A #BeastOfTheDay Conflict
Multiple beasts are vying for the honor today
Good Evening:
Friday on #DogShirtTV, the estimable
joined us from a Crimean Tatar restaurant in Kyiv to discuss the recent NATO summit, the future of military spending in Europe, and whether Trump deserves to be called “Daddy”:Friday On Lawfare
Compiled by the estimable Mary Ford
How Strategic Litigation Feeds On and Fuels Political Narrative
Ashlyn Aske and Stephen Prochaska use two cases filed in the lead-up to the 2024 election to argue that performative lawsuits filed by allies of President Trump are part of a larger right-wing strategy to transform online narratives into litigation, popularizing fringe theories in the process. Aske and Prochaska demonstrate that this “legal theater” allows misleading narratives to be legitimized by being heard before a court, and emphasize that the practice reduces the courtroom to one of Trump’s rhetorical strategies.
Through filing politically strategic yet factually weak lawsuits, activists drum up drama that captures online audiences’ attention, while legitimizing false narratives with the symbolic imprimatur of the legal system. Many such lawsuits, including others documented in our research, were filed in the lead-up to the 2024 election. Commonly, these lawsuits, filed days or weeks before the election—with no respect for deadlines—challenge laws that have been on the books for years. This timing raises questions about plaintiffs’ motives—suggesting that these filings function more as a plot device for a narrative than a good-faith effort to address a legal issue.
AI and Secure Code Generation
Dave Aitel and Dan Greer argue that the shift to “vibe coding”—code generated by large language models (LLMs)—has fundamentally changed software engineering. Aitel and Greer examine how the greater emphasis on LLMs has undermined traditional processes for evaluating software security, analyze the ability of AI to identify vulnerabilities that human reviewers miss, and offer suggestions on how cybersecurity frameworks can be improved.
Even children learn early to point and name—but knowing the word “dog” doesn’t reveal whether the animal might bite. In cybersecurity, we’ve built systems that similarly point and name vulnerabilities without understanding whether they’re truly dangerous. By embracing AI solely for pattern recognition, we’ve created a powerful “pointing machine” that identifies possible threats but does not comprehend their actual impact. What we need instead is a “knowing machine,” capable of understanding how code functions within complex, real-world environments, recognizing not just hazards but the full context of how and whether those hazards might become genuine risks.
Comparing the American and Chinese Zero-Day Pipelines
In the latest edition of the Seriously Risky Business cybersecurity newsletter, Tom Uren analyzes the findings of a report released by the Atlantic Council on zero-day supply chains in the United States and China. Uren also questions claims made by Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Dan Caine that U.S. Cyber Command provided significant support in U.S. strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities last week.
Still, the report makes a compelling argument that America's zero-day acquisition processes are no longer fit for purpose. American agencies need to make some serious changes to strengthen the zero-day supply chain, like improving procurement processes and filling in the talent pipeline.
Documents
Olivia Manes shares the text of the Supreme Court’s opinions in the ruling Trump v. CASA. In a 6-3 opinion, the Court granted the government a stay on universal injunctions issued by federal judges in response to President Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship.
Podcasts
On Lawfare Daily, Mykhailo Soldatenko speaks with Eric Ciaramella, Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and Samuel Charap, Senior Political Scientist at the Rand Corporation, about the latest developments in Russia-Ukraine Talks. They talk about the national interests of both parties, whether a negotiated compromise is possible, and what a potential agreement may look like.
Videos
On June 27 at 4 pm ET, I sat down with Lawfare Senior Editors Anna Bower and Roger Parloff and Lawfare Legal Fellow James Pearce to discuss the Trump administration’s lawsuit against judges in the district of Maryland and the Supreme Court’s ruling in DVD v. DHS over the removal of immigrants to third countries.
The Situation
In my “The Situation” column—which ran today because the Supreme Court dumped 119 pages of ferocious discussion of universal injunctions on us on a Friday and I needed the weekend to process it all—I considered some mixed feelings about the opinion and why the court’s liberals treated the decision as a dire emergency:
On its face, in fact, the majority’s positions—written by Amy Coney Barrett—strike me as intuitively reasonable, more plausible, actually, than the dissent. If a person sues the government challenging the constitutionality of a policy, why should the relief awarded by a court include a blanket ban on application of the policy to anyone else beyond the plaintiff anywhere in the country—including in areas not within the territorial jurisdiction of the court? Isn’t it a problem that such an injunction gives every district court in the country at least a temporary veto over every federal policy?
I confess to having some instinctive sympathy with this view. And to be fair to the conservative majority in this matter, their suspicion of the universal injunction is not new and has been articulated over a number of years now, again, across administrations.
So why then the apocalyptic rhetoric from Justices Sotomayor and Jackson? The answer, I think, is fear of gamesmanship on the part of the Trump administration—and an intense frustration with the court majority for tolerating, even encouraging, it.
Acting #BeastMaster
sends in a rhinoceros and her baby as today’s #BeastOfTheDay:
Not knowing that Holly is acting as #BeastMaster this week while on safari, however,
has proclaimed today’s #BeastOfTheDay the Attenborough’s echidna, which we honor on the occasion of its first sighting in more than 60 years:An NPJ Biodiversity paper reports:
In 2022 and 2023, we deployed camera-traps in the Cyclops Mountains, guided by the results of Indigenous and local knowledge surveys, in an attempt to gather photographic evidence of the survival of Attenborough’s long-beaked echidna.
We didn’t capture any photographic evidence of Z. attenboroughi during the 2022 survey; from the 2023 survey, we obtained 110 echidna photographs from 26 independent capture events, taken by six different cameras deployed at higher elevations in the Cyclops Mountains. We also captured 15 videos…
In the Terpera language of Yongsu Sapari and Yongsu Dosoyo, Attenborough’s long-beaked echidna is called Payangko, and our camera-trap images demonstrate the potential importance of Indigenous and local knowledge in biodiversity research. Our success in capturing the first photographic evidence of the species was built on the Indigenous and local knowledge of communities in the Cyclops, which informed us on echidna behaviour and habitat, where to place camera-traps, how to search for echidna signs and, fundamentally, gave us confidence the species was still extant. Indigenous and local knowledge in the Cyclops is part of a broader knowledge system and local cosmology that informs issues such as land stewardship, sustainable hunting practices, and resource management. The community of Yongsu Sapari, for example, has for centuries maintained no-hunting and no-logging areas that support sustainable forest management.
In honor of today’s Beast, take a moment to be grateful that you, unlike the echidna, don’t lay eggs. Laying eggs would be awful. Enjoy not having to.
Tell Me Something Interesting
Sometimes, when I (
) am having trouble with some project or other, I like to look to the past for inspiration. I particularly like to look up quotes from Charles Darwin. They always make me feel wonderfully normal and rational in my misery.Let me show you why with a few real examples of things Darwin wrote when having trouble at work:
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