Here at Lawfare, we try to spot critical legal issues impacting national security before they're really upon us . . . and eating our brains.

News broke yesterday that the Russian military has moved artillery units inside of Ukraine and that Russian troops are actively using them against Ukranian forces---a move with dramatic escalatory potent...

The Steptoe Cyberlaw Podcast is on hiatus in August, but we’ve brought it back for a special appearance – a debate over Senator Patrick Leahy’s version of the USA Freedom Act sponsored by the Federalist ...

The Lawfare Podcast is at the beach this week. We can neither confirm nor deny that we will be back next week.

Washington was abuzz this week as more than 50 African leaders were in town for the first U.S.-Africa Summit. Yesterday, Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, the President of Somalia, spoke at Brookings on the future ...

One of the great things about working at the Brookings Institution---and there are many of them---is access to a remarkable range of people knowledgable about whatever happens to be going on in the world...

Wow, that was quick. I haven’t even turned on the air conditioning at home yet, and already we’ve done the last podcast of the summer.  The Steptoe Cyberlaw Podcast will go on hiatus for August and retur...

Our guest this week is noted computer law guru Orin Kerr, and the podcast is a deep dive into technology and law.

It was a big week at the D.C. Circuit, which handed down the en banc decision in the Al Bahlul military commission case. It's a complicated decision: a mess of a procedural history, lots of separate opin...

Our guest this week is Chairman of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB), David Medine.  We do a deep dive into the 702 program and the PCLOB’s report recommending several changes to it.

As the election crisis in Afghanistan comes to a head, all eyes---or some of them, anyway---are once again on the future of Afghan democracy. But the United States's history in the region extends back mu...

Our guest this week is David Heyman, who recently completed a tour as DHS’s Assistant Secretary for Policy (my old job).  David has had a long and productive career in homeland security, in government, a...

Brad Smith, Executive Vice President and General Counsel of Microsoft, recently discussed the future of privacy in an increasingly digital age at a Brookings event entitled, "The Future of Global Technol...

All roads lead to Iran---at least in the news these days. There's the nuclear talks, which are coming to a head. There's common interests between the United States and the Islamic Republic in the conflic...

This week in NSA: The House passes an NDAA amendment to regulate “secondary” searches of 702 data, and the prize for Dumbest NSA Story of the Month Award goes to Andrea Peterson of the Washington Post fo...

Brookings Senior Fellows Kenneth Pollack, Suzanne Maloney, and Michael O’Hanlon discussed the evolving security crisis in Iraq on Thursday at a Brookings event entitled "Iraq in Crisis: What Options Does...

Our guest for the week, Paul Rosenzweig, requires no introduction on this site.

On Tuesday, at the 2014 Computers, Freedom and Privacy Conference, a panel of experts debated the pros and cons of adding outside lawyers to litigation before two tribunals at the heart of the NSA survei...