The regulation of emerging technologies often involves prolonged legislative processes that demand significant attention and resources. Setting a future-proof framework is therefore imperative: not only to accommodate innovation, but to hedge against the uncertainties that render detailed legislation obsolete. The drafting of legal frameworks to regulate emerging technologies increasingly engages a variety of future-proofing techniques. Surveillance laws are more susceptible to the need for future-proofing. The nature of intelligence agencies and their operational need to remain secretive provide powerful incentives to prevent their governing legal framework from undergoing frequent legislative revision. Accordingly, surveillance laws are often drafted in a manner catering to these constraints. This article maps and assesses the principal future-proofing strategies available to legislators. It then examines Israeli surveillance law as a test case. The article analyses the Israel Security Agency (ISA) Law, which, inter alia, governs the online surveillance activities of Israel's domestic security agency, the ISA. The article examines the language of the ISA Law currently in force. It explores a past expansion of its purposive domain through the deployment of ISA surveillance for COVID-19 contact-tracing, and the subsequent judicial narrowing of the statutory provision enabling this deployment. The article then discusses in detail the future of ISA surveillance powers and their future-proofing mechanisms pursuant to the recently published ISA Amendment Memorandum.
Since the 1970s the EU has expressed its continuous commitment to contributing to the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. This commitment, which is increasingly linked to its obligation to advance the rule of international law, is manifested in its support for the creation of an independent Palestinian state alongside the State of Israel (the two-state solution). The article contributes to the literature on the EU's efforts in conflict resolution in the context of the Conflict, and it does so in the scholarly contexts of international law, EU law, international relations, and European integration. Firstly, it identifies a dissonance between, on the one hand, the EU's strong interest in the resolution of the Conflict and its firm commitment to such resolution and its long-standing engagement in promoting such resolution; and, on the other hand, its actual, ineffective contribution to achieving that goal. Secondly, it analyses the two principal instruments adopted by the EU towards Israel: (i) the linkage between the upgrading of EU-Israel relations and advancement towards the resolution of the Conflict (the linkage instrument), and (ii) the policy of granting trade and trade-related benefits to entities and products situated within the recognised borders of the State of Israel, while withholding the benefits of EU-Israeli cooperation from entities and products in the Occupied Territories (the differentiation instrument). The article represents the first attempt to analyse these instruments together, and to do so within the overarching theoretical framework of the EU's actorness and effectiveness in its external relations. It concludes that the ineffectiveness of these instruments renders the EU's involvement itself ineffective, thereby preventing the EU from contributing meaningfully to the resolution of the Conflict. The analysis of the article focuses on EU efforts over the last 30 years, and its conclusions are examined against the developments in the Middle East since the Hamas attack on Israel in October 2023.
This article explores the potential effect of converting a constitutional narrative into a tax narrative that might help to address a constitutional controversy. The article examines, as a case study, the deep and long-standing issue of inequality in mandatory conscription. All efforts made over the decades to resolve the conflict or reduce its scope have failed. The article sets up a novel framework by conceptualising mandatory service as a 'tax in-kind', proposing a mandatory army tax credit (MATC) as a significant tool to alleviate the inequality. The proposed regime bridges the tension between Israel's 'people's army' ethos and the growing inequality. The proposed tax regime leverages the framing effect to preserve the 'people's army' ethos while addressing inequities. Our insights apply to any country with mandatory military service facing issues of inequality: should conscription controversies be addressed solely through constitutional narrative, or through tax narrative as well? In addition, the approach of the article challenges traditional tax perspectives and public policy by incorporating non-monetary obligations into the tax discourse.
This article examines the transformative impact of large language models (LLMs) on online content moderation, revealing a critical gap between platforms' rule-based policies and their AI-driven enforcement mechanisms. Using Facebook's hate speech moderation policies and practices as a case study, we identify a paradox: while content policies are increasingly rule-oriented, AI-driven enforcement seems to operate in a standard-like manner. This disconnect creates transparency, consistency and accountability challenges relating to the delineation of online freedom of expression that are not addressed in the literature, and require attention and mitigation. In this specific context, we introduce the concept of 'rules by the millions' to describe how AI systems actually operate through generating vast networks of micro-rules that evade traditional regulatory oversight. This phenomenon disrupts the conventional rules-versus-standards framework used in legal theory, raising urgent questions about the adequacy of current AI governance mechanisms. Indeed, the rapid adoption of LLMs in content moderation has outpaced the human capacity to monitor them, creating a pressing need for adaptive frameworks capable of managing the evolving capacities of AI.
