Compiled by Athena Smith.
Articles
The Russian Bots Went Silent. Or Did They?
Renée DiResta explained that the evidence does not show that Ukrainian drone strikes on Russian Yandex data centers knocked out large numbers of Russian propaganda bots, as a viral story claimed. She noted that the dramatic decline in traffic from Yandex’s main network reflects a drop in web crawler activity rather than social media bots, and that Russian influence operations—which obscure their origins using VPNs and other proxies—may not originate from Yandex. DiResta concluded that the story’s popularity reflects a widespread sense that online conversations are crowded with suspicious or inauthentic accounts.
The Yandex story is appealing because it confirms something many people already suspect: that much of what they encounter online is fake or manipulative. It’s also comforting to believe that one’s noisiest or most aggressive political opponents aren’t even real. The Ukrainian drone story offers the poetic justice of seeing a bad actor get its comeuppance: Ukrainian drones hit Russian infrastructure, and suddenly the internet becomes a nicer place.
America Didn’t Lose Its Rare Earth Industry. It Sold It.
Kirsten Asdal, Tom Koch, and Tao Tan proposed a financing instrument—a contingent convertible security that converts into ownership if Beijing weaponizes supply—to rebuild U.S. rare earth supply and blunt China’s leverage. The authors explain that American companies sold off the U.S. rare earth industry for reasons that made economic sense at the time, but that the United States erred in treating it as a market rather than, as China recognized, a geostrategic industry.
Translating this concept into reality raises important implementation questions about statutory authority, precise trigger definitions, CFIUS integration, and corporate governance. We offer the CoCo bond model to stimulate discussions around aligning interests in a market failure and national security context, and we invite the legal, policy, and financial communities to help refine the “plumbing” necessary to make asymmetric financing a workable pillar of U.S. statecraft.
Podcasts
Lawfare Daily: The Spy Who Changed the Cold War in the Middle East: Michael Feinberg sat down with author and journalist Ben Macintyre to discuss his new book, “Redwood: The Untold Story of the Cold War’s Most Extraordinary Spy,” about a little-known intelligence coup from the Cold War that changed the strategies of great powers in the Middle East.
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