Good Afternoon:
Document Dump
Maureen Comey’s suit against the Justice Department over her firing.
Donald Trump’s suit against the “degenerate” New York Times.
Uh, no.
By removing all of the chickens from both your arms and legs.
Sure.
Really bad people.
That depends. Do you have a magnesium deficiency?
Yesterday on #DogShirtTV, the estimable
and the estimable were scheduled to debate Charlie Kirk’s legacy, but Pesca didn’t show up for almost 40 minutes, leaving me and Holly to discuss hostages and Virginia politics while we waited:Yesterday On Lawfare
Compiled by the estimable Isabel Arroyo.
New AI Transparency Rules Have a Trade Secrets Problem
Julius Hattingh explains how overly broad disclosure exemptions—aimed at protecting artificial intelligence (AI) developers’ trade secrets—risk undermining proposed state laws that would obligate developers to publish safety and security protocols (SSPs). Hattingh argues that new AI laws should require that trade secret exemptions be balanced against the public’s interest in understanding catastrophic AI safety risks, and that explicit procedures should be created for the government to contest redactions with which it disagrees.
By requiring [safety and security protocols] to be released publicly, the laws would enable external parties to study and scrutinize a developer’s framework and hold the developer accountable to it. From a transparency perspective, this is a first step toward creating standards to help the government, researchers, and the general public understand and respond to this extraordinary technology and the companies developing it.
Yet despite their promise, one reason to doubt these bills will work as intended—and why they could even backfire—is their treatment of developers’ trade secrets. Each of the four bills appropriately allows developers to redact certain sensitive information from an SSP before publishing it to the world: for example, where disclosure would threaten public safety, national security, cybersecurity, or a developer’s trade secrets.
Offensive Cyber Operations as Relief for Citizens Under Internet Blackout
Michael Genkin argues that, if internet access constitutes a human right, the international community should permit offensive cyber operations to break imposed internet blackouts. He explores the role of blackouts in exacerbating repression in Iran, analyzes sovereignty-based barriers to a “humanitarian” basis for cyber operations, and highlights third-party countermeasures as a promising avenue for conducting such operations.
If internet access is truly considered to be a human right and internet blackouts a violation of that right, a pathway for a more robust response by states is required.
One internationally recognized pathway might be the implementation of third-party countermeasures against the state implementing the internet blackout. To be considered legal, such measures must be temporary, proportionate, and expressly intended to elicit corrective behavior from the wrongdoer. Traditionally, these include actions such as asset freezes, sanctions, or travel bans. While these measures, at least theoretically, can compel an offending state to restore free internet connectivity, they would most likely also raise concerns about their proportionality. Conversely, internet blackouts that are implemented at the logical level—that is, the absence of a physical disconnection of networking equipment providing connectivity—allow for a novel countermeasure in the form of offensive cyber operations designed to disrupt, degrade, and deny the ability of the wrongdoer to implement an internet blackout.
Lashkar e-Tayyiba’s Dangerous Reemergence
Tricia Bacon unpacks what a provocative attack in Kashmir implies about Pakistani military support for the Lashkar-e-Tayyiba terror group and analyzes how a more active Lashkar might exacerbate India-Pakistan tensions.
Lashkar’s role in the Pahalgam attack suggests that Pakistan’s army has loosened the restraints. It is too soon to assess whether it will allow Lashkar even more latitude. India’s airstrikes on Lashkar’s facilities, however, did not deter the group—it more likely had the opposite effect—while the conflict bolstered the army’s position domestically. India and Pakistan reached a “more dangerous baseline” after the conflict in May, and a reactivated Lashkar will make an already-precarious situation in the region more perilous.
Podcasts
On Lawfare Daily, Scott R. Anderson, Anna Bower, Eric Columbus, Roger Parloff, Michael Feinberg, and I sit down for a live conversation about the lower court order blocking the firing of FTC Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter, the federal appeals ruling upholding the judgment in E. Jean Carroll’s defamation suit against President Trump, Fed. Governor Lisa Cook’s lawsuit challenging President Trump’s effort to fire her, the politicization of the FBI, and more.
Today’s #BeastOfTheDay is the loon, seen here zooming:
In honor of today’s Beast, say the word “loon” a few thousand times.
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