Rational Security: The "Stop Cap" Edition
Scott Anderson sat down with Kate Klonick, Molly Roberts, and Troy Edwards to talk through the week’s big national security news stories.
This week, Scott sat down with his Lawfare colleagues Kate Klonick, Molly Roberts, and Troy Edwards to talk through the week’s big national security news stories, including:
- “MisAnthropic.” On Monday, Anthropic filed a civil complaint in the Northern District of California and a petition for hearing at the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit over the Department of Defense’s designation of the frontier artificial intelligence company as a “supply chain risk.” The litigation capped off weeks of building tensions between Anthropic and Pentagon officials over the firm’s two ethical red lines for the Defense Department and its use of its AI model, Claude, specifically around widespread surveillance of Americans and the use of AI and autonomous weapons. What exactly are the Pentagon’s grounds for designating Anthropic as a supply chain risk, and how does Anthropic argue that doing so is inconsistent with the law? And what might the implications be for the AI industry as a whole?
- “The Mashhadian Candidate.” Fears that Iran would respond to the ongoing Israeli-U.S. military campaign through overseas terrorism have come to a head this week, as reports emerged that U.S. intelligence had detected an encrypted message being transmitted from Iran that may serve as “an operational trigger” for assets sitting outside of the country. What do we know about Iran’s involvement in past clandestine operations, including terrorism? And what does it mean that this is all happening at a moment when the Justice Department and FBI have lost so many of their experienced national security personnel?
- “Maricopa-calypse Now.” Federal investigators have ramped up several inquiries that appear to be aimed at longstanding—and, thus far, unsubstantiated—allegations of fraud in the 2020 election that are particularly popular with President Trump and his closest supporters. Last month, FBI agents executed a search warrant on Fulton County’s election office and confiscated ballots and voting equipment used in 2020. Last week, the FBI reportedly subpoenaed records from a conservative Arizona legislator over the state senate’s audit of the 2020 election results in Maricopa County. And days later, the Department of Homeland Security’s Homeland Security Investigations office (or HSI) requested records from Arizona state officials regarding their own investigations into alleged 2020 malfeasance. What should we make of these developments? And at what point should we be concerned about the federal government's engagement in these sorts of matters in advance of the upcoming 2026 midterms?
This week’s object lessons are all-consuming. Kate is celebrating online legal analysis by drinking from her Balkinization mug. Troy is lamenting yet another slate of firings at the FBI by drinking from his EX FED mug. Scott, finding himself with unexpected free time at Union Station, devoured Barbara Tuchman’s “A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century.” And Molly introduces us to the texturally triggering cherimoya.
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Scott R. Anderson is a fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution and a Senior Fellow in the National Security Law Program at Columbia Law School. He previously served as an Attorney-Adviser in the Office of the Legal Adviser at the U.S. Department of State and as the legal advisor for the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, Iraq.
Molly Roberts is a senior editor at Lawfare. She was previously a member of the editorial board at The Washington Post, where she covered technology, legal affairs and more, as well as wrote columns about everything from cryptocurrency grift and graft to panda diplomacy at the National Zoo.
Troy Edwards is a Public Service Fellow at Lawfare and a former federal prosecutor with the U.S. Department of Justice. He served as the Deputy Chief of the National Security Section at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia and previously as an Assistant United States Attorney at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia. He joined the Department through its Honors Program at the National Security Division’s Counterterrorism Section. The opinions presented here are entirely his own and not those of the U.S. government.
Kate Klonick is an Associate Professor at St. John’s University Law School, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, Yale Law School’s Information Society Project, Harvard Berkman Klein Center and a Distinguished Scholar at the Institute for Humane Studies. Her writing on online speech, freedom of expression, and private internet platform governance has appeared in the Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal, The New Yorker, the New York Times, The Atlantic, the Washington Post and numerous other publications. For the 2023-2024 academic year, she was a Fulbright Schuman Innovation Scholar in the European Union where she was a Visiting Professor at SciencesPo and University of Amsterdam researching and writing about the Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act.
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