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Benjamin Wittes

Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution · 1 appearance on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

analystjournalistauthorhostacademic@benjaminwittes ↗benjaminwittes.com ↗Wikipedia ↗YouTube ↗

Wittes focuses on U.S. national security law, federal courts, and surveillance policy, serving as a contributing writer for The Atlantic and a legal analyst for NBC News and MSNBC. He has written several books, including The Future of Violence: Robots and Germs, Hackers and Drones and Unmaking the Presidency.

12statements → 8claims → 2claims resolved → 3.58/5average certainty → 2.58/5average debate potential →

2 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted 6 not checkable as stated how the 8 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

5 predictions · 3 assertions · 4 insights · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 8 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 2 are resolved, and 6 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Benjamin argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Assertion Supported
Wittes: Terrorism victims generally share ethnicity and religion with their perpetrators
“Generally speaking, the victims of terrorists have the same ethnicities and religious backgrounds as the terrorists who kill them,”
Benjamin Wittes Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 20:40 a16z Podcast | The Law (and Tech) of Warfare

Expressed certainty vs assessment result

none yet certainty 1
none yet certainty 2
100% certainty 3
100% certainty 4
none yet certainty 5

weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet

How they sound: speaking style how? →

198 words/min while actually speaking · 4.1 um and uh per 1k words

No argument clarity score for Benjamin Wittes: no usable question→answer exchanges on raw tape (a fair score needs 8+). We do not score a sample that small. Roundtable and news formats yield far fewer direct exchanges than interviews.

Measured by listening to 4,176 words across 1 episode, but every recording we have of Benjamin Wittes is the aired feed, and an editor cleaned that audio before release. Some of the hesitation was cut before we ever heard it, so read these as floors: the true rates are at least this high. These are measurements of speaking style, not scores. How it's measured →

Everything Benjamin Wittes said on the a16z Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Prediction Not checkable as stated
Wittes: Apple will lose encryption standoff in court, forcing Congressional compromise
“If they lose, I think they'll lose in litigation, not in legislation. The scenario in which Apple loses, or some other provider loses, is that they lose in litigation and then they have to go to Congress In order to change the legislative landscape to undo wha…”
Benjamin Wittes Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 18:26 a16z Podcast | The Law (and Tech) of Warfare
Insight
Wittes: Digital technology makes sexual violence scalable for the first time
“And so this is in a Silicon Valley sense, the first time sexual violence has ever been scalable. We have perps that are doing You know, thousands of victims all over the world.”
Benjamin Wittes Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 24:01 a16z Podcast | The Law (and Tech) of Warfare
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Wittes: US confrontation with Russia will dominate foreign policy for years
“Adversary foreign power. Don't confuse it with anything else. It is led by a person who does not have the United States' best interests at heart, and who wants to reestablish hegemony over a region that involves a lot of countries that don't want to be subject…”
Benjamin Wittes Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 29:36 a16z Podcast | The Law (and Tech) of Warfare
Insight
Wittes: Academic blogs fail because they lack journalistic editing sensibilities
“Part of the problem is that the blogs, generally speaking, that try to give voice to academics are generally not run by journalists, and so they don't have a journalistic sensibility in terms of what they're pushing people to do.”
Benjamin Wittes Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 13:15 a16z Podcast | The Law (and Tech) of Warfare
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Wittes: Cybersecurity became a partisan political issue in the US
“We have over the last year accidentally created a partisan issue out of cybersecurity.”
Benjamin Wittes Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 16:03 a16z Podcast | The Law (and Tech) of Warfare
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Wittes: Unopenable encrypted phones will eventually spark a legislative crisis
“More and more and more phones are showing up in law enforcement un openable. And this is affecting more and more law enforcement agencies more and more often, and we're having no debate about it. And the problem with that is then one big thing will happen, and…”
Benjamin Wittes Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 17:42 a16z Podcast | The Law (and Tech) of Warfare
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Wittes: Indiscriminate counter-terrorism policies risk re-injuring victims of terrorism
“If you don't do a good job of being discriminating you're very, very likely to be re-injuring victims of terrorism.”
Benjamin Wittes Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 21:22 a16z Podcast | The Law (and Tech) of Warfare
Insight
Wittes: Tech platforms replaced governments as primary defenders against digital threats
“You don't look to the government, you look to the provider of your spam filter. You're vulnerable to individuals that you never imagined yourself to be vulnerable to, and you look to A very different model of defense than you, than we all grow up in sort of ci…”
Benjamin Wittes Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 27:17 a16z Podcast | The Law (and Tech) of Warfare
Insight
Wittes: Elite versus mass movement axis explains politics better than left-right
“It's the spectrum I think about. It's an imperfect Understanding of it, to be sure, but I think it works much better than a left-right axis.”
Benjamin Wittes Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 28:43 a16z Podcast | The Law (and Tech) of Warfare
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Wittes: Partisanship will severely hinder US federal cybersecurity policy
“I worry that that is a, is going to make a lot of cybersecurity questions much, much more difficult as a policy matter to address, at least at the federal level.”
Benjamin Wittes Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 16:53 a16z Podcast | The Law (and Tech) of Warfare
Assertion Supported
Wittes: Terrorism victims generally share ethnicity and religion with their perpetrators
“Generally speaking, the victims of terrorists have the same ethnicities and religious backgrounds as the terrorists who kill them,”
Benjamin Wittes Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 20:40 a16z Podcast | The Law (and Tech) of Warfare
Assertion Supported
Wittes: Brookings study identified up to 6,000 victims in 80 sextortion cases
“So we actually did, I, about a year ago, published a study, a Brookings study, of ADs extortion cases, and they accounted for A minimum of 1300 victims, and I think more, probably more like 6000 victims.”
Benjamin Wittes Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 24:27 a16z Podcast | The Law (and Tech) of Warfare

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
a16z Podcast | The Law (and Tech) of Warfare Jan 2, 2019 24m
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