No Show Tomorrow or Friday

Sorry for the late notice

Good Evening:

On deep consideration of the matter, I would have to say almost certainly not. What if your mother doesn’t like coconut infused crepes or pandan cream? What if she’s allergic to strawberries? The “perfect” Mother’s Day breakfast has to account for such things.

---

With apologies for the late notice, there will be no show either tomorrow or Friday. There’s been a death in the family, I’m afraid.

See you on Monday.

For the same reason, this dog shirt is going to be a bit abbreviated.

---

Yesterday on #DogShirtTV, the estimable Jimmy Rushton came on the show to tell us about the absolutely wild investigation he just published in the Kyiv Independent about a crazed operation to get people in Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine to do stupid stunts that will get them tortured and killed:

---

Yesterday On Lawfare

Compiled by the estimable Marissa Wang

What the Murthy v. Missouri and Daily Wire Consent Decrees Do—and Don’t—Establish

Renée DiResta argues that two recent settlements involving allegations of government pressure on social and conservative media are being mistakenly portrayed as legal validation of claims that the Biden administration engaged in media censorship. Instead, DiResta explains that these are negotiated agreements and contain no evidence of a Biden-era “censorship regime.”

In March and April, the Trump Justice Department settled two high-profile Biden-era cases involving allegations of government pressure on social and conservative media: Murthy v. Missouri (formerly Missouri v. Biden) and The Daily Wire v. State Department. Since then, the resulting decrees have been cited in Justice Department press materials and across right-leaning media as court-endorsed proof that a “censorship industrial complex” operated under the prior administration.

Neither case came close to establishing that claim.

Kicking the Tires: A Voluntary Path to Pre-Deployment AI Vetting

Dean W. Ball and Kevin Frazier explain that, although the Trump administration likely lacks the legal authority to enforce a system of mandatory pre-deployment vetting for advanced artificial intelligence models, existing agencies such as the Center for AI Standards and Innovation and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency are better equipped to facilitate voluntary testing and preparedness.

The Trump administration is weighing the creation of a “review system” for frontier AI models. According to the New York Times, in this proposed approach, AI labs would provide the federal government with “first access” to “get ahead” of models with significant cyber capabilities, presumably such as Anthropic’s Mythos. It’s unclear what legal authority would allow the president to accomplish these goals—specifically, mandating labs to undergo a vetting process and then sharing any essential information related to countering any detected risks with other parts of the government.

However, existing authorities would allow for a voluntary “kick the tires” testing period. Labs could opt to share models with materially new capabilities with the Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI), which is housed within the Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology; the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) could then fund an effort to help a broad set of actors—including local, state, federal actors as well as other public and private entities—take any necessary cybersecurity precautions. This would help labs avoid popular backlash for knowingly introducing models that may threaten critical systems and public well-being and perhaps subvert more onerous, formal requirements.

Podcasts

Lawfare Daily: Chatting on Chatrie with Adam Unikowsky, Michael Dreeben, and Richard Salgado: Kate Klonick sits down with Michael R. Dreeben, Richard Salgado, and Adam Unikowsky to discuss Chatrie v. United States, a case on the constitutionality of geofencing warrants before the Supreme Court. The group discussed Unikowsky’s arguments on behalf of Chatrie, Salgado’s technologist amicus brief, and Dreeben’s involvement in the precursor case of Fourth Amendment issues in tech.

---

Today’s #BeastOfTheDay is the cougar, seen here reproducing in Minnesota:

MPR News reports:

Trail cameras near Voyageurs National Park in northern Minnesota captured footage of a female cougar and three large kittens in late March.

The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources said Thursday it’s the first time in more than a century there’s been documentation of a reproducing cougar population in the state…

The video of the four cougars — also known as mountain lions or pumas — was captured by two trail cameras that Voyageurs Wolf Project researchers placed over a deer carcass northeast of Orr.

“In late March, we received a mortality signal from a GPS-collared deer and found the carcass buried under a pile of leaves on a hillside — a telltale sign of feline predation,” researchers wrote in notes accompanying the video posted online. “We suspected it was likely a bobcat but thought, just possibly, it could be a cougar. So we put up two trail cameras on the cached deer carcass and four hours later, two cougar kittens returned to the kill. The entire family showed up that evening and spent hours in front of our cameras.”

In honor of today’s Beast, show up and have kittens.