The Lawfare Podcast: Patreon Edition

The Lawfare Podcast: Patreon Edition

By The Lawfare InstituteBusinessNewsGovernment
Download on the App Store

The Lawfare Podcast: Patreon Edition episodes

  • Dmitri Alperovitch and Matt Tait on the Latest in Cybersecurity

    It was quite a week in cybersecurity. The Israeli firm NSO Group was outed by a consortium of newspapers and media entities for its snooping software Pegasus, which seems to have gathered data from the phones of a shockingly large number of people. Then, starting Sunday evening and into Monday morning, the Biden administration announced a multi-lateral response to China's Microsoft Exchange Server hack. There were indictments, there was a toughly worded statement, but there were no sanctions. Was it enough? 


    Benjamin Wittes sat down with Matt Tait, AKA @pwnallthethings, the chief operating officer of Corellium, and Dmitri Alperovitch, the founder of the Silverado Policy Accelerator and the co-founder of CrowdStrike. They talked about the Biden administration's response on China; the disclosure of Pegasus and what that means for iPhone security, for Apple and for the Israeli government; and they talked about mobile device security. Is it hopeless?

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

    46 min
  • Scott Anderson on Withdrawals, Then and Now
    U.S. troops are pulling out of Afghanistan, the withdrawal is almost done and U.S. forces turned over the Bagram Airfield to Afghan forces the other day. Scott Anderson knows something about withdrawals. He served at U.S. Embassy Baghdad shortly after the United States withdrew from Iraq. He joined Benjamin Wittes on Lawfare Live to talk about the Afghan withdrawal, his memories of the Iraq withdrawal and why these things sometimes go better and sometimes go worse. What has the Biden administration learned from the Iraq withdrawal experience? What is it doing right this time, and what is it doing wrong?

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

    52 min
  • Lawfare Archive: Afghan Parliamentarian and Female Presidential Candidate Fawzia Koofi on Afghan Security and the Condition of Women and Girls

    From February 16, 2013: Fawzia Koofi (website, Twitter) is an Afghan Member of Parliament and Vice President of the Afghan National Assembly. She is also running for President of Afghanistan in the planned April 2014 elections, and would be the first female president in Afghan history. She has a remarkable backstory: Born as the nineteenth of her father's twenty-three children, Koofi was left to die from exposure as a baby girl. She survived and witnessed during her childhood father's and brother's deaths from political unrest. She was forced to leave medical school when the Taliban took over Afghanistan in 1996 and banned the education of women and girls, and, soon after her own daughters were born, her husband died from tuberculosis he contracted while a political prisoner in a Taliban jail. After the new Afghan government was formed after the 2001 U.S.-led invasion, Koofi ran for and won a seat in the Afghan parliament. She currently represents the Badakshan region in northeastern Afghanistan and is a leading advocate for the rights of women and girls. Koofi has also written a recently published memoir, The Favored Daughter, about her life and her journey into politics.


    Koofi delivered the closing remarks at the Harvard Women's Law Association's annual conference. (Special thanks to the association's president and conference organizer, Stephanie Davidson, for arranging the interview.) Alan Rozenshtein spoke with Koofi at her snowed-in hotel about the current state of Afghanistan and the challenges facing her country.

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

    25 min
  • Lawfare Archive: Eric Schwartz, Refugee Policy and the Syrian Civil War
    From April 9, 2016: This week on the podcast, we welcome Eric Schwartz, the Dean of the Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota. Schwartz previously served as U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Population, Refugees, and Migration. In his conversation with Benjamin Wittes, he sketches the key aspects of U.S. refugee policy, explaining how it both protects the security of the United States and at times undermines its ability to accept refugees. Schwartz, who believes the United States has an interest in alleviating the Syrian refugee crisis, outlines what a coherent refugee policy would look like, and argues that the reforms must go beyond simply accepting more refugees.

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

    42 min
  • Africa and U.S. Foreign Policy Opportunities with Judd Devermont
    National security attention rarely focuses for long on Sub-Saharan Africa, and when it does, it's largely on the most populous countries like Nigeria, Ethiopia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Former intelligence community and National Security Council official Judd Devermont, now director of the Africa Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, wants to change that. Along with Nicole Wilett, who used to cover Africa for the State Department, the National Security Council and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Judd has created and co-hosts the new podcast called "49," now available everywhere. This podcast jumps head-first into the past, present and future of U.S. policy toward each of Sub-Saharan Africa's 49 countries. David Priess sat down with Judd to discuss a few of these countries, the new podcast and the opportunities for the incoming Biden administration to make real inroads in relations with countries across the continent.

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

    47 min
  • Florida Man Regulates Social Media

    On May 24, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed into law a bill designed to limit how social media platforms can moderate content. Technology companies, predictably, sued—and on June 30, Judge Robert Hinkle of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida granted a preliminary injunction against the law.

    The legislation, which purported to end “censorship” online by “big tech,” received a lot of commentary and a great deal of mockery from academics and journalists. Among other things, it included an exemption for companies that operate theme parks. But Alan Rozenshtein argues in a piece for Lawfare that though the law may be poorly written, the issues raised by the litigation are worth taking seriously. This week on our Arbiters of Truth miniseries on our online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Alan—an associate professor of law at the University of Minnesota Law School and a senior editor at Lawfare—about the Florida legislation.


    What exactly would the law have done, anyway? Why does Alan think the judge underplays the potential First Amendment considerations raised by private companies exerting control over huge swaths of the online public sphere? And what’s with the theme park stuff?

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

    1 hr
  • When Red Lines Fade Away

    Jack Goldsmith is feeling a little bit grouchy. In a piece on Lawfare entitled, "Empty Threats and Warnings on Cyber," he blasts the Biden administration and its predecessors for "publicly pledging to impose 'consequences' on Russia for its cyber actions for at least five years—usually, as here, following a hand-wringing government deliberation in the face of a devastating cyber incident." Goldsmith catalogs the recent history of administrations promising big action against Russia, yet seeming to take none, and he asks why we would do this. Why would we thus erode our deterrent capability?

    He joined Benjamin Wittes to discuss the latest of these statements, the history of them and the question of why the United States keeps speaking loudly and carrying such a small stick.

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

    36 min
  • Robert Fatton on the Assassination in Haiti and Its Aftermath

    Last week, the country of Haiti was rocked by the assassination of its controversial president, Jovenel Moïse, who was killed in a bizarre plot, the details of which are still being uncovered. Moïse's death is yet another shock for a Haitian political system that was already in a state of crisis and has some calling for foreign intervention, a controversial proposal with which Haiti has a long and difficult history.

    To discuss these developments, Scott R. Anderson sat down with Professor Robert Fatton, Jr. of the University of Virginia, a native of Haiti and a widely published expert on Haitian politics. They discussed what we know about the assassination plot and what it may mean for the country and region moving forward.

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

    54 min

About The Lawfare Podcast: Patreon Edition

From the publisher's feed

The Lawfare Podcast features discussions with experts, policymakers, and opinion leaders at the nexus of national security, law, and policy. On issues from foreign policy, homeland security,…