The Lawfare Podcast: Patreon Edition

Cullen O’Keefe, Research Director at the Institute for Law and AI, joins Kevin Frazier, Assistant Professor at St. Thomas University College of Law and a Tarbell Fellow at Lawfare, to discuss a novel AI governance framework. The two analyze Cullen’s recent Lawfare essay in which he details how regulation of AI supply chains by the U.S. and its allies could promote the safe development of AI. Their conversation also explores the feasibility of this and related governance proposals amid geopolitical turbulence and congressional stagnation. 

This week, Alan and Scott sat down with Lawfare Senior Fellow Molly Reynolds and Fellow in Technology Policy and Law Eugenia Lostri to talk through another week of big national security news, including:“Bye Biden.” President Biden made the historic decision to withdraw from the 2024 presidential race over the weekend. He swiftly endorsed his Vice President Kamala Harris, who now appears poised to become the Democratic candidate at the party’s convention next month. How might Harris be different from Biden, both as a candidate and as a president? And what will the change mean for the 2024 race?“The CrowdStrikes Back.” Countless businesses around the world found their Windows computers disabled this past week, due to a faulty update pushed out by the prominent cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike. The consequences continue to ripple out, including waves of canceled and rescheduled flights at numerous major airlines. What can this incident teach us about the security of our computer infrastructure? And are there ways to avoid similar incidents in the future?“Netanya-who?” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is scheduled to give his long-awaited speech to Congress later today. But the normally high-profile event has been overshadowed by recent news relating to the 2024 presidential race, potentially mitigating some of its intended effect. What should we expect from Bibi’s speech? And how will it impact progress towards a ceasefire in Gaza—and U.S.-Israeli relations more broadly?For object lessons, Alan recommended Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel "The Marriage Plot." Scott sent a love letter to the New York Times’ odd coverage of world culture, including this week’s exposé on Japanese backpacks. Molly gave the people what they want, with a new public radio podcast recommendation: NPR’s "Embedded: Supermajority." And Eugenia carried on a longstanding tradition of bringing in video game recommendations, this time for the cozy agriculture sim Stardew Valley. 

In the runup to Jan. 6, lies and falsehoods about the supposed theft of the 2020 election ran wild on Twitter. Following the insurrection, the company took action—abruptly banning 70,000 users who had promoted misinformation on the platform. But was this mass deplatforming actually effective in reducing the spread of untruths?According to a paper recently published in Nature, the answer is yes. Two of the authors, David Lazer of Northeastern University and Kevin Esterling of the University of California, Riverside, joined Lawfare Senior Editor Quinta Jurecic to discuss their findings—and ponder what this means about the influence and responsibility of social media platforms in shaping political discourse.

Alissa Starzak, head of public policy at Cloudflare, joins Kevin Frazier, Assistant Professor at St. Thomas University College of Law and a Tarbell Fellow at Lawfare, to discuss the promises and perils of AI in the cybersecurity context. Frazier, who interned with Cloudflare while in law school, and Starzak cover the novel threats posed by AI to the integrity of the Internet. The two also discuss privacy laws, AI governance, and recent Supreme Court decisions.

This week, we’re at the Aspen Security Forum, the annual gathering of national security and foreign policy heavyweights. The conference regularly draws senior government and military officials from the United States and around the world to chew over the big issues of the day, and this time we had a full plate. It’s not exactly hardship duty escaping to a glamorous mountain paradise. But the real world hardly felt far away. Questions linger about the November elections and the security failure that led to the assassination attempt on Donald Trump while two wars grind on with no clear sign of stopping. Shane Harris sat down with his colleagues Courtney Kube of NBC News and Gordon Lubold of The Wall Street Journal to talk about the highlights of the conference and what people discussed on the sidelines, where the real action often happens.Watch recordings of the security forum panels. https://www.aspensecurityforum.org/ Read more from our guests. Courtney Kube: https://www.nbcnews.com/author/courtney-kube-ncpn3621 Gordon Lubold: https://www.wsj.com/news/author/gordon-lubold Chatter is a production of Lawfare and Goat Rodeo. This episode was produced and edited by Noam Osband of Goat Rodeo. Podcast theme by David Priess, featuring music created using Groovepad.

Alan Rozenshtein, Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota Law School and Senior Editor at Lawfare, and Matt Perault, the Director of the Center on Technology Policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, sat down with Alexander Macgillivray, known to all as "amac," who was the former Principle Deputy Chief Technology Officer of the United States in the Biden Administration and General Counsel at Twitter.amac recently wrote a piece for Lawfare about making AI policy in a world of technological uncertainty, and Matt and Alan talked to him about how to do just that.

Over the last two weeks, the Russians have bombed a children’s hospital in Kyiv, Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán has been on an international peace mission, the NATO summit has taken place in Washington, and Ukrainian forces have continued to struggle to hold territory. To go over a busy few weeks, Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Anastasiia Lapatina, Lawfare’s Kyiv fellow, and Eric Ciaramella of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

From April 14, 2020: Nobody has been more aggressive about using the coronavirus crisis to seize power than Hungarian strong man Viktor Orbán. Orbán declared a state of emergency and has been ruling by decree. He has also instigated criminal penalties for spreading false information about the coronavirus, and his Fidesz party has effectively dissolved Parliament. Joining Benjamin Wittes to discuss the decline of Hungarian democracy is András Pap, a Hungarian scholar of constitutional law and a professor at Central European University's nationalist studies program in Budapest, and Anne Applebaum, essayist, author, and scholar of Eastern Europe, nationalism and the former Soviet Union. They talked about whether Orbán's seizure of power is as big a deal as it initially appears, about where Orbán stands in the pantheon of right wing populists worldwide, and about what, if anything, the European Union is likely to do about it.

This episode of “Trump's Trials and Tribulations,” was recorded on July 18 in front of a live audience on YouTube and Zoom.Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes spoke to Lawfare Legal Correspondent and Legal Fellow Anna Bower and Lawfare Senior Editor Roger Parloff about Judge Cannon’s order dismissing the classified documents case against Trump, Trump’s motion to vacate the New York conviction, and took audience questions from Lawfare material supporters.