Frogs at the Lincoln Memorial
The plague of frogs that began on Saturday
Good Evening:
The estimable
and I—along with some members of the Greek Chorus—attended the Million Frog March on Saturday. It turned out to be more like a 40 or 50 frog march. It also turned out to be, as we kinda but only kinda knew, an environmental protest. Which was fine. Any excuse to don frog costumes and go down to the National Mall should be treated as a gift from God and honored as such. We weren’t the only ones who showed up for reasons other than protecting amphibian ecosystems, though I am all for that too.I intend to make prodigious use of my new inflatable frog costume.
Thursday on #DogShirtTV, the estimable Ben Wizner of the ACLU came on the show to talk about war powers with an evil President:
Friday on #DogShirtTV, the estimable
showed up to spill the tea on MAGAland’s latest scandal. We’ve got private jets, country music, and Kash Patel, folks:The Situation
In Wednesday’s “The Situation” column, I reflect on how the president’s relatively low approval ratings impact his capacity for political action.
Is it persistent and the beginning of a George W. Bush-like freefall in the second term, or is it a momentary blip from which Trump will recover? I don’t know that either.
What does it mean for the midterms? That I also don’t know—except that it doesn’t mean anything good for Trump and the Republicans.
Here’s what I do know: The Situation looks very different when the president is popular than when he is not. The Situation looks different when that approval curve is rising than when it is falling. And The Situation looks different when Republicans are winning off-year elections than when they are losing them.
Recently On Lawfare
Compiled by the estimable Isabel Arroyo
Russia and Ukraine Pummel Each Other’s Energy Infrastructure
Anastasiia Lapatina examines tactical and strategic shifts in how Russia and Ukraine target each other’s energy infrastructure, focusing on Russia’s region-by-region effort to knock out Ukraine’s energy grid and Ukraine’s long-range drone attacks on Russian oil.
Although Moscow has tried, and mostly failed, to plunge Ukraine into darkness every cold season, the coming winter may prove more difficult for Ukraine than ever. Russia now has greater quantities of better weapons and is attacking not only Ukraine’s electricity generation but its natural gas production, too—methodically targeting the most vulnerable regions.
This time, however, there are important differences on both sides of the border: Ukraine is responding with a campaign of its own, striking energy sites deep into Russian territory—as far as 1,200 miles—thereby forcing Moscow to curtail some exports and ration fuel internally.
The long-term effects of both campaigns will depend on how long each side can sustain its attacks and how much strategic damage it can do.
In Defense of the UN Cybercrime Convention
Thomas N. Burrows argues that Mailyn Fidler’s October article in Lawfare overstated the novelty and scope of the UN Cybercrime Convention, particularly where Fidler compared it to a global mutual assistance treaty. Burrows emphasizes similarities between the convention and past UN treaties and underscores the robustness of the convention’s safeguards for human rights.
In October, Lawfare published an article by Mailyn Fidler entitled “Procedure as Substance in the UN Cybercrime Convention.” The piece argued that although the UN Cybercrime Convention is substantively parallel to the Budapest Convention, the UN treaty functionally establishes a global mutual legal assistance treaty (MLAT) that would reshape criminal cooperation “writ large”—demanding attention by the U.S. and the international community. As a senior member of the U.S. delegation that negotiated the UN Cybercrime Convention, I read Fidler’s analysis of the convention with great interest. While she correctly characterized some parallels between the Budapest and UN instruments, several of her assertions require a response.
Russia and China in the Gray Zone
Ariane Tabatabai compares Russia’s gray zone activity against NATO allies to China’s incremental pressure on Taiwan and highlights how the two powers have learned from each other.
Though Russia has a long history of gradually pushing the envelope to achieve its aims, its recent activities are similar to the recent Chinese playbook on incrementally increasing pressure on Taiwan. To be sure, these two campaigns have significant differences (for example, while Moscow’s most recent activities have thus far been limited to air incursions, Beijing’s have also spanned the maritime domain). Russia’s recent activities have also been more ad hoc, and limited in their breadth and depth, while China’s have been sustained for several years, and gradually grown in scope, intensity, occurrence, and complexity. More fundamentally, China’s campaign should be understood in the context of its wish to reunify with Taiwan, which is not the case with Russia’s activities against NATO. But they share a number of similarities and are occurring against the backdrop of increased cooperation between the two countries in their “gray-zone campaigns,” a term used by the intelligence community to describe the “deliberate use of coercive or subversive instruments of power by, or on behalf of, a state to achieve its political or security goals at the expense of others, in ways that exceed or exploit gaps in international norms but are intended to remain below the perceived threshold for direct armed conflict.” Such cooperation has implications for NATO in Europe as well as U.S. allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific region. This is especially true as Beijing seeks to attain readiness to militarily seize Taiwan by 2027 even as its preference likely remains to do so without the use of force.
Commerce and Moral Compromise in Contemporary China
Michael Feinberg reviews Patrick McGee’s book “Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company.” Feinberg praises McGee’s rigor and summarizes his account of how Apple became complicit in authoritarian repression to access Chinese factories and markets.
McGee’s chronicle of the multi-decade relationship between Apple, its suppliers and fabricators in China, and the PRC’s government is written in the form of a narrative history, but by the time it concludes, it reads more like an indictment detailing the company’s compromises with and contributions to one of the most pervasively authoritarian regimes in the contemporary world. Relying largely on original research and over 200 interviews with former Apple employees, McGee lays out the most comprehensive account yet published of the moral quagmires that entrap American businesses that fail to fully understand the nature of the regime in East Asia that offers them the globe’s largest marketplace and some of its cheapest factories. One could call it a cautionary tale, perhaps, except that McGee demonstrates, with a prosecutor’s zeal, that few of the participants feel any regret for their actions or the actions they enabled by others. Covering Apple from its near bankruptcy in the late 1990s through to the present day—even if events following the first Trump administration are largely breezed through—McGee’s tale should give pause to anyone who has admired Apple based solely on its innovative design and intuitive interfaces.
Reuters Blows Lid on Meta’s Fraud Profit Scandal
In the latest edition of the Seriously Risky Business cybersecurity newsletter, Tom Uren discusses Meta’s financial windfall from scam ads, state-backed hackers’ apparent self-restraint while attacking supply chains, new moves to crack down on scammers in the UK, and more.
The documents suggest that Meta’s management weighed the financial windfall from scam ads against the costs of regulatory action. The company raked in $3.5 billion every six months from ads determined by the legal team to have “higher legal risk,” such as impersonating a brand or celebrity. The document notes that the revenue would almost certainly exceed the cost of “any regulatory settlement involving scam ads.”
Podcasts
On Lawfare Daily, Michael Feinberg sits down with Fareed Zakaria to discuss Zakaria’s book “Age of Revolutions,” which was recently reissued with a new afterword on the second Trump administration. The two discuss intellectual, cultural, and populist revolutions across history; the relationship between revolution and governance; the most salient lessons from successful revolutions; and more.
On Rational Security, Natalie Orpett, Eric Columbus, and Molly Roberts join Scott R. Anderson to discuss the end of the government shutdown, President Trump’s recent spate of pardons for those accused of trying to manipulate the 2020 election results, and Justice Department investigations into government reports alleging Russian support for the Trump candidacy.
Videos
At 4 pm ET on Nov. 14, Natalie Orpett sat down with Eric Columbus, Anna Bower, Roger Parloff, and Loren Voss to discuss a court hearing on whether Lindsey Halligan was lawfully appointed as U.S. attorney, a judge’s ruling granting a permanent injunction in the challenge to National Guard deployment in Oregon, and more.
Today’s #BeastOfTheDay is the sperm whale, seen here eating a giant squid:
We’ve known for a long time, based on squid beaks found in whale stomachs, that sperm whales eat giant squid. But we’ve never seen it happen before. Congratulations to the scientists involved in getting this footage, and congratulations also to today’s Beast for a belly satisfyingly full of squid!
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