The Lawfare Podcast

Probably best known as the Twitter handle @pwnallthethings, Matt Tait is the chief operating officer of Corellium. Previously, he was a hacker for GCHQ, the British version of the National Security Agency, he was the CEO of Capital Alpha Security, and he worked at Google Project Zero, among other things. Most of this podcast was recorded before the news of the Kaseya ransomware attack broke over the weekend (Matt wrote a piece on Lawfare entitled, "The Kaseya Ransomware Attack is a Really Big Deal"). They talked a bit about Kaseya at the beginning of the episode before turning to a more general discussion of ransomware, other current cybersecurity threats and what Matt is worried about as he looks into the future.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/lawfare. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From December 14, 2019: Recently, former CIA officer Jerry Lee was sentenced to 19 years in prison for conspiring to share classified information with the Chinese government. During the time in which Lee was in touch with Chinese intelligence agents, dozens of CIA sources in China were arrested or killed—a catastrophe for CIA operations in the country. What's the connection between this disaster and the Lee case? And what do both mean for Chinese counterintelligence work overall? David Priess sat down with John McLaughlin, practitioner-in-residence at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and former acting director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and Shane Harris, intelligence and national security reporter for The Washington Post whose reporting covered much of the Jerry Lee case. They talked about the case, counterintelligence in China and the impact on the U.S.-China relationship. Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/lawfare. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From December 3, 2016: Earlier this week, the New York Times published a story by Charlie Savage, Eric Schmitt, and Mark Mazzetti informing us that the Obama administration had changed its interpretation of the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force to more broadly cover the use of force against al-Shabaab, expanding its previous reading of the AUMF as only authorizing force against members of al-Shabaab individually linked to al-Qaeda. Bobby noted the story on Lawfare and provided a few comments. While the news has been somewhat drowned out amidst the hubbub of the presidential transition, the significance of this change in legal interpretation shouldn't be lost—so we brought Bobby and Charlie Savage on the podcast to talk with Benjamin Wittes about where this change came from and what it might mean.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/lawfare. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From February 27, 2019: On Wednesday, February 27, 2019, Michael Cohen—the former executive vice president of the Trump Organization, former deputy finance chairman of the Republican National Committee, and former personal lawyer to Donald Trump—paid a visit to the House Committee on Oversight and Reform. Cohen accused the president of campaign finance violations after taking office. He alleged that he was present when Roger Stone gave Trump advance notice of the WikiLeaks dump of the hacked DNC emails. And he claimed that the president's statements in a meeting with Jay Sekulow led Cohen to conclude that the president wanted Cohen to make false statements to Congress. So we cut out all of the bickering, all of the procedural obstructions, and all the rest of the frivolity, to bring you just the one hour of testimony you need to hear.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/lawfare. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Manhattan district attorney and the New York attorney general's office have issued an indictment against the Trump Organization and its chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg. It was, shall we say, not the indictment that many people who imagined accountability for Donald Trump would have prayed for or would have expected. It focuses on under-the-table compensation for senior executives—one senior executive in particular. To discuss it all, Benjamin Wittes spoke with Lawfare senior editor Quinta Jurecic; Daniel Hemel, a tax law expert at the University of Chicago; and Rebecca Roiphe of the New York Law School, who is an expert on prosecutions and politicization and a veteran of the New York office that brought the case.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/lawfare. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week on Arbiters of Truth, our podcast on our online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic bring you an episode they’ve wanted to record for a while: a conversation with Nathaniel Gleicher, the head of security policy at Facebook. He runs the corner of Facebook that focuses on identifying and tackling threats aimed at the platform, including information operations. They discussed a new report released by Nathaniel’s team on “The State of Influence Operations 2017-2020.” What kinds of trends is Facebook seeing? What is Nathaniel’s response to reports that Facebook is slower to act in taking down dangerous content outside the U.S.? What about the argument that Facebook is designed to encourage circulation of exactly the kind of incendiary content that Nathaniel is trying to get rid of? And, of course, they argued over Facebook’s use of the term “coordinated inauthentic behavior” to describe what Nathaniel argues is a particularly troubling type of influence operation. How does Facebook define it? Does it mean what you think it means?Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/lawfare. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Early Monday morning, the U.S. carried out airstrikes in Iraq and Syria against two Iranian-backed militia groups. The strikes raise a whole host of diplomatic, legal and policy questions. To break them all down, Jacob Schulz sat down with Scott R. Anderson, Lawfare's executive editor and a senior fellow in the National Security Law Program at Columbia Law School.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/lawfare. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Adam Klein was, until the other day, the chairman of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, known colloquially as the PCLOB. In that capacity, he had the opportunity to do something that no one has ever really done before as an outsider: review a bunch of FISA applications, that is, applications for electronic surveillance under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The result is a white paper that looks behind the FISA curtain that he published before leaving office and about which he wrote a Lawfare post. He joined Benjamin Wittes on Lawfare Live to talk about the applications, the review, the white paper and the Lawfare article, and how the FISA process could stand improvement.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/lawfare. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this second half of David Kris's two-part discussion with FBI historian John Fox, David and John continue their whirlwind tour of the Bureau, focused on its use of wiretap evidence, SIGINT and other intelligence. In the last episode, they worked their way from the FBI's founding through the era of prohibition and gangsters, World War II and part of the Cold War, including the prosecution of DOJ official Judith Coplon based on information from NSA's Project VENONA. In this episode, they move forward through the FBI's more recent history to cover abuses revealed in the 1970s, the terrorist attacks of 9/11, as well as some present-day issues.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/lawfare. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From the Lawfare Archive, July 18, 2015: While world powers and Iran were embroiled in last minute negotiations last week, Brookings hosted a panel discussion on the meaning of another power’s recent nuclear threats: Russia's. In recent months, Russia has rattled the saber, with Vladimir Putin remarking on his nuclear options during the Crimea crisis and making a mild threat to nuke the Danish navy. Given that Russia maintains enough nuclear muscle to destroy the world---theoretically anyway---how seriously should we take these provocations?The panel was moderated by Brookings Fellow Jeremy Shapiro and featured Hans Kristensen of the Federation of American Scientists and Brookings scholars Pavel Baev and Steven Pifer. Together, the trio took a deep dive into Russia’s recent nuclear threats during the Crimea crisis, the country’s capabilities—both conventional and nuclear—relative to NATO, and its ongoing modernization program. The three conclude with terrifying thought: The folks surrounding Putin just might not fully understand deterrence.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/lawfare. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.