Bad Week

We'll lick 'em tomorrow.

Good Morning:

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Yesterday on #DogShirtTV, the estimable Roger Parloff—who attended James Comey’s arraignment—told us all about it. My rage was poorly restrained:

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The Situation

I vented said rage in yesterday’s “The Situation” column:

there is a notable gap between prosecution and defense lawyers who showed up to yesterday’s hearing in what we might call pride of service. On the prosecution side, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia could not find a single lawyer who had worked for the office prior to late September to stand up in court and say, “My name is X and I represent the United States.”

Not one.

The acting U.S. attorney, of course, had been fired because he wouldn’t bring this case. And no career official from the office was at the prosecution table either. Instead, there were two assistant United States attorneys from North Carolina, whose familiarity with the case was so limited that they stressed they were only just starting to get their hands around it and its discovery.

On the other side, by contrast, Comey’s lead defense counsel introduced himself as follows: “Your Honor. Pat Fitzgerald, and it’s the honor of my life to represent Mr. Comey in this matter.”

This is a bit of an inversion of the normal understanding of the roles of criminal lawyers. Federal prosecutors typically feel a certain honor and pride in representing the United States in court—believing that their cases represent attempts to do justice. Defense counsel, by contrast, generally think of themselves as representing a check on the justice system’s coercive power in general. But they often don’t take particular pride in their specific individual representations as embodying justice—much less that representing a particular accused miscreant is the honor of their lives. There are exceptions, of course, but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a case in which the prosecution was so evidently ashamed of its case and the defense so visibly proud to represent someone accused of a crime.

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Yesterday On Lawfare

Compiled by the estimable Isabel Arroyo

Tech’s ‘Sovereignty Washing’ in Europe Will Ripple in the Global South

Arun Sukumar examines the “sovereign cloud” services that U.S. hyperscalers are marketing to European leaders who fear overreliance on American tech. Sukumar warns that these services remove incentives for governments—particularly in the Global South—to keep the internet free.

With hyperscalers willing to assure through their sovereign cloud services that cross-border data will be reduced to a minimum, what incentives do Global South countries have to champion a freer internet? If anything, their proposed offerings for Europe are tantamount to cloud companies reconfiguring—under geopolitical pressure—internet architecture through routing and certificate policies. Their actions sit awkwardly with some of these companies’ own calls to protect the “public core” of the internet that ensures its global availability and integrity. Then there is the matter of government involvement in sovereign cloud management. Many developing countries will handily accept a role for a “government and security official” in managing hyperscalers’ sovereign clouds. Their acceptance may have to do with managing cybersecurity or crime, but this is how mission creep is likely to occur.

How Acquisition Reform Could Make Military AI More Expensive and Less Safe

Amos Toh and Julia Gledhill urge lawmakers to reject provisions of this year’s National Defense Authorization Act slashing data disclosure and oversight requirements for military acquisitions. The authors hold that such changes would not streamline the acquisition process, but rather degrade the efficacy of military hardware and empower contractors to overcharge the Department of Defense.

This year’s NDAA risks repeating past mistakes with a new generation of military contracts. The Department of Defense inspector general has issued more than 20 reports since 1998 documenting contractors overcharging the Pentagon. Weakening acquisition safeguards will not only pave the way for more waste; it also undermines the Pentagon’s ability to discern the proper role of AI and other emerging technologies in filling critical capability gaps, particularly at a time when claims about what these technologies can accomplish do not always stand up to scrutiny.

Podcasts

On Lawfare Daily, Justin Sherman sits down with Jen Roberts and Sarah Graham to discuss the past, present, and future of the global spyware industry; the geographic concentration of key spyware entities in several countries; the recent rise in spyware investment within the U.S.; and the impact of “strategic jurisdiction hopping” on transparency.

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#YourMusicOfTheDay: Operation Brahms

Opus 9 is a piece I do not know, “Variations on a Theme by Robert Schumann.” I have not listened to it yet today. Schumann was a mentor to Brahms and was, of course, a very great Romantic composer. His wife, Clara, was a famed pianist and a composer in her own right, and the couple adopted and promoted the young Brahms as a protege. Schumann then went insane and ended up in an asylum, where he died, and Brahms helped manage his affairs and remained life-long friends with Clara. Brahms wrote several variations on themes by other composers. There’s one on a Joseph Haydn theme. There’s one on a George Handel theme. There may be others that I’m not thinking of right now. This would have been a deeply personal work for Brahms, as he wrote it in the period of Schumann’s decline in the asylum. So think of it as a kind of homage to the composer’s dying mentor, in whose care Brahms was deeply involved.

I may have thoughts on the piece after I have listened to it a few times.

Today’s #BeastOfTheDay is a lost octopus:

Video Source