The Lawfare Podcast

On Thursday of this week, Lawfare’s Benjamin Wittes and Bobby Chesney, along with General Jack Keane, appeared before the House Armed Services Committee to provide “Outside Perspectives on the President’s Proposed Authorization for the Use of Military Force Against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).” It’s an in-depth hearing that delves extensively into the President’s proposed AUMF, its merits and its flaws, and how those failings can be addressed. For today’s podcast, we’ve removed any non-AUMF discussion so that only the most relevant parts are included.

 

Direct download: Episode_112--HASC_AUMF_Hearing.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 6:08pm EDT

In mid-September, Benjamin Wittes, Editor-in-Chief of Lawfare and a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, delivered a keynote address on Constitution Day at the National Security Agency. We are pleased to now be able to provide that speech in full. That’s right - it took this long for an unclassified speech, from someone without a security clearance, to pass through the declassification process. To that point, Ben’s address touches on the difficulties of transparency in intelligence operations, outlines just why so many people now struggle to trust the intelligence community, and concludes with three challenges the community must address in order to maintain public confidence in the future. 

Direct download: Episode_111--Ben_Wittes_Constitution_Day_NSA.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 6:19pm EDT

A few weeks ago, Shane Harris and Benjamin Wittes spoke at Washington and Lee School of Law’s symposium on Cyber-surveillance in the Post-Snowden Age. Shane and Ben are familiar names to frequent Lawfare readers, no doubt. Ben is the editor-in-chief of Lawfare and a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution; Shane is senior correspondent at the Daily Beast and author of @War: The Rise of the Military-Internet ComplexTheir speech, under the title "Point/Counter-point," is a lighthearted, but thorough, overview of the prevailing debates around NSA surveillance including the role of congressional oversight, our evolving perception of privacy, and how the law can respond to rapid technological change.

Direct download: Episode_110--Shane_and_Ben_Show.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 12:31pm EDT

This week, Robert S. Litt, General Counsel of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence gave a keynote speech at the Brookigns Institution on US Intelligence Community Surveillance One Year after President Obama’s Address. In his address, Litt discusses the progress the Administration and the IC has made in carrying out Obama’s Presidential Policy Directive, or PPD-28. He outlines the legal authority for certain surveillance programs, particularly those set to expire in 2015, and addresses their implications on privacy, civil liberties, competitiveness, and security. In the end, the conversation addressed many of the questions raised by the implementation of these reforms, and laid out an explanation of where we go from here.  

Direct download: Episode_109--Bob_Litt.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:26pm EDT

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