The Lawfare Podcast

Before the American president took to Twitter, Estonia’s president, Toomas Ilves, had used the social media platform to communicate with his country. President Ilves was the head of state of Estonia from 2006–2016, when he oversaw the launch of the country’s e-residency system and handled massive Russian cyberattacks. On Tuesday at Stanford University, Megan Reiss and Benjamin Wittes sat down with President Ilves for a conversation about Ilves’s use of Twitter as president, election interference, the digitization of Estonia, and cybersecurity cooperation.

The idea of proxy conflict dates to the Cold War and earlier, but Tim Maurer’s new book “Cyber Mercenaries: The State, Hackers, and Power” makes one of the first forays into proxy conflict in cyberspace. Last week, Maurer sat down with Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes at the Hoover Book Soiree to talk about the book. They discussed Maurer’s typology of how states like the United States, Syria, Russia and China differ in their use of cyber proxies and the challenges they pose to attribution and accountability.

The Washington Post reports this evening that: "Mueller told Trump’s attorneys the president remains under investigation but is not currently a criminal target." The report comes the same day as Alex van der Zwaan was sentenced to 30 days in jail for lying to Mueller's probe.

Chimène Keitner served as counselor for international law at the State Department under the Obama and Trump administrations. On this week’s podcast, Keitner speaks to Scott Anderson about her experience at the department and the department’s future in the wake of Secretary Rex Tillerson’s departure.