The Answer Is No
It’s always no
Good Evening:
Yesterday on #DogShirtTV, the estimable Eve gaumond had some concerns about the way AI is being used in the Quebec school system:
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Yesterday On Lawfare
Compiled by the estimable Sarah Willrich
What’s up with Trump’s Mail-In Voting Executive Order?
The estimable Molly Roberts analyzes President Trump’s March 2026 executive order on mail-in voting. While the order’s technocratic process of creating mailing lists may seem innocuous, a recent Department of Homeland Security memo reveals the administration’s desire to aggressively create “citizen lists,” likely disregarding privacy laws in the process.
The logical assumption was that these three separate lists would effectively merge into one. The USPS, if it complied with the order, would cross-reference the state lists with the DHS list in order to produce the crucial list in this conversation; that is, the one that would determine whose ballots were eligible for transmission by mail and whose were not. Yet this remained only an assumption. The order itself mentioned only three separate lists with no requirement for how they would interact—or even that they would interact at all. The proof of the pudding was always going to be in the rulemaking.
‘Nihilistic Violent Extremism’ Isn’t a Thing, and I’m Tired of Pretending It Is
In the latest edition of Lawfare’s Foreign Policy Essay series, Bennett Clifford questions the continued use of nihilistic violent extremism (NVE) as a term to describe the often hyper-online threat actors, whom the FBI says are inspired “primarily from a hatred of society at large.”The term, he argues, lacks clear meaning and, as a result, prevents policy from being adequately tailored in response.
If NVEs were actually nihilists, from where would they derive the “political, social, or religious goals” they would need to qualify as “violent extremists”? Maintaining a worldview that assumes violent action can cause favorable political or social change almost certainly requires a belief in some system of values, a worldview that assumes, at some level, that meaningful social or political changes are possible, or at the very least that there is some purpose to existing. This is why most historical nihilists—despite their radical rejection of societal structures—have been extreme political quietists.
Can Frontier AI Labs Lawfully Agree to Pause?
Nicholas Felstead argues that Anthropic’s recent call to “slow or temporarily pause frontier AI [artificial intelligence] development” would require coordination between AI companies in a way that could violate antitrust laws. He identifies a core tradeoff between the ability of a pause to address safety concerns and the likelihood it would be viewed as unlawful collusion.
A formal pausing agreement raises the antitrust risk level significantly: Because the parties commit to curtail the supply of products and services, it risks per se antitrust treatment as a naked horizontal output restriction. An intermediate version—where each lab contracts separately with a mutual auditor that runs the evaluations and triggers the pauses—is more defensible. However, the cross commitments between firms still function like a coordinated restraint, as one firm’s evaluation failure suppresses another firm’s output. But the real quagmire is that the features that might make a pause effective and functional—commitment, notification obligations, verification, and consequences for defection—are those that establish the existence and terms of a potentially anti-competitive agreement among competitors.
Podcasts
Lawfare Daily: The Trials of the Trump Administration, June 26: Natalie Orpett sits down with Eric Columbus, Roberts, and Roger Parloff to discuss the Supreme Court’s recent decisions in immigration cases, a federal judge squashing portions of Trump’s mail-in voting executive order, John Bolton pleading guilty, and an update in the criminal prosecution of the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Today’s #BeastOfTheDay is the ghost crab, seen here investigating a camera:
In honor of today’s Beast, practice reasonable suspicion.
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