a16z Podcast | The Law (and Tech) of Warfare

Lawfare's Growth and Mission

• Readership experienced exponential growth following Donald Trump's candidacy and election, surpassing the site's total 2016 traffic by early 2023.
• The site's name "Lawfare" is a pun on "war over law" and "law about war," chosen after the founders discovered Michael Glennon had a book titled Fog of Law.
• The publication employs a "first-person voice" model, prioritizing direct expert commentary over diluted third-party reporting to counter media trends that obscure nuance.
• Lawfare is characterized by its nonpartisan, technical authority, aiming to provide a resource for practicing national security lawyers rather than a general political commentary platform.

Historical Evolution of Covered Issues

• 9-11 and Detention: Early coverage focused on the law of detention, Guantanamo Bay closure, and the legal frameworks for holding detainees, a topic that has since faded in salience.
• Drone Warfare: The debate shifted to legal targeting in non-battlefield zones (e.g., Yemen) and the ethics of autonomous weapons, with a distinction made between battlefield military drones and CIA operations.
• Surveillance and Snowden: Edward Snowden's revelations triggered a major shift in public discourse toward surveillance authorities and the technical architecture of data collection.
• Encryption (Crypto Wars Phase Three): The Apple vs. FBI dispute reignited debates over encryption, with the guest noting that "dams burst" (sudden policy shifts) are a poor method for making legislation compared to ongoing serious debate.
• FISA Court: The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court was established in 1978 to handle electronic surveillance and, by 1994, physical searches, creating a unique institution for national security oversight.

Cybersecurity and Geopolitics

• Cybersecurity has become erroneously polarized into a partisan issue, complicating policy-making due to disagreements over the reality of Russian hacking and the nature of Russian motives.
• Russia is identified as a primary adversary seeking to reestablish regional hegemony, with U.S. government power to confront Russia described as a dominant theme for the coming years.
• The guest argues that the "elites versus mass movements" and "foreigners" axes are more predictive of current political divisions than traditional left-right labels.

Emerging Forms of Remote Violence

• Sextortion: A Brookings study analyzed 80 cases involving a minimum of 1,300 victims (likely closer to 6,000), identifying "sexortion" as the first scalable form of remote sexual violence enabled by technology.
• Proliferation of Threats: The book The Future of Violence argues that technology creates a "many-to-many" threat environment where individuals can attack from anywhere, displacing the traditional government monopoly on defense.
• Governance Challenges: The shift to remote violence forces a redefinition of government responsibility, as physical co-location is no longer required for threats, challenging liberal political theories of state protection.
• Scalability Examples: The guest notes that routine scams (e.g., "Nigerian prince" emails) are a benign precursor to more severe transnational threats where individuals can weaponize tools previously reserved for state actors.

Methodology and Expertise

• Lawfare utilizes an "army" of law students and serious academics to generate content, addressing the insularity of academia by requiring writers to translate technical concepts for non-expert practitioners.
• The publication maintains a "grounded factual technicalness" to provide relief from partisan noise, a strategy that initially alienated the left but now faces accusations of being a "professional" rather than partisan voice.
• The site avoids dismissing opponents as lacking expertise, instead urging interlocutors to understand the functional necessities of opposing views, such as law enforcement's need for device access versus tech companies' mathematical constraints on encryption.

Meta-Commentary on Media

• The guest observes a trend of media diluting expertise with third-person voice, arguing that the only barrier to expert mainstream influence is the ability to translate complex ideas broadly.
• Lawfare's "Handmaiden of Power" moniker originated from a critique by Glenn Greenwald but was reclaimed as an internal joke, symbolizing the site's deep integration with government processes.
• The guest, Benjamin Wittes, is a legal journalist with no formal law degree, having entered the field through interest in the FISA court and the Aldrich Ames spy case.