#BeastOfTheDay Smackdown

Echidna v. Rhino

Good Morning:

I stopped by the Polonne Sunflower Garden yesterday and was delighted to see that the troops are coming up nicely. In the front, you can see the already-flowering front-line soldiers, who have been blooming for a few weeks now. The really exciting part, however, was in the back, where the columns of reinforcement troops I planted a few weeks ago are coming up. These are mammoth sunflowers—as are the unflowering ones in front. They will grow to be about six feet tall, but won’t flower until the late summer. They are numerous. They are robust. They are enjoying the miserable weather. And they are under surveillance.

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Yesterday on #DogShirtTV, the estimable

Mike Pesca

staged a lightning coup, taking over the show with an agenda including Kenyan politics, intelligence assessments, and the AUMF. The estimable

Holly Berkley Fletcher

joined in from an extremely swanky tent:

I promised Pesca I would plug the Gist List in this dog shirt, so here it is. Subscribe to it.

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Yesterday on Lawfare

Compiled by the estimable Mary Ford

In the AI Race, Copyright is the United States’s Greatest Hurdle

Tim Hwang and Joshua Levine argue that while the United States is ahead of China in the race for artificial intelligence (AI) dominance, domestic copyright litigation threatens the United States’ already fragile lead. Hwang and Levine discuss the need for Congress and the courts to affirm the legality of using publicly available data to train AI models and assess how China has positioned itself to catch up to—and potentially surpass—the United States.

These lawsuits are an existential threat for these firms. The U.S. is the world leader in AI model development. It is home to 75 percent of the world’s AI supercomputers, the infrastructure necessary to train cutting-edge AI models. But such comparative advantage will be wasted if copyright lawsuits obstruct access to an invaluable input for AI model development: data. AI innovators fleeing the U.S. for safer legal pastures would be a gift to the Chinese AI industry and its CCP supporters, as it would hamper existing and future R&D happening domestically.

The Security by Design Project: An Annotated Review

Omid Ghaffari-Tabrizzi, Justin Sherman, and Paul Rosenzweig take stock of the Security by Design project’s work over the past two years and provide a holistic review of the attempts to implement the concept.

Security by Design (SbD) is an integrated process focused on delivering software where, generally, security is baked in from the outset throughout the design process. Over the past two years, Lawfare has conducted a rigorous examination of what SbD means in practice—the first ever such effort to assess the concept. We have published nineteen papers and articles, along with three podcasts, as part of this project (with one or two papers all in the pipeline).

This article is meant as a summary of what our contributors have produced. We collect, categorize, and summarize the product of our project—an academic, comprehensive, and holistic overview of the latest research on SbD and attempts to implement the concept effectively.

Podcasts

On Lawfare Daily, I sit down with Lawfare Legal Fellow James Pearce and Lawfare Senior Editors Anna Bower and Roger Parloff to discuss the Supreme Court’s opinion in the birthright citizenship case, allegations levied against Emil Bove by a whistleblower, and ongoing suits over the federalization of the California National Guard.

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On Sunday afternoon, I (

EJ Wittes

) picked the Attenborough’s echidna to be the #BeastOfTheDay. It’s a great Beast, extremely worthy. It was just caught on video for the first time after being undocumented for over 60 years. It has important lessons to teach us about collaboration between scientists and indigenous communities. It’s a mammal that lays eggs!

But then, when Sunday’s dog shirt was posted, did the echidna get the recognition and honor to which it was entitled? No. It got shoved out of the way because

Holly Berkley Fletcher

(who behaved in a decidedly non-estimable fashion) took a picture of a big, stupid rhino and her little stupid baby.

So, because this is a democracy, Sunday’s official #BeastOfTheDay is being submitted to a popular vote. I’m calling on all of you to stand up for everything good and righteous in this world, to defend the gracious, humble, hard-working echidna against bullies on safaris. Do your duty.

Thank you for your cooperation.

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Today’s #BeastOfTheDay, submitted by acting #BeastMaster

Holly Berkley Fletcher

, is this mangy old lion, who has seen better days and is no longer with his pride. His name is “American Democracy.”