Is Frank Sinatra the Beast of the Day?
And is he mad at us?
Good Morning:
Yesterday on #DogShirtTV, the estimable Lindsay Chervinsky showed up to tell us about John Quincy Adams:
Yesterday On Lawfare
Compiled by the estimable Isabel Arroyo
The Difficulty of Coding Terrorism
Daniel Byman and Riley McCabe catalogue the challenges inherent in counting, classifying, and analyzing acts of terrorism—particularly domestic terrorism—to inform policy. The authors identify 11 specific methodological challenges and explain how their recent report on terrorism trends for the Center for Strategic and International Studies dealt with each one.
These 11 challenges can be grouped into three categories. The first set of challenges involves inclusion questions about which incidents do and do not count as terrorism; the second set involves coding challenges for acts that are clearly terrorism but do not fit neatly into coding categories; and the third set involves analysis questions that might lead different analysts to draw different conclusions even when they agree on the underlying data. In the end, terrorism researchers must recognize these ambiguities even as they use data to inform policy.
Regulating Commercial Spyware Through Export Controls
Elaine Korzak compares the implementation of the 2013 Wassenaar Arrangement export controls in the European Union to their implementation in the United States. Korzak examines the factors that complicated the controls’ rollout in the U.S. and identifies key lessons for future efforts to regulate commercial spyware.
The experience of Wassenaar export controls offers valuable insights for states’ national and international efforts to regulate commercial spyware technologies. The following observations seek to highlight three lessons, based on a comparative analysis of the implementation of Wassenaar controls in the U.S. and the EU. First, new equities and considerations have emerged and need to be addressed by export control regimes and other regulatory efforts. Second, Wassenaar export controls have proved to be a contentious tool. Third, Wassenaar export controls and their effectiveness are inherently limited. Collectively, these observations help assess the utility of export controls, and in particular the Wassenaar Arrangement, as a multilateral tool to regulate commercial spyware tools.
Documents
Isabel Arroyo shares a memorandum from the secretary of defense directing staff to immediately learn and integrate the department’s generative artificial intelligence platform GenAI.mil into their workflows.
Podcasts
On Lawfare Daily, Olivia Manes sits down with Susannah Glickman to discuss the role of defense tech in the second Trump administration, the historic relationship between tech, defense, and the U.S. government, and why defense tech firms that have benefitted from U.S. industrial policy now find it more profitable to undermine.
On Rational Security, Scott R. Anderson, Tyler McBrien, and Alex Zerden discuss the state of Syria one year after ousting dictator Bashar al-Assad, the Trump administration’s national security strategy, and JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon’s pledge to invest $1.5 trillion in national security-critical U.S. companies.
Videos
Presented by Lawfare and SITU, Deportation, Inc. is a new series of short investigative videos examining how United States immigration enforcement has evolved into a rapidly growing multi-billion-dollar industry shaped by private profit and political power—a system in which profitability increasingly dictates policy and enforcement priorities.
Laura Field, the author of “Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right,” taught the first lesson of her 6-part class on the conservative intellectual movement and how it has shaped Donald Trump’s presidency as a part of the Lawfare Lecture series. You can gain access to these classes by becoming a paid supporter at Patreon or Substack. The lectures will also be published on Lawfare’s YouTube channel on a delayed timeline.
Today’s #BeastOfTheDay is the pelican, seen here inviting its friend the seal to come bother some humans:
In honor of today’s Beast, go out of your way to violate someone’s personal space today.
I Have a Dream: EJ Wittes Edition
Two nights ago, I—EJ Wittes—dreamt that Frank Sinatra came on #DogShirtTV.
He was not invited. He was not a guest. No one knew how he got the Riverside link, but he sure as shit didn’t pay for it. He just popped up on the show one morning, absolutely furious.
Frank Sinatra was angry because he had not yet been the #BeastOfTheDay. He felt that this was a grave injustice. He felt that he was obviously supposed to have been the BotD long ago, and we’d been unfairly ignoring him. He ranted about it. He raved about it. Riverside had to work hard to compensate for his audio levels. And my father, ethically bankrupt little starfucker that he is, agreed.
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