Episode 7: The Less Prep the Better

The National Security Law Podcast

Bobby Chesney and Steve Vladeck

Courses, Politics, News, Education, Government

4.8 • 646 Ratings

🗓️ 8 March 2017

⏱️ 49 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this episode, Professors Chesney and Vladeck live up to their new motto (see the episode title) by wading into the confusion surrounding a pair of recent presidential claims with significant national security law implications: President Trump's claim that the Obama administration wiretapped him (or his campaign), and his allegation about the "GTMO recidivism" rate as between the Bush and Obama administrations. This in turn leads to a discussion of the "Vault7" dump by Wikileaks of information on CIA tools for accessing iPhones, Android devices, and so forth, and from there they discuss the new immigration executive order as well (disagreeing as to its litigation prospects). With time running short, they move on to a lightning round touching on the draft Active Cyber Defense Certainty Act (that's right, it's the "AC/DC Act"), and an important but little-noticed military commission ruling that seems likely to result in four CIA officers having to testify about the interrogation of al-Nashiri. Things don't get contentious until the end, when for better or worse they take up the NBA MVP debate. Cornucopias also get a mention, for insufficient reasons.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello from Austin and welcome to episode seven of the National Security Law podcast where we have a new motto, the less prep the better.
0:09.2	As you can tell and as you will be able to tell over the course of the next 35 minutes.
0:12.9	No doubt. We're brought to you by the Strauss Center at the University of Texas at Austin and it's Wednesday, March 8th, and I'm Bobby Chesney.
0:21.2	I'm Steve Vlottick, as you guys have hopefully figured out by now, we're both on the faculty
0:24.6	here at the University of Texas School of Law. And Bobby, we're both pretty overwhelmed by
0:28.8	a lot of news in the national security space. It's a cornucopia of national security law topics.
0:34.3	So you say cornucopia, and I think Hunger Games, because the cornucopia is where all the
0:38.2	weapons were that you would go and get to kill everybody.
0:41.3	Yeah, you know, I feel like that was just like a misuse of the cornucopia concept, but I guess
0:45.3	our readers are already reaching for the skip button.
0:48.1	We should quickly move on.
0:49.3	The cornucopia concept.
0:50.4	What else can we talk about by that?
0:52.6	Oh, there's nothing going on. So just to give
0:55.1	everyone a sense of what we're going to try to cover in our brief time today, there's some stuff
0:59.7	happened over the weekend, Bobby. President Trump tweeted about being wiretapped by his predecessor,
1:05.2	President Obama. There's some stuff we ought to say about FISA and, you know, how that works.
1:10.4	President Trump and now today's press secretary, Sean Spicer, have been putting out some
1:15.1	interesting statistics about Guantanamo with regard to releases of detainees and recidivism.
1:20.6	Bobby, I think we should say a few words about that.
1:23.0	Yesterday, of course, the big news was the Vault 7 scandal, the WikiLeaks dump of the first part of what appears to be a treasure trove of CIA hacking and vulnerability, exploits, and abilities.
1:36.3	We'll see whether that goes.
	...

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