American citizens have been brutalized, pepper-sprayed, and killed on the streets of Minneapolis. For many, one particular breakdown is a final, damning cause for despair: Minnesota's apparent inability to investigate and potentially prosecute the federal agents responsible. The Department of Homeland Security on Saturday reportedly blocked Minnesota officials from examining the scene of Alex Pretti's shooting. Access was refused even after state officials got a judicial search warrant. As a result, key forensic evidence was almost certainly lost. This comes after state officials were excluded from the investigation into Renee Good's death. Federal obstruction of Minnesota's criminal investigation merits more creative pushback from the state: Leaving investigations in the hands of DHS alone sends a powerful message to ICE officers. It tells them that even if they effectively execute a U.S. citizen who presents no threat on camera on a public street, they will face no consequences'a recipe for future tragedies. The state's interest in finding a way to at least create some deterrence to deadly federal lawlessness is not just a matter of justice: It is also a way of keeping its people safe moving forward....

In the early hours of January 3, the United States armed forces executed an astounding operation. American air, land, and sea units destroyed Venezuela's air defenses, sent in Special Forces that took out President Nicolas Maduro's security team, and brought the dictator and his wife back to the U.S. for trial. But rather than applaud the removal of an illegitimate dictator and his wife, many foreign leaders quickly condemned the snatch-and-grab. If critics correctly argue that the attack on Venezuela violates international law, they have unintentionally revealed that international law'not the United States'must change. Removing Maduro was just: The dictatorship has killed tens, if not hundreds of thousands, of Venezuelans, destroyed the country's economy, and denied the electoral wishes of the Venezuelan people for new leadership. But international law did nothing about this crisis, and countenanced no solution. Because it prevents Western democracies from using force to preempt grave threats from disruptive nations, such as Venezuela or Iran, while posing little obstacle to the designs of our rivals in Beijing or Moscow, international law no longer serves as an instrument of global stability. The United States must lead an effort to reform it to allow more stability-enhancing interventions in the new era of great-power competition that we are entering....

The Irish government announced this week the introduction of the Communications (Interception and Lawful Access) Bill, which would regulate the use of 'lawful interception,' the industry term for surveillance technology, including spyware made by companies such as Intellexa, NSO Group, and Paragon Solutions. 'There is an urgent need for a new legal framework for lawful interception which can be used to confront serious crime and security threats,' said Jim O'Callaghan, Ireland's minister for justice, home affairs, and migration. The main driver for this new law is that Ireland's existing 1993 law governing the use of lawful interception tools predates most modern means of communications, such as messages and calls made with end-to-end encrypted apps. Communications encrypted in this way are generally speaking only accessible if authorities hack into a target's devices, both remotely using government-grade spyware, or locally using forensic technology like Cellebrite devices. The announcement specifically mentions that the new law will cover 'all forms of communications, whether encrypted or not,' and can be used to obtain both content of communications and related metadata....

Elon Musk wants a jaw-dropping $79 billion to $134 billion in damages from OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming the AI company defrauded him by jettisoning its nonprofit mission, Bloomberg first reported. The figure comes from expert witness C. Paul Wazzan, a financial economist whose bio says he has been deposed nearly 100 times and testified at trial more than a dozen times in complex commercial litigation cases. Wazzan, who specializes in valuation and damages calculations in high-stakes disputes, determined that Musk is entitled to a hefty portion of OpenAI's current $500 billion valuation based on his $38 million seed donation when he co-founded the startup in 2015. (If you're wondering, that would mean a 3,500-fold return on Musk's investment.) Wazzan's analysis combines Musk's initial financial contributions with the technical know-how and business contributions he offered to OpenAI's early team, calculating wrongful gains of $65.5 billion to $109.4 billion for OpenAI and $13.3 billion to $25.1 billion for Microsoft, which today owns a 27% chunk of the company....