Join Me Today For Operation 100 LBS of Blue and Yellow Chalk
I can't go to Alaska with my lasers, but I can go to the Russian embassy and draw on the sidewalk . . . a lot. You can join me live.
Good Morning:
This is happening at 12:10 pm Eastern time:
I have literally 100 lbs of chalk in my living room. I have an estimable cameraman. And I will have a live translator so that Ukrainian non-English speakers can join too.
I expect only pleasant interactions with law enforcement—drawing on the sidewalk being very legal, even in Occupied DC.
Because of this operation, I will not have an installment today in my series on light operations.
Wednesday on #DogShirtTV, the estimable
and I had an estimable surprise guest, Kate, a former FBI analyst, who came by to tell us about a serious problem in our current Situation: FISA. Now, I’m on the record defending FISA as an important national security tool, but how should we think about it when Trump has control of the DOJ?Yesterday on #DogShirtTV, the estimable
and I discussed the upcoming Trump-Putin summit in Alaska. Spoiler alert: we aren’t happy about it.The Situation
In Thursday’s “The Situation” column, I argue that the Trump-Putin meeting in Alaska is dishonorable because Trump is needlessly elevating Putin into the realm of the respectable, and is also very likely to fail because Putin is reluctant to stop fighting and only Ukrainian, not American, acceptance of peace terms can end the war.
And it is folly because—for all the gullibility and dishonor—it will not work. There is no deal that the United States should accept that Putin will agree to. And even if Trump decides to accept an unacceptable deal, Ukraine is a sovereign nation, and it is Ukrainian acceptance of any arrangement—not American—that is required to end the war. And Ukraine will not be present in Alaska.
Recently On Lawfare
Compiled by the estimable Mary Ford
A ‘Window Sticker’ for Software
Adam Isles argues that software buyers would benefit from a “window sticker,” a document disclosing an item’s overall security performance, when purchasing software products. Isles proposes the design of a sticker with performance information structured around three broad categories—security processes, security performance, and impactful security features— to drive software security reforms.
Car buyers get to see a window sticker—known as a Monroney sticker—when making purchasing decisions. Software buyers could benefit from their own “window sticker” when making purchasing decisions so that, just like with a car, they can see different “crash test ratings,” the origin of parts, and which features are available, either standard or as an option. This article explores what such a “window sticker” might look like in the context of software products often exploited by malicious actors
The UN’s Permanent Process on Cybersecurity Faces an Uphill Battle
Pavlina Pavlova and Christopher Painter acknowledge that consensus agreements such as the “Global Mechanism”—a United Nations (UN) mandate to advance global cyber norms—come at a price, and warn that the UN risks deadlock and difficulty implementing the agreement if it continues to accommodate conflicting views rather than find a reasonable compromise between opposing camps.
The recent agreement presents positive signaling for multilateralism, but consensus on process is not the same as consensus on substance. The next phase must move from dialogue to concrete action. As the Global Mechanism prepares to begin work in 2026, the international community faces a new opportunity—and a sobering responsibility. Unless Western like-minded countries demonstrate resolve and leadership to adopt new approaches to advance responsible behavior, they risk ceding the agenda—and with it, the future of international cybersecurity—to authoritarian states, a scenario they have long sought to avoid.
Newsom v. Trump: A Trial Diary
Anna Bower chronicles the three day bench trial in Newsom v. Trump—California’s lawsuit against Trump administration over its federalization and deployment of the California National Guard in response to protests in Los Angeles.
On the first day, the court heard testimony from three witnesses: William B. Harrington, the Army’s deputy chief of staff for Task Force 51, which is the command post that oversaw the deployment of the troops in Southern California; Maj. Gen. Scott Sherman, who served as the commander for the troops deployed in Southern California; and Ernesto Santacruz, an ICE field office director in Los Angeles.
Three Risks Looming Over the Trump-Putin Meeting
Mallory Stewart—in anticipation of President Trump’s meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska on Friday—identifies three significant risks to international law and security that the Trump team should keep in mind: the perception that the meeting is a reward to Russia, the potential to negotiate away essential defensive capabilities for Ukraine and Europe, and the illusion that one meeting can solve the massive security challenge Russia poses.
Recognizing that President Putin waited almost eight years before expanding his illegal invasion to take the rest of Ukraine, the Trump administration must develop an understanding that continuing engagement, monitoring, verification, and oversight are the baseline requirements to addressing serious international law and security challenges. Even if Putin agreed to every demand to cease his war on Ukraine today, continuing engagement and oversight over decades would still be necessary to ensure follow-through. The great majority of the world is hoping for a solid and enduring ceasefire in Ukraine. But no one wants that ceasefire to come at the cost of empowering Russia or other aggressor nations to use force again for territorial expansion. Any ceasefire must have the clear support of the Ukrainians as well as the majority of Europeans to ensure their commitment to work together and take effective action if the ceasefire fails.
For First Time, Most Americans Want to Back Ukraine for ‘as Long as It Takes’
Shibley Telhami analyzes a University of Maryland Critical Issues Poll that found that American support for Ukraine is at its highest since early 2023, and suggests that as President Trump seeks a deal with Putin, embracing Moscow would put him at odds with Western Allies and the American public.
Nearly two-thirds of Americans polled, 64 percent, say they sympathize more with Ukraine compared to two percent who say they sympathize more with Russia. This support for Ukraine constitutes an increase of five percent from 59 percent the last time we conducted a similar poll in March 2025. Notably, most of the increase came from Republicans whose sympathy went up from 45 percent in March of 2025 to 55 percent in the latest poll, while Democratic support remains nearly the same at 83 percent compared to 82 percent in March 2025. Sympathy with Russia has remained nearly non-existent at 2 percent—a constant since July 2024—with practically no Democrats sympathizing more with Russia and only 3 percent of Republicans saying the same.
Podcasts
On Lawfare Daily, Matt Gluck sits down with Stephen Brooks and Ben Vagle to discuss Brooks and Vagle’s new book entitled, “Command of Commerce: America’s Enduring Economic Power Advantage Over China,” the essence of the gap in economic power between the two countries, and the importance of U.S. alliances in maintaining economic leverage over China.
On Lawfare Daily, Anastasiia Lapatina sits down with Anastasia Radina to discuss the Ukrainian government’s attack on anti-corruption agencies' independence.
On Rational Security, Daniel Byman, Kate Klonick, and I join Scott Anderson to take stock of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s end-goal for Gaza, the details of the Trump administration’s deal with chip manufacturers NVIDIA and AMD, and President Trump’s secret order potentially authorizing the use of military force against cartels that have been designated as terrorist organizations.
Today’s #BeastOfTheDay is the rhinoceros, seen here being enriched:
In honor of today’s Beast, be grateful for all those who expend effort to enrich your life.
Tell Me Something Interesting
So I (
) am currently reading Diarmaid MacCullogh’s book on the Reformation, which I thoroughly recommend to any of you deeply interested in the history of theology and deeply do not recommend to any of you who care about chronological order in narrative. In all seriousness, great book, but the style is not for everyone.About two thirds of my way through, I happened upon the following quote in a discussion of Henry IV of France’s political position after his conversion to Catholicism:
Extremist partisans of the League reinforced this insight with repeated freelance bids to kill the king, at around one major assassination attempt a year. The murderous persistence of their religious zeal would have won admiration in the 1990s from devotees of the Ayatollah Khomieni’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie.
Now, because I am who I am, and sometimes two normal, productive days of my life are simply going to disappear into a wormhole of bizarre research, this statement left me with a burning question: which historical figure has the highest rate of assassination attempts per year over time? I’m not joking. I have spent so much time on this. I have eight different browser tabs and an excel spreadsheet open as we speak:
In the course of this deeply unimportant research, I have encountered a major problem. How does one define an assassination attempt? For instance, this list of “Assassination Attempts on Adolph Hitler” includes everything from “literally a bomb under the table” to “some people passed around a letter in an attempt to start a mutiny.” After some thought, I decided that, for an assassination attempt to count, there needs to have been an actual attempt to do lethal damage to the target at a specific place and time. It’s not enough to have thought about it or talked about it. You have to have shown up and tried.
An additional problem comes from the tendency of certain figures to manufacture assassination plots against themselves. I ended up excluding Vladimir Putin from my analysis entirely, for instance, on the basis that about half of the ten or so known attempts on his life are alleged to have been staged.
More dramatically, the conventional wisdom seems to be that the CIA attempted to kill Fidel Castro 638 times between 1953 and 2001, which would put Castro’s assassinations per year ratio at an astounding 13.3. There was even a BBC documentary in 2006 called 638 Ways to Kill Fidel Castro. As far as I can tell, that number arises from a claim by a former Cuban counterintelligence chief and cannot be treated as factual, but every listicle author on Earth apparently disagrees with me about that, presumably because 638 assassination attempts is too impressive a fact to check. For the record, the Church Committee report, which I ultimately consulted for a more reasonable number, claims eight CIA assassination attempts between 1960 and 1965, putting Castro’s ratio at a perfectly respectable 1.3 even without considering other possible assassins.
So, who’s our winner? Well, it’s not Henry IV, whose 12 attempts in 17 years puts him at an unremarkable .71. It’s definitely not Salman Rushdie, who has as far as I can tell only been the subject of an actual assassination attempt twice in 33 years, an absolutely paltry ratio of .06. To be fair, this seems to be a testimony to the dedication of the British police and Rushdie’s own caution, rather than a dearth of people who would try to kill him if they could. But this leads to a larger point: in order to be the subject of repeated assassination attempts—rather than merely assassination wishes—one has to be reckless enough or unprotected enough for people to be able to get to you, which Rushdie decidedly is not.
So what kind of people are? Well, Alexei Navalny has a ratio of 3, having suffered three attempts in almost exactly a year between July 2019 and August 2020. Benito Mussolini’s ratio is maybe higher, with four attempts between November 1925 and October 1926, but the false flag problem strikes again here.
For my money, I think the highest assassination attempts per year ratio goes to a man
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