The Lawfare Podcast (general)

It's the end of the year, and that means we opened the phones for the annual "Ask Us Anything" edition. You called in with your questions, which we routed to Lawfare contributors for their answers. Benjamin Wittes, Molly Reynolds, Steve Vladeck, David Priess, Susan Hennessey, Scott Anderson, Judd Devermont and Rohini Kurup responded to questions on everything from pardons to prosecuting contractors to ethnic diversity at Lawfare.

Thank you for your questions. And as always, thank you for listening.

Direct download: Ask_Us_Anything.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:00am EDT

It’s not something that has gotten a lot of attention amid a busy U.S. news cycle, but much has been happening in Ethiopia over the past two months. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, who just last year won the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to bring unity between Ethiopia and neighboring Eritrea, led a military battle against domestic forces in the northern Ethiopian region of Tigray. The fighting has caused the significant displacement of people living in the region and has involved reports of atrocities. In early December, the Prime Minister claimed victory, but concerns remain about how long tensions will endure—or at least continue to simmer. It’s a complicated situation with major implications for stability in the East Africa and Horn of Africa region. To break it all down, Jacob Schulz talked with two different experts. First, to get a sense of what’s going on and how we got to this point, he spoke with Emmanuel Igunza, a reporter in East Africa for BBC News; then, he spoke with Beza Tesfaye, the director of research and learning for migration at Mercy Corps, about the humanitarian problems implicated by the crisis.

Direct download: Conflict_in_Ethiopia.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:00am EDT

In the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, digital technology was touted as a potential savior. In particular, there was a burst of enthusiasm around so-called digital contact tracing apps, which would track people's movements and interactions and notify them if they had been exposed to COVID. Apple and Google, which together control the operating systems for virtually the entire smartphone market, joined forces and created a standard to help researchers, private entities and governments create contact tracing apps. But despite the early hype, enthusiasm about these apps quickly fizzled, and even today, they remain underdeveloped and rarely used. As part of Lawfare's ongoing Digital Social Contract research paper series, law professors Jane Bambauer from the University of Arizona and Brian Ray from the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law, published a paper titled, "COVID-19 Apps Are Terrible—They Didn't Have to Be." Alan Rozenshtein sat down with Jane and Brian to talk about why contact tracing never played more than a marginal role in managing the pandemic.


The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland has been conducting and regulating signals intelligence, SIGINT, since before the United States was born. To talk about how they do it across the pond, David Kris sat down with two experts on UK SIGINT and SIGINT regulation: Michael Drury and Tony Comer, both veterans of Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the British counterpart to our own National Security Agency. Michael was GCHQ's first full-time legal advisor from 1996 to 2010, when he joined the private sector, and Tony was GCHQ's historian until his retirement earlier this year. They compared and contrasted the U.S. and UK experience with SIGINT, SIGINT regulation, popular support for SIGINT and intelligence in general, and also some cutting-edge issues, including how SIGINT works today, synergies between SIGINT and cyber, GDPR encryption and online harms.

Direct download: SIGINT_in_the_UK.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:00am EDT

Jasmine El-Gamal is a nonresident senior fellow with the Middle East program at the Atlantic Council. Between 2008 and 2015, she served as a Middle East advisor in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and as a special assistant to three undersecretaries of defense for policy. She is the author of a recent article in Newlines magazine entitled, "Lost and Found in Guantanamo Bay: Two encounters with two different men in the most notorious detention facility in the world shaped my faith – and my life – forever." She joined Benjamin Wittes to talk about the article, how she ended up as a young woman as a translator at Guantanamo and in Iraq, what she's done since, and how the experience of Guantanamo shaped her later policy career, as well as her view of America, Islam and counterterrorism.

Direct download: Jasmine_El-Gamal_on_What_She_Lost_and_Found_at_Guantanamo.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:00am EDT

This week on Lawfare's Arbiters of Truth series on disinformation, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Jaime Longoria, an investigative researcher at First Draft, who monitors information disorder in Latino or Latinx communities in the United States and in Latin America. In the run-up to the 2020 U.S. election, there was an explosion of press stories about mis- and dis-information in Spanish-speaking communities. But this is hardly a new phenomenon. They talked with Jaime about the long-standing and ongoing information disorder in these communities, how it is or isn’t distinctive, why it tends to go under the radar in public conversation and what can be done about it.

Direct download: No_One_Expects_the_Spanish_Disinformation.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:00am EDT

It is two days after the Electoral College has met in 50 state capitals, voted and given 306 electoral votes to Joe Biden, making him the next president of the United States. Or did it? There is talk of a kind of electoral Alamo wherein a final showdown takes place over the counting of those electoral votes come January 6 when Congress meets in a joint session to receive the votes of the state electors. To discuss what happened this week, Benjamin Wittes sat down with Molly Reynolds, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and Scott R. Anderson, Lawfare senior editor and fellow at the Brookings Institution. They talked about whether the election is actually over, or if we are heading toward some kind of final cataclysm where the forces of Trumpism take on the last stage of the electoral process.

Direct download: Its_Over_or_Is_It.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:00am EDT

Alan Rozenshtein sat down with Yaya Fanusie, a former CIA analyst and an expert on the national security implications of cryptocurrencies, who recently published a paper as part of Lawfare's ongoing Digital Social Contract research paper series, entitled, "Central Bank Digital Currencies: The Threat From Money Launderers and How to Stop Them." They talked about how central banks are exploring digital currencies, how those currencies might in turn be used by criminals and terrorist groups, and how governments and the private sector should respond.

Direct download: Yaya_Fanusie_on_Central_Bank_Digital_Currencies-2.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:00am EDT

In the first part of this episode, Jordan Schneider, the host of ChinaTalk, sat down with Yun Jiang, a former Australian government official and an editor at the Australian National University's China Story blog, for a deep dive into the Australia-China relationship, providing much needed context on why tension has boiled over in recent months. In the second part, we excerpt a conversation that Jordan had with Wendy Cutler, a long-time USTR official and current vice president and managing director of the Asia Society Policy Institute. They talked about how the Biden administration could address China on trade, and she offers her take on Yun and Jordan's policy proposals for shoring up Australia.

Direct download: China-Australia_Relations.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:00am EDT

This week, the Supreme Court returned once again to the complex and sometimes controversial Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, or FSIA, that protects foreign sovereigns from litigation before U.S. courts. At the same time, Congress is once again debating new exceptions to the protections provided by the FSIA on issues ranging from cybercrime to the coronavirus pandemic, an effort that may risk violating international law and exposing the United States to similar lawsuits overseas. To discuss these developments and where they may be headed, Scott R. Anderson sat down with two leading scholars on sovereign immunity issues: Chimène Keitner, a professor at the UC Hastings School of Law and a former counselor on international law at the U.S. State Department, and Ingrid Wuerth, a professor at Vanderbilt University Law School and one of the reporters for the American Law Institute's Fourth Restatement on U.S. foreign relations law.

Direct download: The_Past_Present_and_Future_of_Sovereign_Immunity.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:00am EDT