Baboons Do Jealousy

Who would have guessed?

Good Morning:

We have had a big inflow of cash for Project Batteries over the past 24 hours, a result of my appearance the other day on the Bulwark Podcast. I haven’t done exact calculations, but we have now raised more than $108,000. We also have, as a result, a bit of a bottleneck, as I try to get cash to the Anastasiia Lapatina as quickly as I can. She continues to buy batteries and other supplies for people who need them. I will update you all on the details as soon as I can.

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Yesterday on #DogShirtTV, the estimable Andrew Steele arose from amidst the Greek Chorus for a discussion of Pam Bondi’s congressional testimony. The estimable Mike Feinberg joined in:

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Yesterday On Lawfare

Compiled by the estimable Marissa Wang

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Isabel Arroyo analyzes the rise of digital age-assurance laws and argues that the common tools required to enforce them—age-gating, age verification, and age estimation—pose serious risks to privacy, anonymity, and the structure of the internet.

The threat created by amassing identifying user data in one place is, of course, not limited to breaches and identity theft. Once collected systematically, identifying documentation could also be made available for governments and law enforcement interested in linking individuals with browsing and consumption habits, social media posts, and anything else they do on an age-restricted service that requires uploaded information, which raises civil liberties and free expression concerns. Requests from law enforcement can also induce verifiers to retain identity-revealing age verification data beyond the time when they would normally delete it.

ICE’s Unconstitutional Double Standard for Protesters

Hannah Berkman and Stacy Livingston unpack the potential First Amendment violations of the Department of Homeland Security’s reported plan to create a database of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) protestors, aimed at “exposing” them for efforts to monitor ICE.

Homan is drawing a false equivalency between what protesters are doing—filming law enforcement officers doing their duties in public, following them to monitor those activities, and publishing recordings that disclose agents’ names, faces, and badge numbers—and what the government is doing: arresting people for this activity, creating a government-controlled list of ICE protesters, and preparing to use this information to lean on private parties in hopes that the private parties will then punish the protesters in ways the government cannot.

AI Won’t Automatically Make Legal Services Cheaper

In the latest edition of the Lawfare Research Initiative’s paper series, Justin Curl, Sayash Kapoor, and Arvind Narayanan explain why three structural bottlenecks—regulation, adversarial dynamics, and human oversight limits—may prevent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) from lowering legal costs or expanding access to justice.

The legal industry’s response will determine whether AI improves access and efficiency or merely makes producing legal work cheaper without improving the outcomes clients actually care about. This report surveys reforms addressing each bottleneck, including regulatory sandboxes, judicial case management innovations, and expanding arbitration options.

Podcasts

On Lawfare Daily, Alan Z. Rozenshtein sits down with Curl and Narayanan to discuss their latest Lawfare research report on the future of AI in the legal field and the barriers the law may face in implementing AI.

On Rational Security, Anastasiia Lapatina and I join Scott R. Anderson to discuss the latest developments in Ukraine, including Russia’s ongoing campaign to attack Ukrainian energy infrastructure during a frigid winter, the lack of progress in U.S.-backed negotiations between the two countries, and the use of drone technology.

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Today’s #BeastOfTheDay is the baboon, which we are honoring today for its contribution to science.

More specifically, today’s Beast earns its title for demonstrating sibling jealousy in a recent—and hilarious—study: