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The Open Signal: How Mobile Phone Location Data Can Expose and Endanger American Troops
The architecture of the commercial mobile ecosystem favors exposure over concealment. As long as warfighters carry devices designed for convenience inside an economy designed for surveillance, the United States will remain vulnerable to enemies who can turn a phone’s signal into intelligence and intelligence into a strike.
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To ‘86’ Occasionally Means to Kill but Usually Doesn’t: A Linguistic Investigation into the Instagram Threat Charge Against James Comey
The Comey indictment states that “a reasonable recipient who is familiar with the circumstances would interpret” Comey’s post “as a serious expression of an intent to do harm to President Trump.” This is not the case. Looking across dictionaries, linguistic corpora, and user-generated dictionaries, a general speaker of contemporary American English would interpret the “eighty-six” in Comey’s post as an expression of opinion, a desire to “eject” the president from office.
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DHS Quits Granting Green Cards—Almost Entirely
DHS announced Friday that it will cease granting green card applications except in extraordinary circumstances. Every legal immigrant must leave the country—that is, self-deport—even if they are qualified for a green card and even if leaving would disqualify them.
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How a Proposed Green Card Application Policy Change Would Disrupt Lives by Assuming Legal Immigrants Are Evading the Law
As with other announcements during the second Trump administration, the real goal of the new policy may be to discourage immigration rather than effecting direct policy changes.
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New Cornell Center on Democracy Will Support Democratic Principles at Home and Abroad
As the nation celebrates the 250th anniversary of its founding, and amid concern about democratic backsliding globally, Cornell University has launched the Cornell Center on Democracy to mobilize leading scholars to strengthen democracy through rigorous research, democratic education and public engagement.
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Who Has Authority to Deal with Drones? In Most of Europe, That’s Unclear
Europe’s growing drone problem is a governance problem. The hardware exists. What is missing, across most of the continent, is the legal authority to deploy it, the jurisdictional clarity to coordinate it, and the political will to mandate either.
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The AI Race Isn’t Real
The notion of an AI race against China is at the center of the administration’s deregulatory turn. In Congress and the private sector, an AI race against China is also frequently invoked as a reason to favor light regulation of domestic AI companies, even in the presence of serious threat models. But the idea of an AI race that must be won at all costs is wrong. It is fundamentally flawed as a descriptive matter and normatively defective.
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The Making of a Mythos: AI-Enabled Cybersecurity and the Emerging Architecture of Access
Anthropic’s release of the frontier AI model Claude Mythos Preview has caused significant trepidation, as its autonomous code-reasoning capabilities surfaced previously undetected vulnerabilities across major operating systems and software infrastructure. The architecture of access, being constructed around such capabilities, creates an asymmetry in access. India needs to secure critical infrastructure by updating, modernizing or replacing legacy systems.
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More Perspective on the Cash-for-Capitol-Attackers Fund
President Donald Trump’s attempt to engineer a $1.8 billion taxpayer-funded slush fund for those in legal trouble for promoting his interests is one of the most notable legal stories in recent memory. It points not only to corruption but to a march toward authoritarian rule imposed by way of the streets. Trump intends to use public money to reward followers who broke the law, often violently, to keep him in power despite the election returns. That sends a dangerous message that if they try that again, they may come out not just with a get-out-of-jail pardon, but with a fortune.
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Solar to Overtake Coal on Texas Grid This Year for the First Time Ever
The Trump administration likes to cast renewables as a socialist scam, but solar has soared in the competitive markets of the Lone Star State.
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Scaling Intelligence: The Security Foundations Beneath America’s AI Ambitions Are Cracking
Artificial intelligence diffusion is stress-testing the assumptions that underpin U.S. cybersecurity. Inspecting those foundations isn’t a precaution against scaling AI—it’s the precondition for doing it with confidence.
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Trump’s Anti-Weaponization Fund Is a (Another) Slush Fund
Federal power can be, and has been, abused. If government officials leak private tax information, misuse law enforcement power, or target citizens because of their politics, those are serious abuses. But the remedy for weaponized government should not be more weaponized government. The Anti-Weaponization Fund is being presented as a cure for politicized government, but its description thus far suggests otherwise. Indeed, it creates an opportunity for the administration to engage in a variant of the abuse the settlement seeks to remedy.
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The Dangers of Hegseth’s “Warfighter” Ethos
Hegseth loves to conjure history to support his vision of the “warrior ethos.” But, at least as far as modern military practice is concerned, Hegseth is an aberration, not an exemplar. The U.S. military has become the most effective and powerful fighting presence in the world not because of brute lethal force, but because of its professionalism and precision.
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Fast 16 Malware Aimed at Undermining Proliferant State Nuclear Weapons Programs, Iran was a Credible Target
The Fast 16 malware looks to be targeting a nuclear weapon program’s hydrodynamic calculation group working on implosion systems using weapon-grade uranium as the nuclear explosive material.
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Clear and Present Danger: The Dismantling of America's Election Protections
The only beneficiaries of making American elections less secure are malign foreign actors eager to interfere, and malicious domestic actors bent on exploiting the opening the administration has created for them.
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The long view
East Texas Sits on a Goldmine of Lithium, but Questions Loom Over How the State Will Regulate Mining and Production
As the U.S. pushes to reduce reliance on foreign suppliers, Texas companies prepare to capitalize on the state’s emerging lithium industry.
The Justice Department Lets 90-Year-Old Regulations on Silencers Fade Away
The Trump administration let a judge block longstanding registration requirements on silencers and short-barreled guns like sawed-off shotguns. But the new legal landscape is murky.
The Long Afterlife of QAnon Conspiracy Theories Haunting American Politics
Started on the online forum website 4chan in 2017, QAnon spread false, far-right theories on social media about a shadowy cabal of satanic pedophiles among the political elite, which Donald Trump was purportedly fighting alongside a mysterious ally named “Q.” While Q stopped posting in 2022, the movement did not disappear. Its conspiracy theories seeped from the margins into mainstream American politics, and the movement’s vocabulary quickly began to appear in official government circles at the start of Trump’s second term. Official uses of Q language have invigorated conspiracy theorists to advance new theories, undermining public health, governance, and civil society.
Sharia, Freedom, and the American Way of Life: A Response to Daniel Brubaker
Sharia alarmists see the illiberal elements in Islamic law as a reason to outlaw all of it — in fact, they call for outlawing not just Islamic law, but more categorically “today’s Islam,” as incompatible with American liberty. But this reasoning could be turned against nearly any group. Reformist arguments have not yet won the day in Islam, but they are being seriously discussed among Muslims around the world. If they eventually do prevail, it will be in part because more Muslims come to see freedom as a noble and genuine ideal worth embracing. And that, in turn, will be possible only if freedom is understood to mean not only freedom from Islam, but freedom of Islam as well.
Can the Midterms Be 'Stolen' On Jan. 3? It's Complicated.
President Trump’s demands in 2020 that Vice President Pence do “the right thing” have prompted speculation that he or his allies will attempt a similar gambit in 2026. Jan. 3 is the day the old Congress ends and the new one begins: Only the swearing-in process still stands between the winners and their seats. This vulnerability lately has filled some commentators and activists with fear. Panic about a ‘rogue clerk’ is likely unwarranted—but it’s worth paying attention.
Nuclear Weapons: The Global Outlook in An Unstable New Era
The stalled US–Iran negotiations on Tehran’s nuclear program and President Donald Trump’s announcement of a US-Saudi nuclear agreement have put nuclear weapons back in the spotlight. But the threat of nuclear breakout has been growing for several decades.