Rebecca Crootof

Took a short break from #TechLaw to return to #AWS (and #WarTorts!) in "Of Kill Bots and Kill Boxes."

Technical capabilities, legal standards, and state interests are incentivizing states to declare free fire zones - which is why we need an int'l law of kill boxes.

papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

"Ironies of Automation"

If you're looking to build out your bibliography, my chapter w/ @bjard.bsky.social on different types of legal uncertainties addresses similar divides: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

The questions were terrible. Should've sent an email . . .

This is going to be the quintessential legal struggle of the so called “agentic” ai wave I think.

How TECH TOOK OVER Hannah Bloch-Wehba Technology firms play key roles in public governance. Their products enable forms of reasoning and data processing that modern agencies must use. Their data permits modes of analysis and surveillance that are crucial to governing populations yet, without private cooperation, would be out of reach. By now, critiques of the power of Silicon Valley could fill Alexandria: opaque, unaccountable, biased, ineffective, corrupt, self-serving, monopolistic, manipulative, anti-democratic. And yet, much like the telegraph, the railroad, and the automobile, cloud computing and artificial intelligence are rapidly remaking markets, social relations, and the state itself.

Tech's entrenchment in public governance requires both a new understanding of how tech companies became so powerful and a new account of the constitutional implications of this transformation. Tech companies did not become integral to public governance by accident, nor did they ascend simply because—as many critics have pointed out—the federal government failed to regulate Silicon Valley during and after the 1990s. Instead, decades of legal and policy interventions forged an enduring, expanding role for technology companies in statecraft. Today, the tech industry plays a central role in securing American geopolitical dominance, supporting government infrastructure, and facilitating flows of data. Understanding both what technology companies do to govern and how they came to occupy such an important role in the state permits a new perspective on the constitutional costs of this arrangement. In their current role, tech companies are integral to public governance, but they neither represent nor are accountable to the public. At stake is not merely whether the existing distribution of power is consistent with constitutional doctrine or the text. Instead, recognizing tech companies' exercise of public power also means reckoning with the permanent transformations to governance that they have wrought.

coming 🔜: How Tech Took Over, an article about how the tech industry became central to our legal and political order

Footnote reads: "No, I'm not citing who said this. Feel free to believe that this is not a real quotation."

Shoutout to @nicholson.bsky.social for freeing me from the tyranny of self-imposed standards for what constitutes being "professional" in my writing.

True. I don't use it for research, but I could imagine doing so.

Hmmm. Ultimately, I care less about whether some part of the process was touched by genAI, and more about clarifying when I did or didn't produce the resulting content.

Taking suggestions for improving the wording of the text I'm considering including in future star footnotes (my own little adoption/reliance canary):

"I never used generative AI in drafting or editing this piece."

wikipedia turns 25 today! the last unenshittified major website! backbone of online info! triumph of humanity! powered by urge of unpaid randos to correct each other! somehow mostly reliable! "good thing wikipedia works in practice, because it sure doesn't work in theory" - old wiki adage

If you can substitute "hungry ghost trapped in a jar" for "AI" in a sentence it's probably a valid use case for LLMs. Take "I have a bunch of hungry ghosts in jars, they mainly write SQL queries for me". Sure. Reasonable use case.

"My girlfriend is a hungry ghost I trapped in a jar"? No. Deranged.

A World Without Rules The consequences of Trump’s assault on international law.

Gift link to my piece with @oonahathaway.bsky.social on our slide to a nihilistic future. www.foreignaffairs.com/guest-pass/r...

Literally a publication for eight-year olds 40 years ago

Includes fascinating implications that I've not seen discussed elsewhere.

The Brazen Illegality of Trump’s Venezuela Operation A scholar of international law on the implications of the U.S. arrest of President Nicolás Maduro.

You can read my take on Trump's illegal invasion of Venezuela here: www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a...

Twitter thread in Spanish by José Mario de la Garza, a human rights lawyer in Mexico, translated using Google Translate: 1. Overthrowing a dictator sounds morally right. No one mourns a tyrant. But international law wasn't built to protect the good, but to restrain the powerful. That's why it prohibits force almost without exception: not because it ignores injustice, but because it knows that if each country decides whom to "liberate" by force, the world reverts to the law of the strongest. 2. The problem is not Maduro. The problem is the precedent. When military force is used to change governments without clear rules, sovereignty ceases to be a limit and becomes an obstacle. Today it is “overthrowing a dictator”; tomorrow it will be “correcting an election,” “protecting interests,” “restoring order.” The law does not absolve dictatorships, but neither does it legitimize unilateral crusades.

Cont’d: 3. The uncomfortable question is not whether a tyrant deserves to fall, but who decides when and how. Because history teaches something brutal: removing a dictator is easy; building justice afterward is not. And when legality is broken in the name of good, what almost always follows is not freedom, but chaos, violence, and new victims. The law exists to remind us of this, even when it makes us uncomfortable.

Maduro isn't the problem: he's the face of the problem. Removing him from power would be merely opening the door. Behind him is the machine: Rodríguez, Cabello, the military command, the operators of repression and plunder. If you only change the person at the top and leave the system intact, what follows isn't democracy: it's a reshuffling. And there's something even more difficult: Chavismo didn't just capture institutions, it captured daily life. Economy, media, bureaucracy, employment, fear, favors, blackmail. A country can't be "de-Chavistaized" by decree or by an electoral miracle. The real transition begins when that network is broken without setting the country ablaze. The challenge is enormous, and it's also a moral one: to unite without vengeance, but without impunity. Targeted justice for those most responsible, truth for the victims, guarantees that the rest will dismantle the system, and a plan for people to live again—not just survive. Because freedom doesn't come with a new president: it comes when the state ceases to be a threat.

Best thing I’ve read this morning, from a human rights lawyer in Mexico. Translation is in the ALT-text.

I feel like I haven’t even been properly lied to about the purposes of this war

The closest comparison for the Grok thing we can imagine right now is if cereal made a bunch of people ill and the news put a microphone in front of some cereal boxes at the grocery store and was like “well they didn’t admit guilt, not sure who else we can ask”

Betcha a shiny nickel this is because they told their LLM to redact all the initials used to identify minor victims and so it also redacted S.D.N.Y.

(And yes, I'm only 2 exams in, and already finding reasons to justify a BS break.)

AI Is Inventing Academic Papers That Don't Exist -- And They're Being Cited in Real Journals Academic articles from authors using large language model are creating an ecosystem of fake research that threatens human knowledge itself.

Say what you want about law reviews and all their flaws, but law review editors won't let this slip for one second.

An interesting read featuring GSU's own @andrew.heiss.phd.

www.rollingstone.com/culture/cult...

Is this post enough to get me on an FBI surveillance list? TBD!

Wrote an issue spotter with "Dan" and "his longtime boyfriend, Evan" to draw out arguments about a standard that creates different rules for "family members."

I'm only two exams in, but thus far, both students have assumed "Evan" is a woman.

The power of heteronormativity!

Chapter 8 is up!

We'll be taking a break for the holidays - expect Chapter 9 circa January 15!

Chapter 8 shifts from basic concepts to our methodology's second step: assess the regulatory regime. We introduce the permissive approach (the presumption against new regulation), its LPE implications, and the Industry Three-Step (a dance of permissive preservation).

papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Time person of the year cover for 2025

I guess it's fitting that it's a reimagined, worse version of someone else's artwork

I'm super-excited about this free Tech Law coursebook from @crootof.bsky.social and @bjard.bsky.social being freely published, and not just because Ashkan Soltani and I have a journal article of ours reprinted in it! (See Chapter 7)

Update:

Informed the school and asked for a follow-up.

Just learned it was deemed an "extremely serious breach."

Consequences TBD.

Chapter 7 is up!

Chapter 7 introduces @harrysurden.bsky.social's concept of structural rights - non-legal rights at risk of being undermined by new tech - and leans on work by W&B, Meg Leta Jones, and @bankston.bsky.social & Ashkan Soltani to think about them in the privacy context.

papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....