And Gripen is Fixed and Rearing to Go

Gripen the Gobo Projector is ready for action.

Good Afternoon:

And just like that, Gripen the Gobo Projector is ready for action. As some of you will recall, Gripen had a little bit of a complicated first outing. The image was bright and beautiful, but the focusing ring was frozen—and I mean frozen. So at Gripen’s debut #SpecialMilitaryOperation, we could only keep the image in focus manually—that is, literally by holding the lens at the proper distance from the slide:

The image was gorgeous, but this is no way to run a railroad:

So this weekend, I did a little surgery on the projector. A little WD-40. A few gentle swings of a rubber mallet, and magically, I managed to loosen the focusing ring and remove the lens apparatus from the plate that holds it. This is very good news.

It means that Gripen is now fully operational.

And this, in turn, means that we are ready for more Special Military Operations.

Stay tuned.

#ExpectMe.

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Yesterday on #DogShirtTV, the estimable

Jack Goldsmith

came on the show to talk about when “questionably legal airstrikes” become “just murder, actually” and what—if anything—we can do about it. It’s a genuinely terrific conversation: sober, serious, and useful:

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Yesterday On Lawfare

Compiled by the estimable Isabel Arroyo

Due Process in Third Country Removals

Matthew Boaz evaluates how removing noncitizens to “third countries” helps the Trump administration circumvent certain due process obligations under immigration law. Boaz details the removal processes available in different deportation cases and argues that those at risk of removal to a third country should have protections on par with those facing traditional expedited removal.

It is clear, therefore, that those subjected to third country removals should have access to the same regime made available to those in expedited removal. This would require notice of a proposed country for removal, an opportunity to articulate fear of removal to the designated country, an RFI conducted within a reasonable amount of time, and review of that RFI decision by an immigration judge. As explained above, either a positive RFI or a positive decision by an immigration judge reviewing the RFI de novo would be sufficient to grant relief. Presently, the process outlined by DHS does not provide for such review, deviating from the regulatory standard.

Like Social Media, AI Requires Difficult Choices

Nathan E. Sanders and Bruce Schneier describe how four major decisions will shape the future of artificial intelligence (AI) and stress the need to avoid the same sort of policy naïvete that plagued the rise of social media.

To that end, we spotlight four pivotal choices facing private and public actors. These choices are similar to those we faced during the advent of social media, and in retrospect we can see that we made the wrong decisions back then. Our collective choices in 2025—choices made by tech CEOs, politicians, and citizens alike—may dictate whether AI is applied to positive and pro-democratic, or harmful and civically destructive, ends.

DeepSeek and Musk’s Grok Both Toe the Party Line

In the latest issue of the Seriously Risky Business cybersecurity newsletter, Tom Uren discusses DeepSeek’s tendency to write inferior code when responding to geopolitically sensitive prompts, a new report exposing personnel and operations at Iranian cyberespionage group Charming Kitten, pervasive cybersecurity myths, and more.

CrowdStrike thinks it’s unlikely DeepSeek specifically trained its models to produce insecure code when specific topics are mentioned, but speculates that it produces less secure code in these tests as a result of “emergent misalignment.” Fine tuning models to produce ‘correct’ results in one relatively narrow domain results in bad output across a range of other topics.

Podcasts

On Lawfare Daily, Jonathan Cedarbaum sits down with Mark Montgomery to discuss how Trump administration funding and staffing decisions have impacted output at leading agencies responsible for cybersecurity, the weakening of public-private collaboration, and the closing of the Critical Infrastructure Partnership Advisory Council.

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Today’s #BeastOfTheDay is kind of a mystery! Enough of a mystery, in fact, that I—

EJ Wittes

—had to consult my father for a final opinion on whether today’s Beast was eligible to be the #BeastOfTheDay.

Generally, in order for a Beast to be eligible, we have to know for sure that the Beast is real and not mythical. Today’s Beast—the Beast of Gevaudan—posed an interesting issue because, while there is sufficient historical documentation to be sure that the Beast existed, we don’t know what kind of Beast it actually was.