Good Evening:
Caption contest. Please leave your nomination for the caption for this pic in the comments below.
This evening, we held the fourth annual sunflower planting outside the Russian embassy in Washington DC. I will have more to say about this evening, and more pictures, in coming dog shirts. Suffice it to say for now that we had a good turnout and got a lot of sunflowers in the ground. I have also put in place several hidden cameras, which should protect the sunflowers—which are on private property this year—from unwanted attack from across the street.
Friday on #DogShirtTV, the estimable Anastasiia Lapatina came to me with a question: What’s this new Pope thing about and should she care? So we talked about it. The estimable Richard Wattenbarger joined us from the Collegium for a musical interlude:
Friday On Lawfare
Compiled by the estimable Caroline Cornett and the equally estimable Katherine Pompilio
1,000 AI Bills: Time for Congress to Get Serious About Preemption
Kevin Frazier and Adam Thierer explain that the growing number of regulatory artificial intelligence (AI) bills—if adopted into policy—could stifle innovation and undermine the United State’s competitive efforts toward global AI supremacy.
If this growing patchwork of parochial regulatory policies takes root, it could undermine the nation’s efforts to stay at the cutting edge of AI innovation at a critical moment when competition with China for global AI supremacy is intensifying—a reality that Dean Ball and Alan Rozenshtein observed last year (before the DeepSeek moment!). As House Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Brett Guthrie argued recently, the United States must “make sure that we win the battle against China” and the key to that is to ensure America does not “regulate like Europe or California regulates,” because “that puts us in a position where we’re not competitive.” Similarly, the Trump administration has stated America must “secure its position as the unrivaled world leader in critical and emerging technologies” beginning with AI.
These important goals of encouraging a robustly innovative national AI marketplace and a strong strategic base to compete with China will be undermined unless Congress preempts the development of a patchwork of conflicting and costly state and local regulatory policies.
Legal Challenges Mount Against Renewed U.S. Sanctions on the International Criminal Court
Nema Milaninia discusses the legal and institutional consequences of Executive Order 14203, which imposes sanctions on the International Criminal Court (ICC) and ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan. Milaninia also highlights three lawsuits alleging the executive order violates constitutional rights and statutory provisions under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.
More broadly, the reimposition of sanctions marks a significant shift in the U.S. approach to the ICC and international justice institutions more generally. While changes in engagement with multilateral human rights institutions may reflect evolving strategic priorities or differences in policy emphasis, sanctions of this nature go further. They move beyond critique or disengagement by imposing legal and financial penalties on cooperation with an international judicial body. By designating the ICC prosecutor and restricting services provided to the court, the order places U.S. persons at risk of enforcement simply for participating in accountability processes. This approach reframes engagement with a treaty-based legal institution not as a matter of diplomatic discretion, but as conduct potentially subject to U.S. sanctions law—placing the ICC in a category of adversarial treatment typically reserved for terrorist groups and transnational criminal organizations.
It’s Like Signal, but Dumb
In the latest edition of the Seriously Risky Business cybersecurity newsletter, Tom Uren discusses revelations that the Trump administration is using a less secure version of Signal known as TM SGNL, indications that the United States will increase offensive cyber operations, and a court ruling that spyware vendor NSO Group must pay WhatsApp $167 million.
An analysis of TeleMessage's Android app by security engineer and journalist Micah Lee found that in the case of TM SGNL the intended recipients, the customer's archive store, and TeleMessage itself had access to plaintext messages. The company's archive server received plaintext chat logs directly from devices running TM SGNL and then forwarded these logs to the customer-controlled archive destination. So, it's really a misnomer to call it an "archive server." We think "best place to steal messages" server is more fitting.
Tracing the Origins of a ‘New American Surveillance State’
Sarah Lamdan reviews Byron Tau’s “Means of Control: How the Hidden Alliance of Tech and Government Is Creating a New American Surveillance State,” which discusses the development of extensive surveillance infrastructure in the United States after 9/11. Lamdan emphasizes the extent of the government’s collaboration with technology companies and the need for updated legal frameworks to address civil rights concerns.
From the initial meetings between data brokers and government officials, Tau follows the growth of the tech industry and the government surveillance programs that flourished alongside it. The technological boom of the subsequent decades would turn everything from watches to refrigerators into data-sucking devices. It would also provide data-sorting systems that could organize people’s data into mosaics reflecting their daily lives and even predict what they might do next. Every new data source and system created opportunities to identify and track people, and data companies were eager to help the government fight crime and protect national security. Tau aptly describes today’s government intelligence systems as ones “built by corporate America and blessed by government lawyers.”
Podcasts
On Lawfare Daily, Ben Brooks joins Frazier to discuss the shift toward open-sourcing leading AI models, OpenAI’s plans to release a new open-weights model, and the ramifications of that pivot for AI governance.
Videos
On May 9 at 4 p.m. ET, I spoke to Anna Bower, Roger Parloff, James Pearce, and Preston Marquis about the status of civil litigation challenging President Donald Trump's executive actions.
Announcements
The Strauss-Clements Intelligence Studies Project of The University of Texas at Austin announces the 11th annual competition recognizing outstanding student research and writing on topics related to intelligence and national security. The winner of the “Inman Award” will receive a cash prize of $5,000, with two semifinalists each receiving a cash prize of $2,500. This competition is open to unpublished work by undergraduate and graduate students enrolled in degree programs at accredited U.S. higher education institutions during the 2024-25 academic year. The deadline for submitting papers is June 30, 2025.
Today’s #BeastOfTheDay is carpooling:
Alright, I’ll be honest. I’m not sure which Beast in this video is today’s Beast. But that’s what democracy is for:
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