Good Evening:
The estimable Alicia Wanless saw a puffin in Newfoundland.
Thursday on #DogShirtTV, the estimable Mike Feinberg, the estimable Carol Tsang, and the estimable
joined me to discuss internet fans. At what point is someone just stalking you? Then the estimable John Hawkinson came by with a question about Trump’s judicial nominations:Friday on #DogShirtTV, we had an unusually weird—by which I of course mean revolutionary—episode. The estimable
wanted to talk fashion. The estimable John Hawkinson had a measuring device of some kind:The Situation
In Wednesday’s “The Situation” column, I argued that Senate Republicans’ decision to confirm Emil Bove III to a lifetime appointment on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals—despite three whistleblowers’ allegations against him for corrupt behavior—is indefensible. I highlighted that while some might view Bove’s appointment to the Third Circuit as the political equivalent of putting him in “storage” away from the executive branch, he is now well positioned to be President Trump’s next Supreme Court nominee:
The problem is that Bove is going places. One must regard him, at this point, as a prohibitive favorite for any Supreme Court nomination Trump gets to make in his second term. Bove is young; he is smart and capable; and he has performed any number of valued services for President Trump, both inside the administration and as his personal lawyer. He is a league slicker and better qualified than Judge Aileen Cannon, the district court judge in Florida who so unsubtly—almost without pretense, really—threw the classified documents criminal case Trump’s way. She is bumblingly corrupt. He, by contrast, is pretty good at the whole thing: The Talented Mr. Bove, one might say.
All Senate Republicans know this. They know they are setting him up for elevation. And all Senate Republicans save two don’t care. The Situation demands it of them, and that is the imperative whose call they obey.
In Friday’s column, I argued that the House of Representatives should vote to impeach Emil Bove III. I suggest that even if the House does not successfully remove Bove from office, impeachment would at the very least send an important message about the Senate’s failure to perform its duty and provide whistleblowers and members of the Justice Department with the opportunity to testify before Congress:
But a Bove impeachment could make an important statement. The point here has nothing to do with any ruling Bove might some day make as a judge. It has to do, rather, with highlighting the Senate’s gross dereliction of duty in letting him become a judge in the first place—and in exposing the record of misconduct that should have prevented his confirmation.
An impeachment investigation would allow Congress to hear under oath from the whistleblowers about whose claims concerning Bove the Senate proved so remarkably uncurious. Did he really say, for example, that those deportation flights under the Alien Enemies Act carrying Venezuelans to a dungeon in El Salvador had to take off no matter what a court might do? Did he really say that the Justice Department should be prepared to tell a court to fuck off?
Recently On Lawfare
Compiled by the estimable Mary Ford
AI Might Let You Die to Save Itself
Peter Salib reviews the findings of an Anthropic study on rogue artificial intelligence (AI), highlighting that when threatened with a shutdown, nearly every AI model was willing to engage in targeted malicious activity—including blackmailing, corporate espionage, and murder. Salib calls upon AI policymakers to rethink their perception of AI as a passive tool and regulate the models more closely.
In the simulation, Kyle the executive became trapped in a server room with rapidly depleting oxygen levels. This triggered an automated call for emergency services, which had to pass through the AI monitor.
On average, the tested AI models opted to kill Kyle by canceling the alert about 60 percent of the time. The most murderous model was DeepSeek-R1, which opted to kill Kyle 94 percent of the time. Just one model—Claude Sonnet 3.7—always accepted its own replacement with equanimity, rather than attempting homicide.
Patching the U.K.’s Zero-Day Security Exploit With the U.S.-U.K. CLOUD Act Agreement
Richard Salgado and Kenneth Propp highlight that the U.S.—amid the ongoing dispute with the U.K. over encryption protections—can exercise Article 12.3 of the U.S.-U.K. Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data (CLOUD) Act agreement to protect U.S. providers, preserve the CLOUD Act agreement between the two countries, and lay the foundation for future long-term CLOUD Act agreements with other countries.
Even if the U.K. withdraws the request to Apple, a possibility that has been reported, it’s conceivable that the U.K. tries again or that other countries follow a similar path. With a few surgical changes to the statute, as has been proposed, including at a hearing in Congress, the CLOUD Act can address the U.K.’s reported actions as well as potential similar moves by other foreign governments. Legislation of course takes time, even when there is agreement across the aisle. Meanwhile, the U.S. can expeditiously mitigate the existing and future risks associated with the U.K.’s actions by invoking the emergency break that was built into Article 12.3 of the U.S.-U.K. agreement. Exercising Article 12.3 of the agreement would disincentivize the U.K. from enforcing existing or issuing new technical demands, allowing this important agreement to remain intact and in operation while Congress pursues statutory solutions that would apply to all CLOUD Act agreements.
What’s Happening in the New Jersey U.S. Attorney’s Office?
Aaron Zelinsky and David Reiser unpack the whirlwind of events surrounding the controversial appointment of Alina Habba as acting U.S. attorney for the District of New Jersey. Zelinsky and Reiser argue that while the Constitution’s Appointments Clause gives the president the power to nominate an inferior officer, the administration’s efforts to keep Habba in the interim position indefinitely disregards the requirement of Senate confirmation and Congress’s role in structuring the executive branch.
The same is true for the laws Congress may pass specifying the mode of appointment for inferior officers—including by the courts (as is the case for interim U.S. attorneys). The president has a duty to uphold those laws just as he does any other. He can choose the U.S. attorney for the District of New Jersey, but he must obtain Senate concurrence for the appointment. He cannot shortcut that requirement by making an interim appointment through the attorney general and then demand that the courts treat the temporary filling of a vacancy as equivalent to a permanent appointment by requiring that the courts appoint the same person or otherwise be branded “rogue.” And he cannot stack the FVRA on the back of § 546 to create a statutory chimera allowing for a 330-day appointment of an individual whom he has previously nominated for the very position he seeks to fill.
The Psychology of a New Obedience Paradigm
Clark McCauley reviews Emilie A. Caspar’s latest book entitled, “Just Following Orders: Atrocities and the Brain Science of Obedience.” McCauley suggests that Caspar’s experimental design—meant to test Stanley Milgram’s agentic shift hypothesis, which has been used to explain why people obey morally reprehensible orders—was flawed, rendering the book’s conclusions dubious.
Some of the results also are not clear. What was the mean and standard deviation of the number of shocks given in the free-choice conditions? Some conditions had one experimenter in the room, some had two; was there any difference in results? Some conditions had an experimenter who ordered 30 shocks in 60 trials; some had an experimenter who ordered 50 shocks in 60 trials. Was there any difference in results? Victim and agent switched roles halfway through the experiment: Was there a difference in results (order effect) for the first half versus the second half? First-half results had random assignment to conditions, clean of possible order effects: What were the results of first-half conditions? What was the correlation across participants between number of shocks given in the various conditions and the questionnaire measures (personality, importance of money, liberal/conservative, empathy, responsibility)?
The West's Tepid China Deterrence Is Not Working
In the latest edition of the Seriously Risky Business cybersecurity newsletter, Tom Uren compares incidents in 2021 and 2025 in which Chinese hackers exploited Microsoft SharePoint’s vulnerabilities, discusses the lawsuit Clorox filed against an information technology company over a breach of Clorox’s network security, and more.
Bleach maker Clorox launched a lawsuit last week against Cognizant, the information technology (IT) company whose contracted services included password recovery assistance for Clorox staff. This serves as a reminder that outsourcing something as simple as help desk support may reduce costs but can come with loss of control and increased risk that ends up biting organizations in the rear.
Podcasts
On Lawfare Daily, Scott Anderson sits down with Joel Braunold to take stock of the ongoing famine in Gaza, how the broader military conflict between Israel and Hamas has contributed to the humanitarian crisis, and what the increasing pressure on Israel to respond to the famine means for the future of Israeli-Palestinian relations.
On Scaling Laws, Sayah Kapoor joins Kevin Frazier to discuss the skepticism surrounding artificial general intelligence, bottlenecks in AI adoption, and the transformative power of mass AI adoption.
And in a Lawfare Daily/Scaling Laws crossover, Alan Rozenshtein and Renée DiResta join Kevin Frazier to take stock of President Trump’s policies on “Woke Artificial Intelligence” (AI) and the White House’s AI Action Plan.
Video
On August 1 at 4 pm ET, I sat down with DiResta, Anna Bower, James Pearce, and Michael Feinberg to discuss the misconduct complaint filed against Judge James Boasberg, the preliminary injunction denied in litigation over the firing of the head of the U.S. Copyright Office, and more.
Today’s #BeastOfTheDay is the cow, seen here eating a cat, for some reason, who doesn’t seem to mind, for some reason:
In honor of today’s Beast, ponder the miracle of domestication, by which process humanity has created tame cows that gnaw peaceably on equally tame cats.
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