The Man Who Now Controls the U.S. Border | Potential Security Threats from Connected Cars | Is There a Cyber Arms Race?, and more

But instead of using A.I. to generate exotic attacks, as some in the tech industry feared, the hackers have used it in mundane ways, like drafting emails, translating documents and debugging computer code, the companies said.
“They’re just using it like everyone else is, to try to be more productive in what they’re doing,” said Tom Burt, who oversees Microsoft’s efforts to track and disrupt major cyberattacks.

Elon Musk’s Lawsuit Against a Group That Found Hate Speech on X Isn’t Going Well  (Vittoria Elliott, Wired)
Soon after Elon Musk took control of Twitter, now called X, the platform faced a massive problem: Advertisers were fleeing. But that, the company alleges, was someone else’s fault. On Thursday that argument went before a federal judge, who seemed skeptical of the company’s allegations that a nonprofit’s research tracking hate speech on X had compromised user security, and that the group was responsible for the platform’s loss of advertisers.
The dispute began in July when X filed suit against the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a nonprofit that tracks hate speech on social platforms and had warned that the platform was seeing an increase in hateful content. Musk’s company alleged that CCDH’s reports cost it millions in advertising dollars by driving away business. It also claimed that the nonprofit’s research had violated the platform’s terms of service and endangered users’ security by scraping posts using the login of another nonprofit, the European Climate Foundation.
In response, CCDH filed a motion to dismiss the case, alleging that it was an attempt to silence a critic of X with burdensome litigation using what’s known as a “strategic lawsuit against public participation,” or SLAPP.

Is There a Cyber Arms Race?  (James Andrew Lewis, Lawfare)
Max Smeets’s “No Shortcuts: Why States Struggle to Develop a Military Cyber-Force” offers a thorough analysis of the challenges states face in developing military cyber capabilities. This is an ambitious book with a wealth of references. Its subtitle—“Why States Struggle to Develop a Military Cyber-Force”—is a bit of a misnomer. At least a dozen countries have competent cyber forces, now mostly used for intelligence and reconnaissance purposes (reconnaissance in the sense of identifying digital targets), and most of these forces are part of the larger national military organizations. What these forces may struggle to develop is not cyber capabilities but doctrine for the use of those capabilities and the political will to accept the risks this use may entail. 
Are military cyber capabilities an extension of states’ current uses of force, or are they sui generis, a unique new category of military action involving a broad array of actors. Scholars and analysts have struggled with this distinction. Smeets explores both ideas, with an emphasis on the latter, seeing cyber capabilities as a product of the commercial forces that shape the new domain. The book’s central themes—that cyber operations are complicated and states not well organized to carry them out—are accompanied by discussion of a range of other topics, including a useful typology of cyber actors, trends in cyber policy, the transfer among nations (intentional or otherwise) of cyber capabilities, the effect of artificial intelligence on cyber actions, and the role of non-state actors. After exploring these topics, the book ultimately returns to the theme that only a relative handful of states have surmounted the barriers to undertaking military cyber operations. 
But the range of hostile actions that states have undertaken and the number of state actors responsible for them runs counter to the book’s assertion “that states are barely able to field a military cyber force.” At least seven countries have used cyber operations for offensive purposes (as this Center for Strategic and International Studies inventory of incidents shows). Choosing not to use a capability is not the same as not possessing it. One way to think of this is to ask how many nations have advanced fighter aircraft. The answer is roughly 30, but less than 10 have used them in combat. There is significant (and suggestive) overlap between countries with advanced fighters and those with offensive cyber capabilities, in that advanced militaries acquire advanced capabilities. Leading examples include the United States’ National Security Agency and its military partner Cyber Command, Russia’s GRU (military intelligence), China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA), the Israeli Defense Forces’ Unit 8200, and the United Kingdom’s National Cyber Force (a “unique partnership between” the Government Communications Headquarters and the Ministry of Defense). An equal number of smaller countries, including several members of NATO, as well as Iran and North Korea, also possess effective cyber forces. The integration of military and intelligence organizations is common in how states organize offensive cyber capabilities. 

It’s Time for Congress to Protect the Classified Records of Former Presidents and Vice-Presidents Because They Won’t  (Kel B. McClanahan, Lawfare)
On Feb. 5, Special Counsel Robert Hur filed his completed report regarding his investigation into the discovery of classified records at President Biden’s Delaware home, the Penn Biden Center in Washington, and the University of Delaware. Former President Trump is currently being prosecuted for illegally retaining classified records at his Mar-a-Lago resort. Former Vice President Pence was also investigated in early 2023 after classified records were discovered at his Indiana home, though no charges were filed. Many experts have explained the differences between the cases, but it is equally important to also point out the key similarities, and why those similarities warrant congressional attention sooner rather than later.
Simply put, the Presidential Records Act (PRA) was not written with classified information in mind. The PRA affords an enormous amount of discretion to presidents and vice presidents to decide what records they want to designate as “presidential records”—which have to be turned over to the National Archives at the end of a term—and “personal records”—which can be taken home. Such discretion means the PRA regime is, at its core, an honor system. While much can—and has been—written about this weakness, Congress rarely takes much of an interest because of the perception that the rest of the legal system does an adequate, if imperfect and slow, job of addressing any issues. 
D.C. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson held in 2012 that the National Archives arguably has the authority to take measures to reclaim any improperly retained presidential records, even if private citizens cannot force it to. However, she also implied that the Archives may not have sufficient authority to second-guess a decision made by a president that something is a personal record, observing that “the PRA does not confer any mandatory or even discretionary authority on the Archivist to classify records [as presidential or personal]. Under the statute, this responsibility is left solely to the President.” 
This perceived ambiguity is the core precept in one of former President Trump’s motions to dismiss his Espionage Act case filed Feb. 22, in which he argues, as expected, that his right to designate personal records—even if they are classified—simply cannot be questioned (heavily relying on the history of the Reagan diaries discussed below). But just last week, Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly reemphasized in the PRA case over former White House adviser Peter Navarro’s refusal to return records to the National Archives that “the mere fact that the material is a journal entry does not mean it is a personal record, particularly as the journal entries include work-related topics,” even when the person (in this case admittedly not a former president or vice president) claims that something is a personal record. 
Wherever one may fall on the “personal records” question, this muddled legal landscape does not solve the actual national security problem presently cropping up in various homes of former White House occupants. One is an abstract question of public records law and the other is a specific question of counterintelligence risk. And Congress desperately needs to address the counterintelligence problem, regardless of whether it revisits the legal question.

The Man Who Now Controls the U.S. Border  (David Frum, The Atlantic)
In the effort to contain unauthorized migration to the U.S., Mexico is an on-again, off-again partner. Sometimes it helps more; sometimes less.
In 2019, the Trump administration imposed a “Remain in Mexico” policy on asylum-seeking migrants. After much political and legal back-and-forth in the United States, Mexico definitively withdrew from the “Remain in Mexico” program in February 2023. But the mass death at the Ciudad Juárez detention facility the following month is a reminder of Mexico’s continuing role in U.S. border enforcement and the grim human consequences of delegating the job to Mexico. If America’s inconsistent and unpredictable asylum policy were less enticing, fewer people would be tempted to invest the money and incur the hazards of crossing Mexico to reach the United States. The United States flashes the message “You can probably stay if you get here” and then quietly looks to its southern neighbor to magnify the dangers of that tempting if.
Delegating the job of border enforcement to Mexico also creates opportunities for Mexican leaders to influence U.S. politics. At a press conference in December, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador shared a slide showing the month-by-month tally of unauthorized crossings into the U.S. After a lull in the summer of 2023, entries spiked in the second half of the year, exceeding 250,000 that month. An American president up for reelection might look at that slideshow from his Mexican counterpart and see not merely an analysis but a threat about the trouble that the counterpart could stir or soothe.
The migrant traffic has slowed in the first weeks of 2024. The border deal that failed to pass the U.S. Senate earlier this month was intended to reassert American control over entry into the U.S. Rejection of the deal shifts power over the border, back into López Obrador’s eager hands.

Why Is Trump Trying to Make Ukraine Lose?  (Anne Applebaum, The Atlantic)
Maybe the extraordinary nature of the current moment is hard to see from inside the United States, where so many other stories are competing for attention. But from the outside—from Warsaw, where I live part-time; from Munich, where I attended a major annual security conference earlier this month; from London, Berlin, and other allied capitals—nobody doubts that these circumstances are unprecedented. Donald Trump, who is not the president, is using a minority of Republicans to block aid to Ukraine, to undermine the actual president’s foreign policy, and to weaken American power and credibility.
For outsiders, this reality is mind-boggling, difficult to comprehend and impossible to understand. In the week that the border compromise failed, I happened to meet a senior European Union official visiting Washington. He asked me if congressional Republicans realized that a Russian victory in Ukraine would discredit the United States, weaken American alliances in Europe and Asia, embolden China, encourage Iran, and increase the likelihood of invasions of South Korea or Taiwan. Don’t they realize? Yes, I told him, they realize. Johnson himself said, in February 2022, that a failure to respond to the Russian invasion of Ukraine “empowers other dictators, other terrorists and tyrants around the world … If they perceive that America is weak or unable to act decisively, then it invites aggression in many different ways.” But now the speaker is so frightened by Trump that he no longer cares. Or perhaps he is so afraid of losing his seat that he can’t afford to care. My European colleague shook his head, not because he didn’t believe me, but because it was so hard for him to hear.
Maybe the extraordinary nature of the current moment is hard to see from inside the United States, where so many other stories are competing for attention. But from the outside—from Warsaw, where I live part-time; from Munich, where I attended a major annual security conference earlier this month; from London, Berlin, and other allied capitals—nobody doubts that these circumstances are unprecedented. Donald Trump, who is not the president, is using a minority of Republicans to block aid to Ukraine, to undermine the actual president’s foreign policy, and to weaken American power and credibility.
For outsiders, this reality is mind-boggling, difficult to comprehend and impossible to understand. In the week that the border compromise failed, I happened to meet a senior European Union official visiting Washington. He asked me if congressional Republicans realized that a Russian victory in Ukraine would discredit the United States, weaken American alliances in Europe and Asia, embolden China, encourage Iran, and increase the likelihood of invasions of South Korea or Taiwan. Don’t they realize? Yes, I told him, they realize. Johnson himself said, in February 2022, that a failure to respond to the Russian invasion of Ukraine “empowers other dictators, other terrorists and tyrants around the world … If they perceive that America is weak or unable to act decisively, then it invites aggression in many different ways.” But now the speaker is so frightened by Trump that he no longer cares. Or perhaps he is so afraid of losing his seat that he can’t afford to care. My European colleague shook his head, not because he didn’t believe me, but because it was so hard for him to hear.
The isolationists of the past were figures such as Senator Robert Taft, the son of an American president and the grandson of an American secretary of war. Taft, a loyal member of the Republican Party, opposed U.S. involvement in World War II because, as he once said, an “overambitious foreign policy” could “destroy our armies and prove a real threat to the liberty of the people of the United States.” But Trump is not concerned about our armies. He disdains our soldiers as “suckers” and “losers.” I can’t imagine that he is terribly worried about the “liberty of the people of the United States” either, given that he has already tried once to overthrow the American electoral system, and might well do it again.
Trump is already behaving like the autocrats he admires, pursuing transactional politics that will profoundly weaken the United States. But he doesn’t care.

The Real Reason Trump Loves Putin  (Franklin Foer, The Atlantic)
For nearly the entirety of the past decade, a question has stalked, and sometimes consumed, American politics: Why do Donald Trump and his acolytes heap such reverent praise on Vladimir Putin? The question is born of disbelief. Adoration of the Russian leader, who murders his domestic opponents, kidnaps thousands of Ukrainian children, and interferes in American presidential elections, is so hard to comprehend that it seems only plausibly explained by venal motives—thus the search to find the supposed kompromat the Kremlin lords over Trump or compromising business deals that Trump has pursued in Moscow.
But there’s a deeper, more nefarious truth about people on the right’s baffling unwillingness to criticize the Kremlin: They actually share its worldview. Putin worship isn’t even an aberration in the history of conservatism, merely the latest instance of a long tradition of admiring foreign dictators. Over the past century, without ever really blushing, the American right has similarly celebrated the likes of Adolf Hitler, Francisco Franco, and just about every Latin American military junta that called itself anti-communist.
The right hails these dictators as ideological comrades in the war to preserve traditional society, the values of order and patriarchy, against the assault of the decadent left. Unlike conservative politicians in the United States, these foreign leaders don’t even need to bother with mouthing encomiums to concepts like tolerance, freedom, and democracy. They can deliver reactionary politics in the unvarnished form that some hard-liners on the American right have always hoped would take root in their own country. As the journalist Jacob Heilbrunn argues in America Last, his history of conservatives’ romance with dictators, “Conservatives have searched for a paradise abroad that can serve as a model at home.”
Heilbrunn’s book opens with verve, then becomes a touch slapdash as the narrative drives toward the present. Even though Trumpism is his hook, Heilbrunn spends exceedingly few pages on the subject. But the present moment should be the shocking culmination of his narrative: Foreign dictators are now thoroughly attuned to the tendency that America Last describes. How else to explain why Putin grants exclusive interviews to Tucker Carlson, or why Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán hosted a gathering of the Conservative Political Action Committee? These autocrats understand that the American right’s tendency to treat its favored leaders, domestic and foreign, with servile devotion makes it a supremely useful ally. If Trump returns to power, Putin can count on him to turn a blind eye to his military adventures, and Orbán can count on him to refrain from criticism of his power grabs.
But what makes Heilbrunn’s history, ultimately, so poignant is that the American right no longer needs to project its displaced desires onto leaders in other countries. It doesn’t have to shop abroad for a tribune who channels the movement’s deepest, most subversive desires. Trump is the foreign dictator that they craved all along.