Compiled by Athena Smith.
Articles
Latin America’s Long Game: Nuclear Disarmament in the Age of AI
Marcel Anduiza explained what lessons can be learned from Latin America’s nuclear prohibition treaty, the Treaty of Tlatelolco. He described how existing nuclear deterrence approaches have failed to deliver the stability they promised and argued that Latin America’s innovative prohibition-based strategy reveals how prohibition approaches can be viable as nuclear powers weigh integrating artificial intelligence into nuclear command, control, and communications systems.
Latin America’s tradition in nuclear diplomacy prompts a serious reckoning with an alternative model within the current nuclear architecture that has already worked for an entire region, a prohibition paradigm that has spread through subsequent nuclear-weapon-free-zone treaties in the South Pacific and Oceania, Central Asia, Southeast Asia, and Africa, and later globalized in the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Originally, the Tlatelolco framework was itself built against resistance to nuclear-state disarmament. Its architects understood that the legal architecture of prohibition had to come first, before the political will of the most powerful actors could be moved.
Zombie Formalism in Luxembourg
Michael FitzGerald explored a Court of Justice of the European Union judgment arising from a French driving-assistance app’s challenge to a decree barring it from distributing content that helps drivers evade police checkpoints. FitzGerald explained that the court’s controversial ruling removes the exemption that platforms using algorithms to curate or prioritize user content previously held from liability for illegal content that their users post.
The word “control” had featured in the Court’s prior case law, but it had been fused to the higher bar of the Court’s established ‘knowledge’ standard. Coyote System emphasized their separation and distinctness for the first time: the “two conditions requiring knowledge and control,” the Court held, “should be understood as being alternative to and independent of each other.” Where previously ‘knowledge’ (or, the related notion of ‘awareness’) was required to rescind platform immunity, after Coyote System, an operator that exercises algorithmic ‘control’ over user content—regardless of what it knows—can no longer be deemed an intermediary for European law and cannot avail of protection from liability regarding the illegal user content it carries.
Podcasts
Lawfare Daily: Eileen Guo on Whether “the Censorship-Industrial Complex” Actually Exists:Michael Feinberg sat down with Eileen Guo to discuss her research into whether the “censorship-industrial complex” was an actual entity or merely a pretextual justification to dismantle the government’s anti-disinformation apparatus.
Rational Security: The “Worlds Colliding” Edition: Scott Anderson sat down with Kevin Frazier, Roger Parloff, and Ariane Tabatabai to talk through the week’s big national security news stories, including the turmoil in the tech world after a former Anthropic researcher urged the industry to slow down, Russian provocations in and near NATO territory related to Ukraine, whether a D.C. Circuit judge can investigate who in the Trump administration defied his court order, and more.
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