesterday that the Russian military has moved artillery units inside of Ukraine and that Russian troops are actively using them against Ukranian forces---a move with dramatic escalatory potential. At the same time, Ukraine appears to be closing in on the last Russian-backed rebel strongholds. As the crisis unfolds and the United States seeks to isolate Russia using a network of sanctions, important questions have arisen about Russia's future role in the region and its relationship with the West. What is Russian President Vladimir Putin's ultimate goal? Why, after so much effort to integrate into the global economy, is Putin choosing another path? Is Russia actually attempting to free itself of the Western dominated world order?

Earlier this week, the Brookings Institution hosted a panel discussion on the future of Russia’s place in the international order in the light of recent more aggressive turns in its foreign policy. Thomas Wright, fellow with the Project on International Order and Strategy (IOS), moderated the conversation with Brookings President Strobe Talbott, Senior Fellow Clifford Gaddy of Brookings’s Center on the United States and Europe (CUSE) and Susan Glasser, editor at Politico Magazine. They describe Putin's worldview and subsequent strategy, and lay out the potential consequences of continued tensions for the global economy, coordinated counter-terrorism efforts, and the increasingly stressed non-proliferation regime.

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 In 2018, a group of academics and free expression advocates convened in Santa Clara, California, for a workshop. They emerged with the Santa Clara Principles on Transparency and Accountability in Content Moderation—a high level list of procedural steps that social media companies should take when making decisions about the content on their services. The principles quickly became influential, earning the endorsement of a number of major technology companies like Facebook.

Three years later, a second, more detailed edition of the principles has just been released—the product of a broader consultation process. So what’s changed? This week on Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with David Greene, senior staff attorney and civil liberties director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. At EFF, he’s been centrally involved in the creation of version 2.0 of the principles. They talked about what motivated the effort to put together a new edition and what role he sees the principles playing in the conversation around content moderation. And they discussed amicus briefs that EFF has filed in the ongoing litigation over social media regulation laws passed by Texas and Florida.

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