Lawfare Hacking Class Now Public

Our first full-fledged course is now available free on YouTube

Good Evening.

Tomorrow is the release date of Scott Shapiro’s fabulous new book, Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks. The book really is an extraordinary read, and I commend it to you all, but flacking a friend’s book is not my game right now.

My game, rather, is flacking the YouTube class that Scott and Sean O’Brien of the Yale Privacy Lab taught virtually on Lawfare and that we are now releasing to the general public in conjunction with the publication of the book.

The class took place last fall as part of Lawfare’s subscriber-only content for Material Supporters. The idea of the class was that supporters of the site would be able to take the class live and that we would later release the video to the public at large in edited form on YouTube. So tonight, in conjunction with the publication of Scott’s book, we are releasing the first episode of the series. There will be around a dozen videos altogether.

The goal of the series, as Scott explains in the first episode, is to learn about hacking and cybersecurity by learning how to hack. The class is designed for people with no technical background, and it is genuinely accessible to people who have never programmed or used command-line driven interfaces before.

Among other things, the class represents what I think is a compelling model for Lawfare, a mechanism by which we can offer something special to subscribers while also honoring our commitment to make all of Lawfare’s substantive content available to the public free of charge. Our subscribers got to participate live, got to ask questions, and to engage directly with the presenters. But the lectures are available to everyone. It’s a model I hope we can replicate often in the future on a wide range of topics.

Big thanks to Scott and Sean for teaching the class. And thanks as well to Lawfare’s associate editor, Katherine Pompilio, and our former digital strategist Claudia Swain, who organized it each week and made things happen.

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Today’s #BeastOfTheDay is the saber-toothed gorgonopsian, who wants you to know that before there were any dinosaurs, before there was such a thing as T-rex, and while lots of other beasts were busy going extinct, the gorgonopsians were the alpha-predators, and they were proto-mammals. They ate fancy bears for breakfast.

Here’s a picture, by Matt Celeskey.