The Lawfare Podcast: Patreon Edition

It’s been a busy week in the world of social media and technology platforms. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg sent an odd letter to the House Judiciary Committee apparently disclaiming some of his company’s past content moderation efforts. Telegram founder Pavel Durov was arrested in France on a wide range of charges involving an investigation into the misuse of his platform. And Elon Musk is engaged in an ongoing battle with Brazilian courts, which have banned access to Twitter (now X) in the country after Musk refused to abide by court orders. These three news stories speak to a common theme: the difficult and uncertain relationship between tech platforms and the governments that regulate them. To make sense of it all, Quinta Jurecic, a Senior Editor at Lawfare, with Matt Perault—the Director of the Center on Technology Policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill—and Renée DiResta, author of the new book, “Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies Into Reality,” and the former technical research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory.

This week, Alan, Quinta, and Scott celebrated the third anniversary of Rational Security 2.0 with their Lawfare colleagues Molly Reynolds, Natalie Orpett, and Tyler McBrien, who sat in brutal judgment as the three co-hosts pitched them their hottest takes yet, including:Are concerns about judicial ethics overblown?Do ethics require that we open the borders and make whoever wants to become one a citizen?Should we just treat AI systems like the wild animals they are?Which takes are undercooked, which too hot, and which are just right? Listen in and decide!Meanwhile, for object lessons, Scott shared some news about the future of Rational Security moving forward. Listen to the end of the episode to find out what!

As Robbie Gramer and Amy Mackinnon wrote in Foreign Policy, “If you want to learn more about the U.S. Democratic Party’s foreign-policy vision as the Democratic National Convention (DNC) gets underway this week, you have two options: a webpage that apparently hasn’t been updated in three years or a massive PDF document that is still written as if President Joe Biden, not Vice President Kamala Harris, is the party’s candidate.”In other words, figuring out what a potential Harris administration foreign policy or Harris Doctrine might look like is no small task. On today’s episode, Lawfare Managing Editor Tyler McBrien sat down with Foreign Policy Columnist Michael Hirsh to try to do just that. They discussed “Preparing for a Less Arrogant America,” Hirsh’s review of the most recent books by Vice President Harris’s top foreign policy advisors, Philip Gordon and Rebecca Lissner, as well as other clues about the shape of a potential Harris administration foreign policy agenda.

Duncan McLaren, Climate Intervention Fellow in Environmental Law and Policy at UCLA, joins Kevin Frazier, a Tarbell Fellow at Lawfare, to discuss geoengineering in light of a recent New York Times article detailing prior efforts to conduct climate interventions, namely the SCoPEx project. This conversation explores the history of geoengineering, different geoengineering techniques, and the opportunity costs associated with further research in the field.

Walt Hickey is the Deputy Editor for Data and Analysis at Insider News, and the author of You Are What You Watch: How Movies and TV Affect Everything. His book explores the power of entertainment to change our beliefs, how we see ourselves, and how nations gain power.He joined Eugenia Lostri, Lawfare's Fellow in Technology Policy and Law, to talk about how we use media to express our societal apprehensions, the ways in which the military, NASA and the CIA collaborate with Hollywood, and the soft power of media productions.Chatter is a production of Lawfare and Goat Rodeo. This episode was produced and edited by Isabelle Kerby-McGowan and Cara Shillenn of Goat Rodeo. Podcast theme by David Priess, featuring music created using Groovepad.

Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota Law School and Lawfare Senior Editor Alan Rozenshtein sits down with Kevin Frazier, Assistant Professor of Law at St. Thomas University College of Law, Co-Director of the Center for Law and AI Risk, and a Tarbell Fellow at Lawfare. They discuss a new paper that Kevin has published as part of Lawfare’s ongoing Digital Social Contract paper series titled “Prioritizing International AI Research, Not Regulations.”Frazier sheds light on the current state of AI regulation, noting that it's still in its early stages and is often under-theorized and under-enforced. He underscores the need for more targeted research to better understand the specific risks associated with AI models. Drawing parallels to risk research in the automobile industry, Frazier also explores the potential role of international institutions in consolidating expertise and establishing legitimacy in AI risk research and regulation.

From October 28, 2022: There's been a lot of discussion about whether Donald Trump should be indicted. Lately, that discussion has focused on the documents the FBI seized from Mar-a-lago or the Jan. 6 committee's revelations about his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. But what about his speech on the ellipse on Jan. 6 when he told a crowd of thousands to “fight like hell,” and they went on to attack the Capitol? Isn't that incitement?Lawfare executive editor Natalie Orpett sat down with Alan Rozenshtein, a senior editor at Lawfare and an associate professor at the University of Minnesota Law School, and Jed Shugerman, a professor at Fordham Law School. Alan and Jed explained the complicated First Amendment jurisprudence protecting political speech, even when it leads to violence, and why they believe that given everything we know now, Trump may in fact be criminally liable. They also reference Alan and Jed’s law review article in Constitutional Commentary, “January 6, Ambiguously Inciting Speech, and the Overt-Acts Solution.”

From October 30, 2020: Laura Rosenberger is the director of the Alliance for Securing Democracy and a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States. She was foreign policy advisor for the Hillary Clinton campaign four years ago, where she had to respond to Russian information operations against the campaign in real time. She has been working on combating foreign interference in U.S. domestic politics ever since, and she is the author of two recent significant articles—one in Foreign Affairs and one on Lawfare—both on the subject of foreign influence operations and interference in U.S. politics. She joined Benjamin Wittes to discuss the strategic purpose of these operations, whether we have to fear more operations during or after the election, and if U.S. voters should have confidence in their system.

From January 8, 2021: The storming of the Capitol on Wednesday was a catastrophic failure of protective law enforcement, as rioters overran Capitol Police barricades and gained access to a building that a lot of police were supposed to be protecting. How did it happen? Who screwed up? And what can be done about it? Benjamin Wittes sat down with Fred Burton, the executive director of the Center for Protective Intelligence at Ontic and a former protective officer; Garrett Graff, a journalist who covers federal law enforcement and who wrote a book about continuity in government; and Lawfare's executive editor Susan Hennessey. They talked about how bad the failure was on the part of the Capitol Police, who is responsible for it, what can be done now to bring the perpetrators to justice and how we should think about changing security protocols on Capitol Hill going forward.