One Badass Drone Operation
Sometimes the good guys win one
Good Evening:
This morning, I woke up to fabulous news, about which I found myself texting almost immediately with the estimable
and the no-less-estimable and, over morning coffee, live-streaming with Lapatina and the estimable Fabian Hoffman, of the Substack.It’s very hard not be encouraged by this sort of news. Here’s our conversation:
Friday on #DogShirtTV, I welcomed the estimable
and the estimable Tyler McBrien to discuss Anna’s latest journalistic triumph, an account of her search for the administrator of DOGE in the style of Bridget Jones’s Diary. Is it super weird? Yes. Will you learn a lot by reading it? Absolutely. Will it make you laugh out loud? I promise.The Situation
Okay, yeah, I went all Martin Luther on you guys:
Today, I want to offer fifteen theses on Donald Trump’s sale of indulgences:
(1) In the four months and ten days since his inauguration, Donald J. Trump has issued a great many indulgences. Not all of them, by any means, have been purchased. Some have been payments owed to his mercenaries. Many have been rewards to supporters. At least some, however, have—directly or indirectly, explicitly or implicitly—been purchased.
(2) The granting of indulgences to political friends and political supporters is nothing new. Presidents have done it for a long time. Presidents have even been occasionally known to grant indulgences to those whose family members have paid handsomely for the consideration. But in the past, such indulgences have tended to issue as a president is on his way out of office, not right at the beginning of his term. President Trump, deploying an admirable form of transparency, has moved the corruption right up front: “whatsoever ye have spoken in darkness shall be heard in the light; and that which ye have spoken in the ear in closets shall be proclaimed upon the housetops,” sayeth the Gospel. And Trump has heard. He has created a veritable marketplace for indulgences.
Friday On Lawfare
Compiled by the estimable Caroline Cornett
The House Reconciliation Bill’s AI Preemption Clearly Violates the Byrd Rule
Gabriel Weil explains why the House reconciliation bill’s 10 year ban on state and local regulation of artificial intelligence (AI) will struggle to pass the Senate because it does not adhere to the Byrd Rule—which governs budget reconciliation processes—since it does not produce the required changes in federal outlays or revenues:
The AI regulatory preemption provision of the House reconciliation bill falls short of producing a change in federal taxes or spending that is “not merely incidental.” While one can imagine downstream effects of state AI law and regulation on the federal budget, perhaps via the cost for agencies to procure AI products or services, any such effects would be highly attenuated and incidental to the primary, non-budgetary purpose of the provision. Technically, provisions that lack a direct non-incidental impact on federal spending or revenues can still pass muster under the Byrd Rule if they serve a necessary term or condition of a budgetary provision. But it strains credulity to claim that broad preemption of state AI regulation for the next decade is a necessary term or condition of an appropriation of $500 million for the Department of Commerce to update its internal AI and information technology systems.
The Second Circuit’s Halkbank III Decision
Philip Capers and Jaime Miguel El Koury break down the Second Circuit’s ruling that Halkbank, a Turkish state-owned bank, does not possess absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for commercial activities under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act and common law. Capers and El Koury highlight that the decision could expand the scope of criminal prosecution against both state-owned enterprises and international organizations:
The Second Circuit ruled that common law foreign sovereign immunity does not protect Halkbank from criminal prosecution. Citing Supreme Court and Second Circuit precedents, such as the “guiding principle” explained in Republic of Mexico v. Hoffman that in foreign sovereign immunity cases, “courts should not so act as to embarrass the executive arm in its conduct of foreign affairs,” the Second Circuit held that deference to the executive branch’s determination regarding foreign sovereign immunity under common law “applies regardless of whether the Executive seeks to grant or, as in this case, deny immunity, and also extends to criminal cases.”
Russia's Cybercriminals and Spies Are Officially in Cahoots
In the latest edition of the Seriously Risky Business cybersecurity newsletter, Tom Uren discusses criminal charges linking the cybercriminals behind the DanaBot malware to Russian state espionage, the creation of a “one stop shop” for United States intelligence agencies to buy sensitive, commercially acquired data, and litigation over the removal of two Democratic members of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Board:
Previous Russian cybercriminal and state interaction has appeared opportunistic and based on personal relationships. This feels a lot more formal, with DanaBot's administrators carrying out ongoing work to meet state requirements.
The indictment doesn't delve into the exact nature of the relationship between DanaBot's developers and intelligence services. It does, however, fill in some blanks in the criminal-state nexus. And it suggests that intelligence agencies were instructing criminals to create tailored systems going at least as far back as 2021. That was when the espionage variant appeared, a full year before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Podcasts
On Lawfare Daily, Josh Batson joins Kevin Frazier to talk about two research papers that uncovered important insights about how advanced generative AI models work and the broader significance of interpretability and explainability research.
Videos
On Friday, May 30 at 4 p.m. ET, I sat down with Scott R. Anderson, Anna Bower, and Roger Parloff to discuss the civil litigation targeting President Donald Trump’s executive actions, including orders finding that Trump’s tariffs are unlawful, the denial of Mahmoud Khalil’s motion for a preliminary injunction, and the dismantling of independent agencies.
Today’s #BeastOfTheDay is the cow, seen here participating in a cooking demonstration:
In honor of today’s Beast, add 700lbs of beef to your batter the next time you make pancakes.
None of these Beasts are the #BeastOfTheDay, because artistic representations of Beasts cannot qualify for #BeastOfTheDay status on their own, but these are nevertheless good Beasts and worthy of recognition:
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