The Lawfare Podcast: Patreon Edition

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On this week’s episode of Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Nick Pickles, the director of global public policy strategy at Twitter. They discussed a new paper just released by Twitter, “Protecting the Open Internet: Regulatory Principles for Policy Makers”—which sketches out, in broad strokes, the company’s vision for what global technology policy should look like. The paper discusses a range of issues, from transparency to everyone’s favorite new topic, algorithms. 

As a platform that’s often mentioned in the same breath as Google and Facebook, but is far smaller—with hundreds of millions of users rather than billions—Twitter stands at an interesting place in the social media landscape. How does Twitter define the “open internet,” exactly? How much guidance is the company actually giving to policymakers? And, what does the director of global public policy strategy do all day?

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It has been a decade since the Supreme Court decided on a case involving the state secrets privilege, a common law rule that allows the government to block the release of state secrets in civil litigation. In this term, the justices will hear two cases involving the privilege: United States v. Abu Zubaydah and Federal Bureau of Investigation v. Fazaga.

To talk about the two cases before the Supreme Court and the state secrets privilege more broadly, Rohini Kurup sat down with Liza Goitein, co-director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, and Bob Loeb, partner in Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe’s Supreme Court and Appellate Litigation practice, and former acting deputy director of the Civil Division Appellate Staff at the Department of Justice. They talked about how the state secrets privilege works, the controversy surrounding its use and what we can expect in the two Supreme Court cases. 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From December 24, 2016: Whatever the President-elect might say on the matter, the question of Russian interference in the presidential election is not going away: calls continue in the Senate for an investigation into the Kremlin's meddling, and the security firm Crowdstrike recently released new information linking one of the two entities responsible for the DNC hack with Russia's military intelligence agency. So how should the United States respond?

In War on the Rocks, Evan Perkoski and Michael Poznansky recently reviewed the possibilities in their piece, "An Eye for an Eye: Deterring Russian Cyber Intrusions." They've also written on this issue before in a previous piece titled "Attribution and Secrecy in Cyber Intrusions." We brought them on the podcast to talk about what deterrence of Russian interference would look like and why it's necessary.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The January 6 investigating committee in the House is busily issuing subpoenas, collecting documents and negotiating with witnesses for depositions. It is also being defied by certain witnesses, and the former president is threatening to try to stop the National Archives from turning over material related to his activities and communications during and leading up to the January 6 insurrection.

To chew over the entire spectrum of issues the committee is facing, Benjamin Wittes sat down with Brookings congressional guru and Lawfare senior editor Molly Reynolds, and Quinta Jurecic, also a senior editor at Lawfare and a Brookings fellow focusing on post-Trump accountability issues. They are the authors together of a recent piece on Lawfare on the hurdles the January 6 investigation may face. They talked about executive privilege claims involving witnesses; about executive privilege claims involving documents; about who controls the privilege, the current president or the past president; and about whether this is all just a complex scheme to run out the clock. 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen’s recent testimony before Congress has set in motion a renewed cycle of outrage over the company’s practices—and a renewed round of discussion around what, if anything, Congress should do to rein Facebook in. But how workable are these proposals, really?

This week on Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Jeff Kosseff, an associate professor of cybersecurity law at the United States Naval Academy, and the guy that has literally written not just the book on this, but two of them. He is the author of “The Twenty-Six Words That Created the Internet,” a book about Section 230, and he has another book coming out next year about First Amendment protections for anonymous speech, titled “The United States of Anonymous.” So Jeff is very well positioned to evaluate recent suggestions that Facebook should, for example, limit the ability of young people to create what users call Finstas, a second, secret Instagram account for a close circle of friends—or Haugen’s suggestion that the government should regulate how Facebook amplifies certain content through its algorithms. Jeff discussed the importance of online anonymity, the danger of skipping past the First Amendment when proposing tech reforms, and why he thinks that Section 230 reform has become unavoidable … even if that reform might not make any legal or policy sense.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.