The SSRN abstract for Noah Chauvin's article "The Capture of the Congressional Intelligence Committees."
"The Capture of the Congressional Intelligence Committees" is forthcoming from the UC Irvine Law Review! It argues that Congress's intelligence oversight committees have become the intelligence community's biggest boosters on Capitol Hill.
papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
Book cover with b&w photo of a man whispering in LBJ’s ear backstage under lights
Very excited to share the cover of my forthcoming book, OUTED: LBJ’S CONFIDANT AND THE ARREST THAT TRANSFORMED A PRESIDENCY.
Coming October 13 from University of Chicago Press!
press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...
SCOTUS may well affirm the constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship.
But how we got to the point where this is even up for debate speaks volumes about the Supreme Court’s failures.
Must-read 🧵 from @tomtmwolf.bsky.social 👇
Glad to see you quoted @amostoh.bsky.social, but there shd be more emphasis on the fact that the tech elites placing the bets worked hard to make them pay off. It's not just a bet, it was an aim, enaced with millions of $s in lobbying & shaping policy over a decade. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
A clear-eyed rebuke of executive overreach and a decisive victory for the First Amendment.
But the administration shows no signs of stopping its crusade against "woke AI," the data brokers' loophole is still wide open, and thousands are dying or displaced in an AI-fueled war.
Where is Congress?
Our analysis of procurement records shows Palantir’s defense revenue accelerated under the first Trump and Biden administrations. Anecdotally, there has been a clear ramp up in AI under the second Trump admin. But still too early to say how much of this is going to Palantir (or any other company).
We at @brennancenter.org found that Palantir’s defense revenue surged over the last decade. 2025 was their most profitable year ever.
Numbers can mislead. But sometimes they just don’t lie.
www.brennancenter.org/our-work/res...
Great post, particularly around the concept of “decision.” Decision has been used to describe what computers do going back at least to Shannon? And now it’s slipping to suggest that if an LLM makes a “decision” then a human has not. But a human is still making a decision about how to decide.
”debased” (adj.): 👇
Illuminating story from @sheeraf.bsky.social @nytimes.com, situating the Iran war in Silicon Valley’s decade-long push to transform warfare.
Who stands to lose the most when industry bets big on war? Civilians and taxpayers.
@brennancenter.org explains why: www.brennancenter.org/our-work/res...
The Dept. of Defense's headlong rush to adopt AI means overreliance on just a handful of tech companies and weak oversight, says the Brennan Center's @amostoh.bsky.social.
This is an incredibly valuable report and I recommend everyone read it and get a primer on how far down the rabbit hole of AI warfare we've traveled so far.
Note how the AI "recommendations" are completely obscured with little to no ability to actually verify or trace their outputs. This is what we mean when we say the distinctions between DSS and AWS are superficial in practice, especially when operators are given seconds to approve.
As @amostoh.bsky.social and I explain in our new report, the military has been ramping up its adoption of AI, while oversight and safeguards have failed to keep up.
But the Pentagon’s dispute with Anthropic has brought a grave threat into focus: using AI to pry into Americans’ private lives 🧵 1/
Both things can be true:
The Pentagon’s blacklisting of Anthropic is an abuse of executive power.
The daylight between the Pentagon and Anthropic is less than you think.
www.nytimes.com/2026/03/01/t...
All this talk of advanced AI targeting and the U.S. still fired a Tomahawk at an elementary school where an outdoor playground has been visible on Google Maps since 2017 www.washingtonpost.com/national-sec...
20/ This begins with restrictions on autonomous weapons, privacy protections, re-investment in the Pentagon’s testing and oversight capacities, and checks on industry’s influence.
None of this will be easy, but our report suggests concrete steps lawmakers should take towards meaningful regulation.
19/ We can’t just trust that the military will eventually course correct or the next administration will do the right thing.
Congress has a constitutional duty to regulate the military and establish durable rules and oversight.
18/ The military is also buying up data containing detailed location, financial and web browsing records of Americans, undermining their Fourth Amendment rights. Congress has not meaningfully restricted these purchases, let alone the use of AI to extract even more sensitive insights from this data.
17/ Congress is also absent.
It has funded the military’s AI boom, yet seems barely alert to its harms.
Deploying AI weapons has life-and-death consequences and should be subject to democratic control.
But aside from requiring some transparency, lawmakers have not enacted meaningful red lines.
16/ This rollback of internal safeguards saps the military of the capacity and know-how to push back against flawed design choices by tech firms.
The army, for example, has struggled with “black box” systems that introduce security vulnerabilities it cannot fully assess or control.
15/ As the military races to adopt AI, it has not meaningfully grappled with these risks.
Instead, it is slashing regulatory capacity and expertise - gutting its main office overseeing weapons testing, for example, and shuttering civilian protection efforts.
14/ @ainowinstitute.bsky.social has found that a handful of tech firms control access to the building blocks of AI.
That gives them enormous leverage to shape the military’s reliance on the technology and charge higher prices. It also creates single points of failure.
13/ While a lot of focus has been on how the military *uses* AI, it’s equally important to scrutinize the infrastructure that keeps it going.
One of the Pentagon’s biggest tech expenses is its $9B contract with Google, Oracle, AWS and MSFT for cloud computing, which keeps the military’s AI online.
12/ Barely a year later, Claude is playing a central role in the Iran strikes.
The model is so deeply embedded in the military’s systems that DOD sources say it will be very difficult to unwind.
11/ Frontier AI companies are just beginning to compete for defense contracts, but they are already having enormous impact.
In July 2025, DOD signed agreements with Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and xAI to develop military applications of their models.
10/ But the Pentagon has been facing pressure to keep up with rapid advances in small drone warfare, which have altered the course of the Ukraine war.
Anduril has become a leading supplier of AI-powered drones and counter-drone technology.
www.wsj.com/politics/nat...
9/ The reality is that even semi-autonomous weapons are fraught with risk.
Even with human input, they can still mistake civilians for targets, fire on friendly forces, and desensitize operators to the human costs of strikes.
8/ AI is also accelerating the development of autonomous weapons. Anthropic's dispute with DOD has focused on weapons that ID and fire on targets without human input.
These weapons can be so unpredictable and indiscriminate that @icrc.org has urged states against using them to target human beings.
7/ In military situations, these mistakes can be deadly. Human oversight breaks down more frequently in the heat of war.
The clearest example of this is Gaza: IDF analysts, under immense pressure to approve AI-recommended targets for strikes, failed to sufficiently corroborate them.