Aegis Paper Series

The “techlash” of the past few years represents a moment of quasi-constitutional upheaval for the internet. The way a few private companies have been “governing” large parts of the digital world has suffered a crisis of legitimacy. Calls to find mechanisms to limit the arbitrary exercise of power online have gained new urgency. This task of “digital constitutionalism” is one of the great projects of the coming decades. It is especially pressing in the context of content moderation – platforms’ practice of designing and enforcing rules for what they allow to be posted on their services.

This Lawfare post summarizes a longer essay we are publishing today with the Hoover Working Group on National Security, Technology and Law. Our essay addresses whether governments ever have a justified basis for treating targets of surveillance differently, in any way, based on nationality. This issue is of general importance and has become particularly important in the current legal debates about whether the U.S.

After brazenly interfering in the 2016 US election, Russia now “perceive[s] . . . its past efforts as successful and views the 2018 U.S. midterm elections as a potential target for Russian midterm operations.” That was the warning delivered by Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats on behalf of the US Intelligence Community to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) as part of the worldwide threat briefing that took place February 13, 2018.

Technology firms are extraordinarily powerful. They control vast sums of money. They serve unprecedentedly large customer bases—in some instances, larger customer bases than any nation on earth (Facebook now has over 2 billion users).