Back to Regularly Scheduled Attacks on Kyiv

Alaska was so last week

Good Morning:

Photo credit: Anastasiia Lapatina

These images of the damage from last night’s missile strikes in Kyiv were taken by

Anastasiia Lapatina

in the neighborhood she only recently moved out of. The damage includes broken windows in the apartment she and her family vacated only a few weeks ago—and where they still have stuff. The death toll in Kyiv from last night’s attacks is nearing 20 and may well go higher.

Obviously, the proper response for you to this is to subscribe to Nastya’s Substack,

Yours Ukrainian

:

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Yesterday on #DogShirtTV, I once again handed the monologue over to the estimable

Holly Berkley Fletcher

, this time because she wanted to talk about Taylor Swift’s engagement. Then we discussed the military takeover of DC.

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The Situation

In yesterday’s “The Situation” column, I shared photos of the National Guard from my afternoon walk around the capital and argue that the presence of the National Guard is not about ameliorating the District’s crime problem, but rather is a way for the president to demonstrate his control over the military as well as the District of Columbia. The pics are cool:

It’s power over the military, and it’s power as well over the District of Columbia. Because if you can humiliate the National Guard by making a couple thousand guardsmen stand around to assert power over the nation’s capital amidst the simmering anger of the overwhelming majority of the capital’s residents, what else can you get the guard to do if need be?

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Yesterday On Lawfare

Compiled by the estimable Mary Ford

What History Can Teach Us About Copyright, AI, and ‘Market Floods’

Derek Slater and Aram Sinnreich respond to a claim made by federal district court Judge Vince Chhabria that a market saturated by artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled work could harm existing copyrighted content. Slater and Sinnreich draw from historical precedent to argue that the broader integration of AI may increase the unpredictability of markets, but will not necessarily prove detrimental to existing creative works.

History is replete with examples of creators and copyright holders claiming that new technology and media would destroy creativity as we know it. The early 20th-century American composer John Philip Sousa’s warnings that the player piano would end live music and shrink our vocal cords parallels Chhabria’s fear that AI will “dramatically undermine the incentive for human beings to create things” (a fallaciously market-centric vision of artists’ motivations). So too does former Motion Picture Association of America CEO Jack Valenti’s fearmongering about analog videotapes enabling movie piracy in the 1980s: “[W]e are facing a very new and a very troubling assault on our fiscal security, on our very economic life and we are facing it from a thing called the video cassette recorder and its necessary companion called the blank tape. And it is like a great tidal wave just off the shore.” Both predictions, of course, did not come to pass—the music and film industries thrived in the wake of these innovations.

In Russia, Pardoned Former Convicts Return Home From War

Emily Hoge examines the implications of Russian convicts, recruited to fight in Ukraine in exchange for pardons, returning home at the end of the Russia-Ukraine war. Hoge argues that although Moscow’s gamble has fed the war effort up until now, this strategy is a double-edged sword—and the partial or full return of recruited convicts could contribute to disorder in Russia.

Stories of pardoned veterans returning from the war to commit new crimes have frequently made local and national news in Russia. Incidents including the murder of a 12-year-old girl in Kemerovo by a pardoned Wagner veteran, or a fire at a night club in Kostroma that killed 13 people—set by a soldier who then signed another contract, and was released from pretrial detention to return to the war—have been headline news even in state media channels. According to Meduza, journalists in Russia have since been warned not to continue discussing crimes by veterans of the war in Ukraine. However, these stories continue to circulate in the independent Russophone press and on Telegram.

Podcasts

On Lawfare Daily, Justin Sherman sits down with Matthew Ford to discuss the role of smartphones in armed conflict, how smartphones are reshaping open-source intelligence and open-source investigations of violence and conflict around the world, and the current state of “participatory warfare.”

On Rational Security, Renee DiResta, Michael Feinberg, and I join Scott Anderson to take stock of investigations into Trump’s enemies, Tulsi Gabbard’s decision to pull security clearances from 37 percent of current and former intelligence officials, and Bluesky’s announcement that it was shutting down services in Mississippi.

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Today’s #BeastOfTheDay is the swan, seen here engaged in pure and needless malice:

Video Source

In honor of today’s Beast, poke someone.