My Dogs Have New Friends
I love Washington DC
Good Morning:
I was at the park yesterday with my two dogs and a car drove up. It had Maryland license plates and an anti-Trump bumper sticker, and two corgis leapt out and immediately began playing joyfully with my two dogs. The driver of the car also got out. He didn’t immediately recognize me at the distance, as was out of context and behind dark glasses in the sun.
But I recognized him, mostly from corgi context.
I love DC.
Yesterday on #DogShirtTV, we had an unusually revolutionary episode. The dog shirt itself was overturned, and amphibians reigned supreme:
On today’s #DogShirtTV, which hasn’t posted yet, the estimable
popped in to thank the Greek Chorus for its gift of a giant battery to keep her and her family warm and in power during the coming winter of power outages. We discussed briefly a plan we have been hatching to create a giving circle to buy such power supplies for families in Ukraine who need them—of which there are a lot. Here’s the question: Would you want to be a part of such a giving circle?I have prepared a little poll to help me assess whether this is something Nastya and I should try to organize:
If and only if you answered “yes” to the previous question:
CORRECTION: An alert and very estimable reader has informed me that I inverted the greater than and less than signs in the top and bottom entries in this poll. I have not fixed these typos because doing so will wipe out the responses of the 40 respondents so far. But just to be clear, the first entry was supposed to say “less than $10 per month” and the last entry was supposed to say “greater than $100 per month.”
Yesterday On Lawfare
Compiled by the estimable Isabel Arroyo
AI Federalism: The Right Way to Do Preemption
Charlie Bullock argues that lawmakers should take inspiration from the successful regulation of past technologies—including electricity and aviation—when working to balance state and preemptive federal laws on artificial intelligence (AI). Bullock emphasizes the importance of an iterative regulatory process that allows that state-federal balance to adjust to fast-developing AI products.
Efforts to include a moratorium in the NDAA seem unlikely to succeed. Even if this particular effort fails, however, preemption of state AI laws will likely continue to be a hot topic in AI governance for the foreseeable future. This means that arguably the most pressing AI policy question of the moment is: How should federal preemption of state AI laws and regulations work? In other words, what state laws should be preempted, and what kind of federal framework should they be replaced with?
I argue that the answer to that question is as follows: Regulatory authority over AI should be allocated between states and the federal government by means of an iterative process that takes place over the course of years and involves reactive preemption of fairly narrow categories of state law.
Cyber Warfare and Its Limits: A Response to Soesanto and Gajos
Kubo Mačák responds to a Nov. 3 Lawfare piece urging Western governments to learn from “responsibly irresponsible” cyber operations that lean on civilian hacktivist help and target civilian infrastructure in enemy territory. Mačák argues that international humanitarian law’s prohibition on cyberattacks that target civilian infrastructure cannot be put aside for military convenience, and that there are more responsible and lawful ways to operationalize civilians’ cyber expertise.
The better path is not to be “responsibly irresponsible,” but responsibly responsible. States should maintain and reinforce the consensus that IHL applies to cyber operations and accept the legal constraints it entails. If civilian expertise is needed, states should integrate it in responsible and lawful ways and ensure civilians are informed about the risks of joining in and about the rules they must respect. To ignore these limits is to risk sliding toward the same lawlessness that democracies condemn in their adversaries.
The Five Eyes Alliance Can’t Afford to Stay Small
In the latest installment of Lawfare’s Foreign Policy Essay series, Mitchell Gallagher argues that today’s cyber threat landscape requires welcoming new members to the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing alliance.
The digital ecosystem has outgrown the reach of any single jurisdiction, exposing the blind spots of an alliance confined to five Anglophone states. Cyberattacks now traverse continents in seconds, exploiting servers, data centers, and legal gray zones far beyond the Five Eyes’ collective footprint. The challenges of this new threat landscape demand a wider coalition capable of defending where its members no longer have reach. The SonicWall breach, which spread through interconnected corporate and government systems in North America and Europe, brought into relief the structural obstacle to assigning responsibility for transnational cyber operations. Notwithstanding extensive forensic evidence, investigators were unable to locate a clear geographic point of origin, an ambiguity that increasingly defines the cyber domain.
Abrego v. Noem: A Hearing Diary for Nov. 20
Roger Parloff reports from a Nov. 20 hearing in the civil case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, in which Abrego petitioned for release while the government sought to dissolve the injunction blocking his removal. Parloff contextualizes a government witness’s testimony that—contrary to public statements by Costa Rican officials—Costa Rica was unwilling to accept Abrego.
The government is currently seeking to remove Abrego to Liberia, after having previously said it would remove him to Uganda, Eswatini, or Ghana. Abrego’s attorneys have said he would not resist removal to Costa Rica, which, in August, had offered to accept him and where the government had offered to send him if he would plead guilty in his criminal case. Abrego’s attorneys contend that the government must first try to send him to Costa Rica—which he has designated as his choice and where he has cultural ties—before sending him to Africa, where he has no ties.
Podcasts
On Lawfare Daily, I sit down with Parloff, Molly Roberts, Eric Columbus, and Loren Voss to discuss a judge ordering the Trump administration to end the National Guard deployment in D.C., updates in the prosecutions of New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI Director James Comey, a hearing in Abrego Garcia’s civil case, and more.
Videos
On Lawfare Live, Natalie Orpett sits down with Parloff and James Pearce to discuss a judge dismissing the indictments against both Comey and James, ruling that Lindsey Halligan was unlawfully appointed to serve as U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia.
Today’s #BeastOfTheDay is the tortoise, which is not an amphibian, seen here consumed by ecstatic joy:
In honor of today’s Beast, eat something that tastes just that good.
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