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Syrian rebel and jihadist forces have captured a major town along the main highway connecting Aleppo and Hama. Since Moscow’s intervention in Syria, Syrian government forces have faced increasing resista...
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As memories of 9/11 continue to fade, courts are increasingly becoming bolder and more confident in asserting their oversight role over national security matters. Last week’s Sixth Circuit ruling in Mokd...
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The United Kingdom is a surveillance state, one far beyond the world envisioned by George Orwell. Between the GCHQ's efforts to bulk-record Internet traffic at the UK's borders, the modern data collected...
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We missed a week on Rational Security because Shane, Tamara, and I were all out of town last week. Did you miss us? This week, we talk about President Obama's decision to send 50 Special Forces members i...
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When the Lights Go Out in the City
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A joint U.S.-Russia military exercise over Syria? Certainly not, says the Pentagon, disputing Russian claims that the two nations conducted just such an exercise.
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Last week, Ingrid Wuerth flagged Spokeo, Inc. v. Robins for Lawfare readers as one of the key national security law cases of the Supreme Court’s October 2015 Term. The Court held argument in Spokeo on Mo...
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After the U.S.S. Lassen’s freedom of navigation operation (FONOP) in the Spratly Islands last week, we wrote that the Lassen and the accompanying P-8 Poseidon aircraft appeared to have conducted normal m...
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As David Bosco hinted in his insightful Lawfare post from yesterday on the US-China showdown in the South China Sea, it turns out that the much-heralded U.S. “freedom of navigation operation” (FONOP) las...
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Here is the statement from Chief Prosecutor Brig. Gen. Mark Martins at the close of a two-week series of pre-trial sessions in the military commissions case against five alledged 9/11 conspirators, Unite...
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What good is CISA, anyway?
Now that both the House and Senate have passed information sharing bills that are strikingly similar but not identical, the prospects for a change in the law are good. But wha...
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At the end of September, the United States and China reached an agreement that promising they would not engage in or support cyber espionage activity aimed at providing competitive advantage to commercia...
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An alert reader in Moscow just sent us this photograph of a t-shirt for sale in the Russian capital. It says, "Support Assad," along with what appears to be an aerial bombing picture. The bottom left say...
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Judge Pohl gavels the session to order.
It appears, in contrast to some earlier pre-trial hearings, that almost all of the defendants are present in the court today. Only Mustafa al Hawsawi is the excep...
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WBUR's "Here & Now" show on my martial arts challenge to Vladimir Putin:
The Canadian broadcasting company ran this interview several days ago on the subject.
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In this post, I want to focus on a narrow slice of Charlie Savage's much-anticipated book Power Wars (published today...go ahead, order it now!), one that might not generate as much attention as the mate...
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As the United States continues to modify its strategy in Syria, the New York Times writes that the new U.S.
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Much of the coverage of the USS Lassen's maneuver near the Subi reef in the South China Sea presented the operation as a challenge to Chinese maritime claims and island-building operations. But in fact t...
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Harun Maruf comes on the show to discuss jihadism in Somalia. Some of the topics covered include:
What al-Shabab has been up to since the Westgate Mall attack in Kenya
Background on al-Shabab’s leade...
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With Charlie Savage’s book out today, I can add to my post last week about the decline of OLC as a source of relatively independent, dispositive legal advice on national security issues within the Execut...