Perhaps the President it not all powerful…

https://www.bespacific.com/trump-administration-to-drop-defense-of-law-firm-sanctions/

Trump Administration to Drop Defense of Law Firm Sanctions

Follow up to Trump Using Another Executive Order to Take Revenge on Law Firms – See also

• The New York Times – “The Trump administration on Monday abandoned its attempts to impose potentially crippling executive orders against law firms that refused to capitulate to the president, walking away from its appeal of victories the firms had won against the White House. With a brief due this week, Justice Department lawyers told the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia that they were no longer interested in pursuing the cases and were voluntarily asking the court to dismiss them. The decision is the White House’s most significant acknowledgment that the executive orders cannot be successfully defended in court. The move is particularly striking given that some firms opted to reach deals in a bid to head off executive orders that President Trump’s Justice Department said it would no longer stand behind. The battle over the executive orders had roiled the legal establishment and led many firms to submit to Mr. Trump rather than face the existential threat his directives represented. The orders barred the firms from government business and suggested that their clients could lose government contracts, spurring widespread panic in the legal profession…”

• WSJ.com / paywalled  – Justice Department plans to withdraw appeals defending punitive executive orders issued by the president, people familiar with the matter said..

• Reuters …The Trump administration plans to drop its appeals ‌defending executive orders ‌that sanctioned four major U.S. law firms, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday, citing people familiar with the matter. The U.S. Justice Department is expected to abandon appeals to trial-court rulings against the actions targeting Jenner & Block, WilmerHale, Perkins Coie and Susman Godfrey, the report said.

• See also Washington Post via MSN – Justice Dept. plans to abandon defense of orders targeting law firms. The Trump administration is planning to abandon its effort to punish several law firms that hired President Donald Trump’s perceived foes or took on cases he disliked, according to two people familiar with the matter. The move would effectively admit defeat and leave Trump’s sanctions on the firms lambasting his executive orders as unconstitutional and retaliatory… ”

• CNN – Trump administration drops suits against law firms with ties to Democrats and other Trump foes

Another ‘punishing those who don’t kowtow’ issue?

https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/pentagon%27s-anthropic-designation-won%27t-survive-first-contact-with-legal-system

Pentagon’s Anthropic Designation Won’t Survive First Contact with Legal System

On Feb. 27, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth designated Anthropic—the maker of the AI model Claude—a supply chain risk to national security. This came immediately after a Truth Social post from President Trump directing "EVERY Federal Agency" to “IMMEDIATELY CEASE” using Anthropic's technology. Hegseth’s designation includes a six-month transition period during which Anthropic will continue providing services to the military during the transition. Anthropic, in turn, has vowed to “challenge any supply chain risk designation in court.”

The escalation capped off a turbulent week. The dispute between the Pentagon and Anthropic over two usage restrictions in Anthropic's military contract—prohibitions on autonomous weapons and mass surveillance—had been building since January, when Hegseth's AI strategy memorandum directed that all Department of Defense AI contracts adopt standard "any lawful use" language. Hegseth met with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei earlier in the week and threatened to invoke the Defense Production Act to compel the company's cooperation. But on Friday the Trump administration had apparently dropped the DPA threat in favor of something more dramatic: a formal supply chain risk designation and a government-wide ban.

From the government's perspective, Claude does pose some concerning vendor reliability issues. But the specific actions Hegseth and Trump took have serious legal problems. The designation exceeds what the statute authorizes. The required findings don't hold up. And Hegseth's own public statements may have doomed the government's litigation posture before it even begins.

Once upon a time we had this thing called privacy…

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/03/llm-assisted-deanonymization.html

LLM-Assisted Deanonymization

Turns out that LLMs are good at de-anonymization:

We show that LLM agents can figure out who you are from your anonymous online posts. Across Hacker News, Reddit, LinkedIn, and anonymized interview transcripts, our method identifies users with high precision ­ and scales to tens of thousands of candidates.

While it has been known that individuals can be uniquely identified by surprisingly few attributes, this was often practically limited. Data is often only available in unstructured form and deanonymization used to require human investigators to search and reason based on clues. We show that from a handful of comments, LLMs can infer where you live, what you do, and your interests—then search for you on the web. In our new research, we show that this is not only possible but increasingly practical.

Perspective.

https://stratechery.com/2026/anthropic-and-alignment/

Anthropic and Alignment

This is not an Article about the campaign being waged by the U.S. against Iran, but it’s a useful — and timely — analogy. There is a never-ending debate that can be had about the concept of International Law and who might be violating it. Some will argue that the U.S. is in violation for the attacks; others will note that Iran has been serially violating International Law with both its overt actions and its support of terror networks for my entire life.

What is important to note is that the entire debate is ultimately pointless: the very concept of “international law” is fake, not because pertinent statutes and agreements don’t exist, but because their effectiveness is ultimately rooted in their enforceability. That, by extension, means there must be an entity to enact such enforcement, with the capability to match, and such an entity does not exist.

Perspective.

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/trumps-way-war

Trump’s Way of War

Iran, Venezuela, and the End of the Powell Doctrine

War hacking: A long shot, but only one of many I’m sure…

https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/iran-strikes-2026/card/israel-hacked-popular-iranian-prayer-app-to-urge-defections-resistance-wtYyb29CmKrTXoJBIV3C

Israel Hacked Popular Iranian Prayer App to Urge Defections, Resistance

Israel hacked a popular Iranian prayer app to send notifications to potentially millions of phones Saturday morning urging the country’s military personnel to defect from the regime and join a fight to liberate the country, according to people familiar with the matter.

Toward AI recognition?

https://journal.carjj.org/index.php/AR/article/view/182

Legal protection of AI works in the absence of a human author

This research addresses the challenges posed by artificial intelligence (AI) to traditional intellectual property frameworks, particularly in cases where creative or innovative works are produced without a direct human author. As AI systems become increasingly capable of self-learning and independently creating content, they challenge the fundamental legal assumption that authorship—and therefore legal protection—is exclusive to human beings. This research critically examines the capacity of current intellectual property laws to accommodate AI-generated works, the possibility of recognizing AI as a legal entity, and the implications of this for attribution and legal liability. Through a comparative legal analysis encompassing civil, Anglo-Saxon, and selected Arab legal systems, the research highlights the shortcomings and inconsistencies in existing legal frameworks. It advocates for the development of a specific legal framework that reflects the realities of the digital age, including a redefinition of the concept of "innovation" and the application of the principle of "responsible human agent." Ultimately, the research calls for a shift in legal philosophy that balances the need for legal certainty with the rapidly evolving nature of technological advancements in the field of intellectual property.

Do we move fast enough or too fast?

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1756061626000091

Intelligent justice: AI-driven forensics and legal process for criminal justice reforms

The accelerated development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies in the field of criminal justice has triggered a paradigm shift in forensic science and legal procedures. The research, Intelligent Justice: AI-Driven Forensics and Legal Process for Criminal Justice Reform, critically examines the application of AI technologies in offering enhanced accuracy, efficacy, and fairness in forensic and judicial procedures. Informed by an interdisciplinary approach, the research discerns the necessity of balancing technological progress with essential values of justice, legality, and procedural rights.

The paper maps the modern landscape of AI technology in criminal law, from algorithmic risk profiling to predictive policing and legal analytics. Using the chosen case studies, the study illustrates the ability of AI systems to generate more precise evidence and accelerate investigation procedures.

Despite the benefits bestowed, the use of artificial intelligence raises serious legal and ethical issues. Some of the most important ones include uncertainty in algorithmic decision-making, the existence of possible biases within forensic algorithms, challenges of admitting evidence, and threat to procedural safeguards. In this research, it is recommended that a robust regulatory and normative framework be put in place to govern the use of AI within criminal justice settings with a strong emphasis on transparency, accountability, and human oversight. In promoting the notion of "Intelligent Justice," the paper contends that AI not merely must improve present practice but prove a force for reform, most importantly in advancing crime prevention, protecting rights, and enhancing a rehabilitative theory of justice.

Perspective.

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-economics-of-technological-change

The Economics of Technological Change

What history and models can (and can’t) tell us about AI

Perspective.

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/iran/trump-iran-gamble-vaez

Trump’s Iran Gamble

How the Latest Strikes Risk Opening a Pandora’s Box in the Gulf

All wars will start like this.

https://databreaches.net/2026/02/28/israel-plunges-iran-into-darkness-with-largest-cyberattack-in-history-during-attack-against-iran/?pk_campaign=feed&pk_kwd=israel-plunges-iran-into-darkness-with-largest-cyberattack-in-history-during-attack-against-iran

Israel plunges Iran into darkness with largest cyberattack in history during attack against Iran

The Jerusalem Post reports:

As fighter jets and cruise missiles struck IRGC command centers, a parallel front reportedly paralyzed the Islamic Republic from within. Reports on Saturday, February 28, 2026, indicated that Iran entered an almost complete digital fog, in what appeared to be a large-scale cyberattack accompanying Operation “Roar of the Lion.”

Critical infrastructure, official news sites, and security communications systems reportedly stopped functioning, leaving the leadership in a communications blackout at home and abroad.

NetBlocks confirmed on Saturday that internet connectivity in Iran plunged to an extremely low level, reaching 4% of normal traffic, signaling an almost total shutdown of nationwide access.

Read more at The Jersusalem Post.

Because we want to use the nasty stuff…

https://www.makeuseof.com/trump-bans-anthropic-from-government-use/

Trump bans Anthropic from government use after company refuses to lift AI safeguards

(Related)

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/pentagon-anthropic-dario-amodei-cbs-news-interview-exclusive/

Anthropic CEO says he's sticking to AI "red lines" despite clash with Pentagon

(Related)

https://fortune.com/2026/02/27/openai-in-talks-with-pentagon-after-anthropic-blowup/

OpenAI strikes a deal with the Pentagon just hours after Trump orders the end of Anthropic contracts, and hours after a staff all-hands

Clean out all those anti-Trump voters?

https://pogowasright.org/trumps-doj-sues-kentucky-four-other-states-for-voter-data/

Trump’s DOJ sues Kentucky, four other states for voter data

McKenna Horsley reports:

The U.S. Department of Justice is suing five additional states, including Kentucky, for not providing voter registration data, including sensitive information such as driver’s license and Social Security numbers.

Kentucky Secretary of State Michael Adams, a Republican, said in a Thursday statement that he would “not voluntarily commit a data breach” of Kentuckians’ private information without a court order.

The DOJ is now suing 29 states and the District of Columbia for the information, which it has said it would use to ensure clean voting rolls in the states.

Read more at Hoptown Chronicle.

Will this impact customs ‘inspections?’

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/02/victory-tenth-circuit-finds-fourth-amendment-doesnt-support-broad-search-0

Victory! Tenth Circuit Finds Fourth Amendment Doesn’t Support Broad Search of Protesters’ Devices and Digital Data

In a big win for protesters’ rights, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit overturned a lower court’s dismissal of a challenge to sweeping warrants to search a protester’s devices and digital data and a nonprofit’s social media data.

The case, Armendariz v. City of Colorado Springs, arose after a housing protest in 2021, during which Colorado Springs police arrested protesters for obstructing a roadway. After the demonstration, police also obtained warrants to seize and search through the devices and data of Jacqueline Armendariz Unzueta, who they claimed threw a bike at them during the protest. The warrants included a search through all of her photos, videos, emails, text messages, and location data over a two-month period, as well as a time-unlimited search for 26 keywords, including words as broad as “bike,” “assault,” “celebration,” and “right,” that allowed police to comb through years of Armendariz’s private and sensitive data—all supposedly to look for evidence related to the alleged simple assault. Police further obtained a warrant to search the Facebook page of the Chinook Center, the organization that spearheaded the protest, despite the Chinook Center never having been accused of a crime.

The district court dismissed the civil rights lawsuit brought by Armendariz and the Chinook Center, holding that the searches were justified and that, in any case, the officers were entitled to qualified immunity. The plaintiffs, represented by the ACLU of Colorado, appealed. EFF—joined by the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, and the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University—wrote an amicus brief in support of that appeal.

In a 2-1 opinion, the Tenth Circuit reversed the district court’s dismissal of the lawsuit’s Fourth Amendment search and seizure claims. The court painstakingly picked apart each of the three warrants and found them to be overbroad and lacking in particularity as to the scope and duration of the searches. The court further held that in furnishing such facially deficient warrants, the officers violated “clearly established” law and thus were not entitled to qualified immunity. Although the court did not explicitly address the First Amendment concerns raised by the lawsuit, it did note the backdrop against how these searches were carried out, including animus by Colorado Springs police leading up to the housing protest.

Like randomly changing employees, except you don’t see the change.

https://www.bespacific.com/shifting-sands-a-cautionary-tale-ai-in-courts/

Shifting Sands, A Cautionary Tale – AI in Courts

Shifting Sands, A Cautionary Tale  Feb 23, 2026. Judge Scott Schlegel, Fifth Circuit Court of Appeal.  On February 13, 2026 – OpenAI retired GPT 4o from ChatGPT. That is a normal product change for a consumer platform. For courts, it is a useful reminder about what we are really doing when we build tools on top of foundation models. Even when you design responsibly, narrow the scope, use approved sources, and test carefully before deployment, the system is still sitting on a layer you do not control. Whether it is a self help kiosk walking an unrepresented litigant through filing steps, a chambers assistant summarizing briefs and helping draft a bench memo, or a staff tool answering procedural questions for clerks, they all share the same dependency. They sit on top of a model layer the court does not control. That layer can change, and the surrounding behavior can change with it. The same input that produced a cautious answer last month can produce a materially different answer next month, even though you did not touch a line of code. That is not a reason to avoid AI in courts. It is a reason to treat court AI as an operational program, not a one time build. Courts live on stability, predictability, and accountability. Those values do not disappear because a vendor shipped an update. If an assistant gives bad guidance, the public is not going to parse whether the cause was upstream or local. The responsibility will attach to the institution that deployed it. So if a court is going to rely on an AI assistant for public facing information, internal staff work, or chambers support, the court needs ongoing control. It needs to know what model is in use and when it changes. It needs scheduled testing against real court questions, not just a launch day review. Model changes need to be treated as meaningful changes, not routine maintenance. The court needs the ability to narrow features, pause the tool, or turn it off quickly when behavior shifts. And it needs a human owner for outputs whenever the stakes are real. GPT 4o’s retirement from the spotlight is the cleanest proof of the point. You can spend months, or even years, building something correctly and still watch the foundation move without notice. Because that foundation will inevitably shift, the oversight mechanisms must match the stakes.

See also via Judge Schlegel – AI IN CHAMBERS.  AI can help chambers, but only if it stays in a defined support lane and every output is treated as untrusted until verified. These guides set practical boundaries for using AI in chambers, with workflows that preserve accountability and keep judgment where it belongs.

• AI in Chambers: A Framework for Judicial AI Use

• Navigating AI in the Judiciary: New Guidelines for Judges and Their Chambers

Be careful what you wish for? Can you set the threshold too low? Should Meta wait until it has iron clad proof?

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/feb/25/meta-ai-junk-child-abuse-tips-doj

Meta’s AI sending ‘junk’ tips to DoJ, US child abuse investigators say

Meta’s use of artificial intelligence software to moderate its social media platforms is generating large volumes of useless reports about cases of child sexual abuse, which are draining resources and hindering investigations, said officers from the US Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) taskforce.

“We get a lot of tips from Meta that are just kind of junk,” Benjamin Zwiebel, a special agent with the ICAC taskforce in New Mexico, said last week during his testimony in the state’s trial against Meta. The state’s attorney general alleges the company’s platforms are putting profits over child safety. Meta disputes these allegations, citing changes it has introduced on its platforms, such as teen accounts with default protections. The ICAC taskforce is a nationwide network of law enforcement agencies coordinated with the US Department of Justice to investigate and prosecute online child exploitation and abuse cases.

Call it a memory refresh…

https://www.bespacific.com/google-has-a-secret-reference-desk-heres-how-to-use-it/

Google Has a Secret Reference Desk. Here’s How to Use It.

Google Has a Secret Reference Desk. Here’s How to Use It.  – 40 Google features to find exactly what you need, the alternative search engines that do things Google won’t, and the reference desk framework underneath all of it.  Hana Lee Goldin, MLIS  – “Most of us search Google the same way we always have: type a few words, scroll, click something that looks close enough, and hope. For a while, that worked. Google handed us a list of links and let us take it from there. What’s happening now is something different. A 2024 study by SparkToro  found that nearly 60% of Google searches end without anyone clicking through to a website, and the trend has accelerated since. By February 2026, Ahrefs found that queries triggering AI Overviews now see a 58% reduction  in clicks. Google has been systematically inserting itself between you and the original source, answering questions with AI-generated summaries before you ever reach the page those answers came from. The results you do see are filtered through an algorithm that weighs your search history, your location, and the billions of dollars advertisers have spent to appear for particular queries. Two people searching identical phrases on the same day can get meaningfully different results without either of them knowing it. And because Google controls roughly 90% of the world’s search traffic, most people have no frame of reference for what a less mediated search experience would even look like…”

Tools for the paranoid.

https://www.bespacific.com/this-app-warns-you-if-someone-is-wearing-smart-glasses-nearby/

This App Warns You if Someone Is Wearing Smart Glasses Nearby

404 Media [no paywall] – The creator of Nearby Glasses made the app after reading 404 Media’s coverage of how people are using Meta’s Ray-Bans smartglasses to film people without their knowledge or consent: “A new hobbyist developed app warns if people nearby may be wearing smart glasses, such as Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses, which stalkers and harassers have repeatedly used to film people without their knowledge or consent. The app scans for smart glasses’ distinctive Bluetooth signatures and sends a push alert if it detects a potential pair of glasses in the local area. The app comes as companies such as Meta continue to add AI-powered features to their glasses. Earlier this month The New York Times reported Meta was working on adding facial recognition to its smart glasses. “Name Tag,” as the feature is called, would let smart glasses wearers identify people and get information about them from Meta’s AI assistant, the report said. “I consider it to be a tiny part of resistance against surveillance tech,” Yves Jeanrenaud, the hobbyist developer and sociologist who made the app, told 404 Media. To use the app, called Nearby Glasses, users download it from the Google Play Store or GitHub. They may need to tweak some settings such as “enable foreground service” to keep the app scanning. Then they press “Start Scanning” and a debug log will show the app’s activity. If it detects what it believes to be a pair of smart glasses, the app will send a notification: “Smart Glasses are probably nearby,” it reads, according to a screenshot…”

Beyond the tipping point? Are humans now obsolete?

https://thehackernews.com/2026/02/manual-processes-are-putting-national.html

Manual Processes Are Putting National Security at Risk

More than half of national security organizations still rely on manual processes to transfer sensitive data, according to The CYBER360: Defending the Digital Battlespace report. This should alarm every defense and government leader because manual handling of sensitive data is not just inefficient, it is a systemic vulnerability. 

(Related) Perhaps AI isn’t the answer either…

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2516885-ais-cant-stop-recommending-nuclear-strikes-in-war-game-simulations/

AIs can’t stop recommending nuclear strikes in war game simulations

(Related) Imagine the fun we could have…

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/02/poisoning-ai-training-data.html

Poisoning AI Training Data

All it takes to poison AI training data is to create a website:

I spent 20 minutes writing an article on my personal website titled “The best tech journalists at eating hot dogs.” Every word is a lie. I claimed (without evidence) that competitive hot-dog-eating is a popular hobby among tech reporters and based my ranking on the 2026 South Dakota International Hot Dog Championship (which doesn’t exist). I ranked myself number one, obviously. Then I listed a few fake reporters and real journalists who gave me permission….

Less than 24 hours later, the world’s leading chatbots were blabbering about my world-class hot dog skills. When I asked about the best hot-dog-eating tech journalists, Google parroted the gibberish from my website, both in the Gemini app and AI Overviews, the AI responses at the top of Google Search. ChatGPT did the same thing, though Claude, a chatbot made by the company Anthropic, wasn’t fooled.

Sometimes, the chatbots noted this might be a joke. I updated my article to say “this is not satire.” For a while after, the AIs seemed to take it more seriously.

These things are not trustworthy, and yet they are going to be widely trusted.

Perspective.

https://gizmodo.com/ai-added-basically-zero-to-us-economic-growth-last-year-goldman-sachs-says-2000725380

AI Added ‘Basically Zero’ to US Economic Growth Last Year, Goldman Sachs Says

Meta, Amazon, Google, OpenAI, and other tech companies spent billions last year investing in AI. They’re expected to spend even more, roughly $700 billion, this year on dozens of new data centers to train and run their advanced models.

This spending frenzy has kept Wall Street buzzing and fueled a narrative that all this investment is helping prop up and even grow the U.S. economy.

President Donald Trump has cited that argument as a reason the industry should not face state-level regulations.

“Investment in AI is helping to make the U.S. Economy the ‘HOTTEST’ in the World — But overregulation by the States is threatening to undermine this Growth Engine,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social in November. “We MUST have one Federal Standard instead of a patchwork of 50 State Regulatory Regimes.”

… “It was a very intuitive story,” Joseph Briggs, a Goldman Sachs analyst, told The Washington Post on Monday. “That maybe prevented or limited the need to actually dig deeper into what was happening.”

Briggs’ colleague, Goldman Sachs Chief Economist Jan Hatzius, said in an interview with the Atlantic Council that AI investment spending has had “basically zero” contribution to the U.S. GDP growth in 2025.