This week, the American Bar Association hosted a panel discussion on “Achieving More Transparency about Secret Intelligence Programs”, which along with Lawfare's Carrie Cordero, featured comments from Alexander Joel of Office of the Director of National Intelligence and Rachel Brand and the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. The panel explores recent calls for greater transparency, and examines whether recently adopted principles go far enough. Can an entity oriented towards secrecy by nature operate effectively in an environment of transparency? And just how much more transparent can intelligence agencies be without enabling legitimate targets to avoid surveillance?

Four years ago, Anwar al Awlaki—an American citizen—was killed in an American drone strike in Yemen, marking the first targeted killing of a U.S. citizen by the U.S. government. While the attack occurred almost four years ago, the legality, morality and prudential nature of the strike, and others like it that occur nearly daily in a scattershot of countries around the world, remain a subject of much debate. 

Last week, Jefferson Powell joined Lawfare’s Jack Goldsmith at the May Hoover Book Soiree for a discussion of Targeting Americans: The Constitutionality of U.S. Drone War, a new book that takes a deep look into the constitutionality of the program. Powell is a Professor of Law at Duke University, and over the hour, he argues that the killing of Anwar al Awlaki under the 2001 AUMF was constitutional, but that the Obama administration’s broader claims of authority are not. He also asserts that American citizens acting as combatants in al Qaeda are not entitled to due process protections. Yet constitutional claims should not be confused with what is moral, or indeed, what is legal under international norms. Those answers, Powell suggests, must be examined through means other than constitutional law.

This week on the show, Zachary Goldman and Samuel Rascoff of the NYU Center on Law and Security came on the show to discuss their new edited volume, “Global Intelligence Oversight: Governing Security in the Twentry-First Century.” The book’s contributors take a comparative approach to examining trends in intelligence oversight. And Zach and Sam join Lawfare’s Benjamin Wittes and Bobby Chesney---yes, that same Bobby Chesney, back from the Zombie Apocalypse---to tease out the book’s chapter’s on the role of transnational oversight, the changing nature of judicial oversight, and how the executive too can create intelligence accountability.

*Correction: The voice at the beginning of the podcast is that of Zach Goldman and not Sam Rascoff as indicated.*

Last week, Juliette Kayyem joined Lawfare’s Jack Goldsmith at the Hoover Book Soiree for a discussion of her new book, Security Mom: An Unclassified Guide to Protecting Our Homeland and Your Home. In their conversation, Kayyem, who served as Assistant Secretary for Intergovernmental Affairs in the Department of Homeland Security, distills lessons from her years of government service, outlining a number of smart, measureable guidelines that every American citizen can follow in order to enhance their own security preparedness. In her assessment, homeland security begins in the home, and we all have a responsibility to ensure that our families are prepared in the event that the unthinkable happens. 

Intel Security's Chris Young gives a talk on the current cybersecurity landscape. And we hold a debate on using Big Data to protect personal privacy, featuring Daniel Weitzner of MIT, Laura Donahue of Georgetown Law, Susan Hennessey of Brookings and Lawfare, Greg Nojeim of the Center for Democracy and Technology, and David Hoffman of Intel: Is Big Data just a privacy threat? Or is it part of the solution too?

This week on the podcast, Benjamin Wittes and Cliff Kupchan talk about the future of U.S-Russia relations and to delve into the Russian intervention in Syria. Kupchan is the Chairman and Practice Head for Eurasia at the Eurasia Group, where he covers Russia’s domestic and foreign policy, as well as its energy sector. He argues that the United States has good reason to talk to and work with Russia on a host of crises, including Syria. While he calls Russia a “revisionist power without a vision,” he also warns that the United States would be foolish to dismiss the country’s concerns out of hand. Instead, American officials should strive to work with Moscow in Syria, where he argues that the national interest requires it, as an anti-Russian obstructionism will benefit neither the United States nor the international community. 

Apple and the FBI may have been settled out of court, but that doesn’t mean the fight is over. With Congress on the verge of considering new legislation to compel technology companies to decrypt data, the Going Dark debate is alive and well. 

Last week on a panel at the IAPP Global Privacy Summit in Washington D.C., Lawfare's Editor-in-Chief Ben Wittes and Daniel Weitzner discussed the fallout from the battle between Apple and the FBI and what is likely to come of the Going Dark debate. Weitzner is the Director of the MIT Internet Policy Research Initiative and Principal Research Scientist at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab; he was formerly the United States Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Internet Policy at the White House. He and Ben parse the contours of the recent dispute between the Bureau and the technology giant, explore the boundaries of commercial use encryption, and debate the role of backdoors in law enforcement investigations. They conclude with thoughts on the policy implications of the latest reemergence of the cryptowars. 

Eric Schwartz, dean of the Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota and previously U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Population, Refugees, and Migration, explains why the United States has an interest in alleviating the Syrian refugee crisis. 

This week, Adam Segal of the Council on Foreign Relations joined Lawfare’s Jack Goldsmith at the Hoover Book Soiree for a discussion of his new book, The Hacked World Order: How Nations Fight, Trade, Maneuver, and Manipulate in the Digital Age. Segal begins at what he calls “year Zero”—sometime between June 2012 and June 2013—explaining that the events in that year ushered in a new era of geopolitical maneuvering in cyber space, with great implications for security, privacy, and the international system. These changes, he suggests, have the potential to produce unintended and unimaginable problems for anyone with an internet connection. 

This week on the podcast, Lawfare’s Ben Wittes interviews Amy Zegart and Stephen Krasner, both of the Hoover Institution, about their recently released national security strategy called Pragmatic Engagement Amidst Global Uncertainty: Three Major Challenges. The document, which was produced by the Hoover Institution’s Working Group on Foreign Policy and Grand Strategy, presents three key challenges to the future of U.S. security—China, Russia, and unconventional threats—and outlines three principles that should guide the United States’s response, ultimately calling for a pragmatic foreign policy that does not go in search of monsters abroad.