The Majority Report with Sam Seder - 2731 - Houthis Gain In Yemen; Anthropic Spying On Activists w/ Shireen Al-Adeimi, Daniel Boguslaw

Episode Date: September 15, 2026

Welcome back to The Majority Report On today's program: The Trump administration is claiming that it is a matter of national security to not apply any "guardrails" to American artificial intelligence companies. Shireen Al-Adeimi, associate professor at Michigan State University, joins to discuss the escalating tensions between the Houthis and Saudi Arabia. Daniel Boguslaw, investigative reporter and publisher of the Deeper States newsletter, joins to discuss his piece in The American Prospect, "Anthropic Is Building a Predictive Surveillance System to Monitor Activists". In the Fun Half: The Florida Surgeon General has a shocking admission about the research process that informed their decision to kill statewide vaccine mandates. Senator John Kennedy question Kash Patel over the FBI no longer ruling out individuals who have committed bestiality from becoming federal agents. Dave Rubin tries to defend Mike Rogers, GOP candidate for Senate in Michigan, over his record of voting against funding aid for 9/11 first responders. Rep. Ana Paulina Luna (R-FL) makes outrageous accusation about Hasan Piker All that and more. On Sunday, October 4, Emma will be in Los Angeles doing a Bitchuation Room Live with Francesca Fiorentini at the Lodge Room. Get tickets here. To connect and organize with your local ICE rapid response team visit ICERRT.com The Congress switchboard number is [phone]. You can use this number to connect with either the U.S. Senate or the House of Representatives. Follow us on TikTok here: https://www.tiktok.com/@majorityreportfm Check us out on Twitch here: https://www.twitch.tv/themajorityreport Find our Rumble stream here: https://rumble.com/user/majorityreport Check out our alt YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/majorityreportlive Gift a Majority Report subscription here: https://fans.fm/majority/gift Subscribe to the AM Quickie newsletter here: https://am-quickie.ghost.io/ Join the Majority Report Discord! https://majoritydiscord.com/ Get all your MR merch at our store: https://shop.majorityreportradio.com/ Get the free Majority Report App!: https://majority.fm/app Go to https://JustCoffee.coop and use coupon code majority to get 10% off your purchase Check out today's sponsors: ONESKIN: Get 15% off OneSkin with the code MAJORITY at https://www.oneskin.co/majority ZBIOTICS: Head to zbiotics.com/majority, code MAJORITY for 15% off your first order SUNSET LAKE CBD: Head to SunsetLakeCBD.com and use coupon code 'Left Is Best' to save 20% your entire order.  Follow the crew on X @SamSeder @EmmaVigeland @MattLech On Instagram: @MrBryanVokey Check out Matt's show, Left Reckoning, on YouTube, and subscribe on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/leftreckoning Check out Matt Binder's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/mattbinder Subscribe to Brandon's YouTube channel: https://ww.youtube.com/Th3Discourse Check out Ava Raiza's music here: https:/www.youtube.com/@avaraiza  

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Code majority for 15% off your first order. Zbiotics is a partner of this show. And we appreciate it. They help us actually. That's how we do the show when we do the show at night, if you know what I mean. We'll put that link in the podcast and YouTube description. Now time for the show. With Sam Cedar.

Broms of any edition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought by the military industrial complex. The majority report with Sam Cedar. And I get the feeling you've been cheated. It is Tuesday, September 15th, 2006. My name is Sam Cedar. This is the five-time award-winning majority report. We are broadcasting live. steps from the industrially ravaged Gowanus Canal in the heartland of America, downtown Brooklyn, USA.

On the program today, Shireen al-Udami, associate professor at Michigan State University, the escalating tensions between Saudi Arabia and the Houthis. And what it might mean for long lines at the gas station, possibly. then Daniel Boguslaw, investigative reporter, publisher of the deeper states newsletter on Substack. His piece in the American prospect, Anthropic, is building a predictive surveillance system to monitor activists. Nice. Meanwhile, Supreme Court halts Trump's postal vote suppression scheme. Trump claims AI concerns a hoax.

Meanwhile, Hakeem. Referees calls on Congress to act. Doubt it. Report shows alligator alcatraz used solitary boxes. Smaller than the size of a closet made F. Steel.

Jesus. A report DHS of voter probe has broken state laws. Mitch McConnell rolls back into the Senate. Appears. Appears. to be alive.

Pentagon reports a munition shortfall and also confirms the deployment of some type of weapon in space. As Kristen Gillibrand quietly lobbies to promote a horrible crypto bill,

Warren slams the bill as a giveaway to Trump. CVS pharmacists in Arizona, Rhode Island, California authorizes strike. And in the wake of treasury bills breaking through the 5%

Mark Fed meets tomorrow and expected to raise rates. Lastly, some good news. Polling looks dismal for Republicans across the country. All this and more

on today's majority report. Hello. Was that too fast? That was too fast. Brian likes the steep drop-off with the intro music, I think.

Just drop us right in. Well, this has nothing to do with the tech issues, but your haircut looks great. Oh, thank you. I've completely forgotten everything else that happened before that. Insufferable. It is Emma Vigland. Hello. Newsday Tuesday? Yes, it is. That's right. Okay, just confirming with you. Appreciate that. And yes, I did get a haircut. And Brian is solo today. So those are the two things that are happening. In the news as well. Bye. We've got, yeah.

Shows over. Hopefully you can hear us and we will go. We're sorry. We had, you know, there's a ghost in the machine and poor Matt on vacation standing by his phone. We now have a direct connection to him, like where we just, we don't even have to dial anymore. Exactly. Let's get into this. There is obviously been.

in the past week or so, a lot of talk about the potential for us all to die at the hands of AI. It is, without a doubt, probably overblown to some extent, which is not to say that there isn't a danger from this stuff. and particularly in the way that it's being used by its creators. People have to remember there are a half a dozen entities or so in this country that have poured billions of dollars into this technology. And it's not a perfect metaphor. But does everybody remember what happened with streaming where you had all of these networks pour? billions literally, not as much as we see with AI, but billions of dollars into streaming. And they realized at one point, like, oh, we didn't know what we were doing.

And we didn't know what the business model was for this. And we didn't have a way of making money on it. So that is why, in my opinion, we got such extended strikes by writers and actors because this was a way for them to start to offload some costs. And, of course, we're going to see the implications of this down the road as we have very little interesting television, et cetera, et cetera, in the future. But in other words, you've got these entities who are racing to be the primary entity in this space, even though it's unclear what that would mean in terms of revenue for anybody. and so they talk about in some instances, I think like when they talk about let's slow things down,

there's a way for them to figure out how they're going to finance the rest of this. But with that said, it would still be nice to have, let's say, the Federal Trade Commission or the antitrust at DOJ or some of the laws that we have on the books to prevent entities from, making products that are harmful to society do their job.

Don Trump won't have any of that. He truthed out yesterday morning the only control or, quote, guardrails that AI needs is a strong and smart, high IQ president. Oh, cool. And the USA has that in spades. The Trump administration stopped AI, quote, people from doing bad comma or potentially

bad comma things. You know this high IQ president. Yes, with the quotation outside of the comma like Dario. Anthropic. Who is now pretending to be a perfect

little angel and we will continue to do so. I mean high IQ. We already have tremendous criminal and regulatory power over these companies. true. Maybe we might want to exercise them. There's a sick conspiracy going

on against AI and data centers, and the only one that's happy about it is China. Whoever wins AI wins. We are leading China and all others, and will continue to do so. Conspiracy theorists, treasonists, traitors, and leekers,

beware. Trump. This notion Well, let's, we'll play Doug Bergam. Here he is Doug Bergberg, carrying the flame for Donald Trump, and also Mr. Wonderful, who claimed the same thing about activists in Utah,

that, of course, all of this desire to fight against data centers, which, incidentally, we don't know what percentage, but a huge percentage of these things, once the bubble bursts are just going to be, be empty eyesores. 70% of Americans are more worried about AI than they are excited about it. And like this data center thing is becoming what you would call an 80-20 issue. And it's not just one that isn't motivating people. It's actually motivating people politically. And that's what I think

scares them. And here's Doug Bergam to tell you who's really behind this. And of course, we do know there's foreign interference. There's foreign sciops campaigns going on trying to get the U.S. to stop building power, to get us to stop building data centers, because we are in an AI arms race, and our competitors use the freedom of speech and open democracy and our social media platforms to try to influence elections. They're doing that, doing it right now. But we're going to have communities that embrace this, and they're going to thrive because of it. Well, the positive comments you said about... All right. First off, there is an entity that has been inhibiting our energy growth, and it is the U.S.

government. The Trump administration has paid literally billions of dollars to stop the production of wind power in this country shutting down multiple wind projects that were in the process of coming online or getting built. As China, by the way, is powering their AI data centers primarily with some of the more renewable energy sources. Something like 75% of their new energy is renewable in China. I mean, they reached net zero or more than that, I believe, already, even though they're at their fastest pace of growth this year. So, but Doug Bergam is as responsible as any person in the country for inhibiting our energy production. And of course, the AI data centers, as you know, all, all just foreign interference. Here's Mike Johnson. This is this morning.

saying, we don't need to worry about regulations. I trust these guys. This is the guy, incidentally, he doesn't even trust himself on his phone, so he has his son monitoring it. But when it comes to Anthropic, go to town, guys. So if you're Dario or Sam or any of the big provider, those two lead frontier labs in the development of AI.

And what happens next? They can self-police. They can self-regulate. need the government to tell them to slow it down. If they want to slow it down, they should. But we cannot have a moratorium on the development of AI, because then we will lose our edge to China. And that has serious national security implications for every American family. So there's a balance here. And we're going to have steady hands at the wheel on this as we do everything else. We, what are the national security implications for every family in the country? I want to know what this, like what it is. Like,

What can we trust Sam Altman with that we can't trust China with? Well, that's the thing. That's what they're concerned about is the open source models like DeepSeek from China that they're financially incentivized to have everybody using Deep Seek and training it as well. These open source models, I think, are a real threat to Anthropic and Open AI, especially ahead of these IPOs where there's wide. understanding that they're extremely overvaluated. Like, it's hard to know what's true and what's not because I want to be skeptical of their claims, but I also don't want to downplay the dangers of AI getting out of control and be arrogant in thinking that I understand this technology fully.

But what I do know is that open AI and anthropic are, at the very least, up to something because they were concerned that this IPO wouldn't go the way that they wanted. and whatever regulation they're asking for from the government from the Trump administration is going to positively impact their bottom line, I think, in contrast to some of these open source models. Also, like with this hugging face thing, too, don't these companies have liability? Like, they hacked. Their product was the result of criminal activity. Resulted in criminal activity. And I think they're trying to avoid that as well. very core questions about what happens when you don't put guardrails on your product and it engages

in what should be a felony, you know, an act of criminality. Yep. We're sending people to prison over misreads from flock cameras. Cops are stalking their girlfriend. Who's worried about China having. Yeah, I want to know exactly. I mean, I want this explored more in hearings that hopefully will start January 3rd. 25th of next year. But I want to know exactly what it is, what isn't the national security

threat if China or anybody else develops this technology faster than Sam Altman or people who I wouldn't trust, I mean, whose entire empires are built on just exploiting and using our, data for spying. We're going to be talking to Daniel Boguslaw in a bit about anthropic building a predictive surveillance, basically minority report stuff, to monitor activists. And that's just where they're going to start. They'll just be monitoring, you know, anybody. But at least they'll be English speaking. But that's what the China stuff is code for. It's the open source. model. It's a threat to the stock price for these companies that haven't produced, Silicon Valley

hasn't really produced a workable new product for users in decades, except for this. And what we're seeing is that it might have kind of very limited capacity in terms of making the money at all beyond the chatbot part. But the hacking stuff is really concerning. And it would be nice to have some transparency about it, but these are private entities. In a moment, we'll also be talking to Shereen al-Ademi, associate professor at Michigan State University on what's happening with the Houthis in Saudi Arabia. But first, a word from our sponsor, Emma.

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of longevity research, OneSkin is helping you unlock your healthiest skin now and as you age. For a limited time, try OneSkin with 15% off using code Majority at OneSkin.co slash majority. That's 15% off OnSkin.co with code Majority after you purchase. They will ask you where you've heard them please support our show and tell them we sent you get 15% off one skin with the code majority at oneskin.co slash majority we'll put a link down below in the video and episode descriptions and at majority dot fm all right quick break when we come back shireen al-de-me we'll be right back we are back sam cedar ama vigland on the majority report it's a pleasure to welcome to the program Shireen Al-O-Damee, Associate Professor at Michigan State University.

Shireen, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. Will you give us just a, I mean, we've spoken about this on the program in the past, but give us just a brief synopsis of Yemen's Civil War and the parties that are fighting that were that have been fighting and perhaps maybe are going to be fighting again soon in Yemen. So it's a little bit of a muddy picture. I'll do my best to simplify it. So it's often called the Civil War, but it really isn't.

It started off as some differences in who was going to lead Yemen post-Arab Spring. And it led to a very violent intervention, military. intervention by Saudi Arabia, claiming to be on behalf of the legitimate government of Yemen, which they've since abandoned and reshuffled. So the current, quote-unquote, Yemeni government is a group of people that the Saudis and the UAE have essentially assembled together. They make up various warlords. They are paid by Saudi Arabia, mostly, but some of them by the UAE.

They have different interests. Some of them are interested in breaking up Yemen to pre-unification. pre-1990 borders. Some of them are interested in recapturing territories that are currently under the ruling of Ansarulah. So that's the, and there's also extremists and terrorist groups within that coalition. That's the one side that's fully backed by this international government, including international, let's say, a coalition of countries, including the United States. And on the other hand, that's known as the PLC. Is that right? The presidential leadership council. Yes. They were literally appointed by Saudi Arabia.

So this is not, they don't have international legitimacy. It's really more of a club than anything else, I guess, on some level. Yeah. The Saudis said they're your new government. And so they're the, apparently, the internationally recognized government. On the other side, you have Ansarullah. They're known as the Houthis, which is, you know, a misnomer because that's just the name of their leader. And they have been on the other side, essentially fighting these.

international forces. They're often called Iran backed because there's this exaggeration by the Americans and the Saudis that Iran is somehow controlling them, that they are proxies, that they can only function because of Iran. There's really no evidence that Iran has backed them in any substantial way. They are allies of Iran. They've gotten closer over the years, but certainly not proxies of Iran. And they initially, the opposition, if you can call them, they initially made up, were not only made up of Ansarulah, they were also made up of former President Saleh for the first two and a half years of the war.

So it was a much broader coalition at first until he turned against them. And now his nephew, who was fighting on their side, was the one who was leading this battle in the western coast of Yemen, Tharif Saleh. So he began with fighting against or with the Houthis and then against them backed by the UAE and now he's backed by the Saudis.

and he is also part of that presidential council. Can you talk about who has legitimacy and actual governmental infrastructure in Yemen? What are Yemenis saying about both of these groups and which group really governs the country? So it's a matter of numbers, really, because if you see the territories on the map, it looks like the Houthis or the Ansadullah control a smaller portion of Yemen. But that's where the most Yemenis live. So 80% of the population lives under areas that have been under Houthi or Ansala rules since 2015, essentially. So over a decade now.

And so if you ask them, they're the government of Yemen. They're the ones running the ministries. They're the ones dispersing salaries. And if you have any dispute, marriage, whatever, divorce, you go through them. They're the government in Yemen. The 20% remaining 20% of the population lives under these areas that are under this control of this. Podge-Podge coalition of, like I said, extremists, separatists and Saudi loyalists. I happen to be my family is from the southern part of the country, which is under this coalition

rule. And the economy is worse there than it is in the northern part of the country. The electric grill is a grid essentially has failed. You know, people go weeks and weeks without electricity or just having an hour or two electricity a day. And these are really hot areas in Yemen, for example. health care is in shambles. And so it's not like they've enjoyed any kind of stability even or access to resources from being under this Saudi-led, UAE-led occupation. But to them, the government is, you know, this coalition. And then you have tribal leaders, too, who are maybe running the show

in certain areas in the South without a centralized government. But these factions, because they have different loyalties, they also have different interests. And they sometimes fight each other as well in those southern areas. And meanwhile, they get Saudi provides them air cover or, in fact, Saudi just goes on bombing runs, that the U.S. has been enabling in one form or another for probably 15 years now. the Obama administration was helping midair refueling, I think it was, for the Saudis, ostensibly because they were, they thought they could convince Saudi Arabia, supposedly to stop the bombing if they helped with the bombing.

That didn't work out so well. So where are we now? because when and just physically in terms of like when we talk about the south with Yemen like are we talking sauna it's it's hard or south of sauna because what I've read is that the the hutsis have taken the essentially control the coastline of the red sea sometimes described as southern but it's really sort of western I can't If you could help us with broad strokes on that. So I don't know why Yemen is called North and South, the traditional North and South, because on the map it really looks like east and west. Yes. But those western areas, so like along the coast and the border with Saudi Arabia and the entire border with the Red Sea up until that tip of the Red Sea,

that is the traditional North Yemen. Okay. And those are the areas largely in control. by Ansalaahullah currently, and the coast was disputed, and so now it looks like they've taken the coast as well, and have full control over Bab and Mendeb's trade, which is the reason everybody is in this war. The reason the Obama administration got into this war

is to control Yemen because of the strategic location it has. The reason Saudis care about Yemen is because of that strategic location, because that's how they ship their oil. And so they've always enjoyed a puppet government in Yemen, and they wanted to keep that the same, and they were getting nervous when Anslau'llah became popular post-Arab Spring. The eastern part of Yemen, it's mostly desert, which is why it's underpopulated.

It's only about 20% of the population lives there, but that's the traditional South Yemen that used to be ruled by the British Empire. And that is essentially borders Oman. Borders Oman and Saudi Arabia, yes, and the Gulf of Aden in the south. So people should understand that it's almost like from the Strait of Hormuz, it's almost like, a mirror image. And it has been the route that Saudi Arabia has been using since the Strait of Hormuz has been effectively shut down, almost like the sort of the back door. And they have used pipelines to get their oil across the country to ports on their east or south, I guess, I mean,

excuse me, west or south. And then coming out through the Red Sea. And now the Houthis have shut that down. Simultaneously, there was attacks launched from Iraq on that pipeline. And so what can you tell us about that? So it's unclear, actually, who attacked that. pipeline. The Iraqi resistance released in Arabic, the statement said, it's an honor we do not claim. And so, and the Iraqi government is investigating the source. But yes, the east-west pipeline was hit.

And the Saudis had been rerouting everything from Hormos to Babel Menda. What they maybe misunderstood or they've always underestimated Yemenis to a large degree, and this is another one of those consequences. With Hormos closed, they should have been working really, really hard to end their entanglement in Yemen. They have not been able to capture territories that have been ruled by Insadullah since 2015. The front lines have basically remained the same, and they were urged toward diplomacy. But the group that they're dealing with now with Ansarullah is a much stronger group, and they're in a much greater position to control Babel-Mandem than they ever had before. They have missiles and drones now that can reach.

We've seen all the way to Tel Aviv, right? And so it is not the same group that they were fighting back in the early days of the war. Of course, there's still massive mismatch because they could just come and bomb, and they have been bombing Yemen over the last several days. But they really should have been very careful in dealing with the situation in Yemen trying to end that, you know, quagmire and the stalemate and lift the blockade in Yemen and stop pouring all of these resources into the next warlord, you know, like tens of billions of dollars have already been spent.

And Ansala can just come and take this within a couple of days. And you can see all of the equipment and everything that they've captured, the weapons and everything that they've captured that are that the Saudis left behind. So what are they going to do now when they can ship their oil? Yeah, that's my question is then if Ansar al-La is not as closely associated with Yemen as, sorry, with Iran as is portrayed in the Western press. What is the source of their funding? How are they able to control this coastline in this way,

despite not necessarily having those strong ties, as you say? So they have a lot of support from the Yemeni people. It's one thing to come and capture territory. It's another thing to build a state, which they had been doing over the last decade, more than a decade now. Yemen is a deeply tribal society, and they understand that, and they have been working with the tribes all along Yemen. For example, even back to 2014,

when they were advancing from their northern... They come from a province all the way in the north of Yemen with that border Saudi Arabia, Sada. And when they marched toward the capital in late 2014 and essentially took over Sana'a, part of that was the military kind of standing down and seeing what happens. Part of that was them negotiating with the...

different tribes to say, hey, can you clear those roots for us? You know, so they've made these alliances over the years. They've even worked with their arch enemy Salih for the longest time until that no longer worked. But they enjoy a lot of support resources from within Yemen. They gain their legitimacy from the Yemeni people. Now, of course, ideally, we would want an end to this war. And Yemen, by the way, is a republic, unlike all of its neighbors that are monarchies.

And so we do have a system. and Yemenis have been fighting for their rights to a democratically elected government, but we've been in the situation where they've been fighting off these foreign powers for the last decade or so. So it would be interesting to see who wins an election if that ever happens in the near future in Yemen. But my bet would be that most Yemenis would vote for the people who've stayed behind and who have supported, you know, the cause of liberation. What is the source of revenue, though? I mean, is it oil and gas? Are they shipping or pumping oil and gas at that time?

If they are, is that not a vulnerability that Saudi Arabia, I would imagine, as they're getting desperate, would attack? Yeah. So the oil and gas rich areas are mostly under the control of the Saudi-led coalition. So you have the province of Maireb, which is oil and gas rich, and it's a front-line battle. between Ansatollah and the coalition. And there's also the question of oil and gas revenues from southeastern Yemen. And Ansadullah had been asking for those oil and gas revenues to be used to pay the salaries of Yemeni civil servants who have not been paid for years and years and years. And when that was no longer, you know, that was not accepted, they disrupted those shipments.

And so in 2024, I believe, they were attacking those shipments and Yemen's oil and gas imports basically went down to zero. I'm not quite sure about other sources of revenue, but there's very little. And that's what they've been fighting to regain these strategic points because, I mean, you've seen how they're fighting. These men are in sandals and AK-47s, you know, and these are, they're using missiles that have been refabbed to extend their range. So there's nothing sophisticated about the way they've committed these, you know, they've been able to control Babel Mendeb, for example. But it's a very dire situation for them, but they don't really enjoy any, like trade, for example, has been stopped because of the blockade by Saudi Arabia. So it's a very impoverished situation. And that's why you have a lot of the Yemeni population that's still starving.

And it's one of the poorest, if not the poorest, country in the world right now. If Trump reportedly, I guess last week, rejected Saudi Arabia's plea for help attacking the Houthis, what do you anticipate, I mean, do you anticipate that continuing, like, that the U.S. would stay on the sidelines? And to that point, what can you tell us about Djibouti? Because I'm curious, I mean, my understanding of Djibouti is extremely limited, other than we have a base there, which I imagine was there for this very purpose to try and keep that straight open from the red seed to the Gulf of Aden. what can you tell us about that? So you know who else has their only international base there in Djibouti? It's China, which they built in 2017, two years into the war in Yemen.

And so China also understands the importance of that strategic location. Trump's position on Yemen is very interesting. Trump, too. Trump, one, was very violent and just gave the Saudi to everything that they wanted, except for eventually stopping the mid-air refueling, as you mentioned earlier. But this administration went to war directly with Ansat-ulah back, you know, and Biden did too, right? When Ansar-Lah were blocking Israeli ships in support of the Palestinian people during the genocide,

the Biden administration started attacking Yemen directly, and the Trump administration at the beginning also amassed to coalition. or tried to do it on their own, started bombing Yemen. Signalgate, if you remember, that's what they were discussing. You know, should we intervene? Vance was saying it's not really our problem. It's the Europeans who are affected by the shipping mostly, right? And so, interestingly, the Ansat al-La and communicated very clearly to Trump

that they're not at war with the United States. Stay out of this. We are blocking Israeli ships from using Baban Mandab Strait. and Trump essentially agreed to this and has had a ceasefire agreement with them since May of 2025. So we're 16 or so months into that ceasefire. And it looks like he has not broken the ceasefire agreement yet, as evidenced by reports that we've seen, like you said, of the Saudis asking for cover over the last couple of days in Trump saying no. And Trump reiterated that, you know, they don't want to fight us. We're not the enemy.

So it'll be interesting if he agrees to essentially the first time around with the same, ceasefire with Yemen, Israelis were left off. Maybe now he doesn't mind if the Saudis are left off of this ceasefire. I would imagine that they're thinking, what more could we do for the Saudis to help them win when it's been 11 years of everything the U.S. can give? And these guys can't even get their act together on the coast. But presumably, I would, I mean, I would have thought that the reason why Trump did not want to get on the wrong side of the Houthis was presumably to keep that straight open. And if that straight is closed relative to any oil coming out of there, it seems like that that would be the reason why, I mean, that the reason that Trump had stayed out of it had become,

you know, sort of inoperable at that point. is there what would be the other reason the I mean there's no Jared Kushner doesn't have any business there does he I mean I'm trying to figure out like what would be the strategic reason other than we just don't have the capacity to engage in a multi-fronted war there I think that's it so when the U.S. ships were docked in the Red Sea they were getting attacked by Insara law all the time and like I said these guys are on fishing boats or speedboats, and they're causing damage worth hundreds of millions of dollars to these American vessels. And the U.S. kept having to move its ships up and down the Red Sea,

right? And now with what's going on in Iran with Hormuz, and we've seen the U.S. pull its resources from Europe, from East China Sea, and so forth, you can't really open up another front. We've seen what happened to the oil and gas prices and diesel, right? Like, midterms are coming up. So I'm sure the calculus is, hopefully they're thinking about this very, very carefully. Like, what would this mean to now open up another front in Yemen? Certainly lose the Senate and the House, and then what else, right? And so I, maybe he will resume when this becomes too big of a problem, but I'm hoping that this would be the opportunity to push the Saudis, who are still one of our biggest allies in the region, toward this peace agreement. Because

Saudi cannot really afford to continue treating Yemen as they had been over the last decade without dealing with the consequences. The consequences are huge now, especially because Formos is already essentially closed by the Iranians. And we've seen ballistic missiles from Yemen in Saudi, southern Saudi airports and military bases over the last few days as well. Last question from me, because you mentioned China, and I was going to ask you about this initially. I mean, China brokered the initial. agreement and those talks, right, between Iran and Saudi Arabia and then also in Yemen to kind of have a cessation of some of the blockade and the brutality in the Biden era. What do you make of China's

role in Yemen in addition to them understanding, of course, how strategically important it is, but the fact that they're coming in there and using diplomacy and the United States is using bombs, It feels like a pretty stark contrast for the Yemeni people. You know, there was an opportunity in 2015 for China to actually play an important role here in Russia, and they both did not. So a month into the war in Yemen in April of 2015, the Saudis wrote up a resolution, the UN Security Council Resolution 2216. They wrote it themselves.

They presented it, and essentially it legitimized the blockade on Yemen. They said, oh, we have the right to stop Iranian weapons. and flowing into Yemen. And so we have the right to investigate everything that comes in and out of Yemen, and that's the blockade that ended up being enforced on the Yemeni people with the approval of the UN. China and Russia were expected to vote no, and they abstained. And so it passed exactly as it was written by the Saudis. And so from the very beginning, China has been very hesitant to publicly make any major moves against the Saudis.

Of course, they have interests all around the world that they want to keep and maintain. They did play a positive role diplomatically. They have not gotten involved with the sale of weapons, as far as I know, or supporting the Saudis, you know, through diplomatic cover or anything like that. But they have kind of stayed in the background a little bit. Maybe this is an opportunity for them to push the line of diplomacy a little bit harder. Shereen, Dami, thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate it. And I have a feeling we may be in touch again soon.

Really appreciate your time. Thanks for having me. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. All right, folks, we're going to take a quick break when we come back, Daniel Bogus Law, publisher of the Deeper States Substack on Anthropic building a predictive surveillance system to a monitor activist. And I assume just about... American surveillance.

Yes. America, yes. But don't worry. At least the Chinese won't get it. We'll be right back. We are back. Sam Cedar, Emma Viglin on the Major Report. Want to welcome back to the program,

Daniel Boguslaw, investigative reporter, publisher of the deeper states' newsletter on Substack. And on to talk about, well, a couple of pieces, but one that was in the American prospect, anthropic, building a predictive surveillance system to monitor activists. Well, at least it's not China. The important thing is that our AI gets there first, and we wouldn't want the Chinese to be monitoring activists

because they're from China. We want Americans to be monitoring activists, right, Daniel? Well, actually, I've talked to some security of researchers for major American corporations who do use the Chinese open source models running locally on their devices to go about their security tasks for U.S. corporations. So publicly, certainly they don't want to admit to that, but privately it seems like the Chinese models are open source and a lot faster. But that's not really what the article is about.

Walk us through what the article is about. Well, it's kind of shocking that Anthropic did. foresee the issues with letting their senior security personnel talk on YouTube channels about surveilling activists or to not list activists and activism on their job postings for security researchers as one of the main surveillance categories. But basically, I caught them with their pants down doing exactly that. They talked about, you know, using... They literally put in their ad for real. researchers, you're going to spy on activists?

Not researchers. I mean, like, they're global security personnel. So basically, Anthropic has two different security teams that are interwoven, but also somewhat separate. One is their sort of like GSIS. That's sort of like I describe it as their CIA. It's focused on global issues, global threats, global threat monitoring, both to their physical personnel and assets, but also to their systems. And then they have a more localized one called the GSIS, which is more of like what I described as their FBI, which is more, you know, the 20, you know, they have like a 24-7 situation room with monitoring screens. And that was the one where the head of that was basically talking in an interview about how they had used

surveillance of activists to basically reroute an anthropic executive, get him into the side door of a hotel, and kind of prevent security challenges around organized activists and protests. And this is really just like the tip of the iceberg, right? Like these are two instances where they had bad operational security and talked about doing this publicly. But, you know, this is happening 24-7 all the time. And it's not just anthropic. It's also happening, you know, at all the other frontier labs. And also it's really happening in corporate offices and for corporations all across America.

And it's become completely normalized that corporate security is allowed to do individual threat monitoring, right? They build cases on persons of interest. This was also something that they talked about and told to the Wall Street Journal. And so basically they have their own spy agencies built in, but, you know, there's just no scrutiny of it. You know, I got all these comments on this piece, people saying, you know, this is run-of-the-mill corporate security operations, you know, with some AI injected into it. But, you know, this is a horrifying prospect that this is the industry standard across businesses, across corporations. The main difference is they get to use their custom AI in-house, you know, injecting clod into their surveillance operations and efforts. And if I understand it, the differences is not like this is not the situation where, hey, we had some guy down at the front desk who tried to come in and seemed we have.

and here's his picture and don't let this guy in the building anymore type of stuff to the predictive parts, right? Like the idea of like we're aware that this person's, I don't know, tweeting about anthropic being bad and AI being problematic. And now we're going to start to track this person. Is that like, what is the predictive part? Yeah, I mean, the predictive part is the idea that you're not looking for specific threats per se, right? You're monitoring people who you think are potential future criminals,

right? So there's no, there's no plot, there's no manifesto, right? You're talking about an expansive network to try to monitor and surveil behavior that you and your algorithms believe could be concerning. I mean, look, when I use Claude and I do use Claude for, you know, investigative research, I use it for coding, you know, I often tell Claude to, cause harm to itself, you know, because I get frustrated and, you know, I get angry and I lose my mind. Now, I don't know if that puts me on a list, but the point is that they're monitoring everything that goes into that, Daniel, too. I mean, I don't want to get into that, I don't want to get into specifics there, but it can get pretty nasty. And, you know, the point is like, they are, they are monitoring

everything that goes into that chat. And they've, you know, talked about how they've reported people. Again, the Wall Street Journal did a big article that was basically spoon-fed to them about all the threats and how hard and scary it is to work at the frontier labs. And they talked about how they are constantly reporting users of their services to the San Francisco Police. And then they were able to contact some of those people that Anthropic reported. And the people were like, look, I was just screwing around. They were making threats. But the question is, okay, so that's getting reported to the SFP. PD, but how are they building dossiers internally on users that are maybe doing things that they just

don't like? How do what, what does the, when they monitor or surveil someone, what, how far do they go with that? Like, I mean, does it mean like we're just watching their Instagram accounts or does it mean like we've got somebody stationed across the, the street from where they live and following them around. Like where, where, where, where, what, what does it mean to surveil for a, for a company that perceives and, and what is the threshold? I mean, it's one thing to say like, we're worried about the safety of our executives. It's another to say, we're worried about, you know, our future IPO and

that we're getting bad press somewhere or that there's somebody protesting a data center. Yeah. And, you know, there's obviously a huge irony of, of, of the constant. whipping up of existential dread and existential fear and then also turning around and complaining about people thinking that these companies are kind of like the tip of the spear for annihilation. But to answer your question about, you know, how far does this go? I mean, I will speak now about the industry standard, what the corporate security industry is capable of. Again, you know, my piece talked specifically about claims made in a couple of instances in a sort of broad effort to monitor activists.

But, I mean, one irony that I talk about a lot is the fact that, you know, the U.S. intelligence agencies now are much more interested in purchasing corporate bulk data than they are in collection, right? And that's because for a couple thousand dollars, pretty much anyone can go out and buy the dossier on you, on your web browsing history, on your, you know, personal preferences on your on your on your basically your geolocation and your movements as well right like that level of granularity is for sale on the open market um and there's you know it it's there are workarounds for how that is obtained right you you you have to be a little sneaky about the way

you sell that information and the way you've requested by that information but you know those capabilities geolocation your movement your pattern of life all of those things are are completely open. And so to answer your question, I mean, you know, they were talking about person of interest monitoring. So in my mind, you know, that's completely all within their capability and within their financial means. But the other thing is, you know, when you see on their job postings that they're hiring intelligence analysts to monitor activism, you know, to me, this sets off alarm bells with what I've also reported happening within the intelligence community, within the fusion centers, which is, you know, this large-scale new threat category for so-called anti-technology extremism, right?

And that dovetails nicely with their efforts to write about, you know, data center protesters, their fears about disruption to their bottom line, to the infrastructure that powers all their frontier models. And so I think that is also like, you have the individual concern, but then you also have this issue of like, are they monitoring organized groups, or are they monitoring pause AI, stop AI, you know, even some of the large. ACLU civil liberties groups that are, you know, organizing to try to create civilian oversight over these models, you know, what's stopping them from, from A, surveillingness, and then B,

feeding that information to state and local police, but then also the federal government. I mean, there's tons of information sharing programs with the FBI, with DHS, that have been running, you know, since the creation of the Patriot Act, and those companies are the front and line. Yeah, this is, I should just say, that it's been really about two decades. of when law enforcement, national security agencies run into the legal tripwires for surveilling on people, they can just turn around and buy that stuff. It's one thing that they're not allowed to collect it in many instances statutorily or constitutionally. But if it exists, they can buy it.

and it seems like that's that's the model that they're headed towards and particularly if you've got these like you say these outfits collecting all this stuff anyways it makes it much easier for them i mean that's sort of what the flock cameras are on in many respects um did you well no i guess i was curious then i mean when you when you say like the ACLU or some of these other uh groups that are maybe organizing opposition to them, what's stopping them from being able to aggregate all of that data and preempt any kind of, say, like civil litigation about harm? That's just one thing that I'm thinking about. And then they're able to know who's going to make these claims about them. And it's sort of this like extra legal way to monitor your political opposition, frankly. Yeah, totally. And

And the other piece of that is, is that I think is worth talking about is, you know, the push that they've been making to label their technology as critical infrastructure. Actually, I should say both, you know, the actual algorithmic technology, but then also the data centers and the power supply, right, that's powering this research and then also powering their models. To your point, like, if they're able to achieve these critical national security, critical infrastructure designations, right, then all of a sudden this sort of effort to, create some form of democratic governance over this technology, all of a sudden becomes like a national security threat, right? And then they're given even more leeway to surveil and categorize anyone doing civil disobedience, anyone organizing to kick these things out of their municipalities, their towns and cities as national security threats who are now legitimized under that critical infrastructure designation as, you know, as threats to the American homeland.

So I don't know, I really think people are unaware of the incredible amount of information sharing between these companies and law enforcement. Again, the Wall Street Journal reported on local law enforcement sharing, local with SFPD. But, I mean, there's literally like four different, you know, cross-pollinating information networks. You know, we're talking about classified and sensitive compartmentalized information sharing streams, you know, basically like a Slack channel for them to just send stuff to the Fed. and the feds to send stuff to them. And obviously, there's a huge incentive problem there where they're incentivized to portray people exercising their constitutional rights as national security threats.

Oh, that sounds like it's going to be fun. Let's talk about what's happening in terms of pre-crime. And you wrote about a banking, database that is now being used by DHS, ostensibly, I guess, to go after immigrants who are here, they're undocumented or perhaps not. I have, who knows, I guess, what the parameters are of this, but walk us through this story. Yeah, so, I mean, this is sort of a pickup credit where credit is due to 404 media's scoop on the Border Patrol operating a sort of predictive, literally right there in the name,

like a predictive crime intelligence unit. And this sort of surfaced in court records showing that someone was traveling from California to Wisconsin. The guy worked on a legal weed farm. But somehow the state police working with Border Patrol were able to pull this guy over and bust him for possession. And then I think he ended up getting charged with like a couple of other crimes, you know, crossing state lines and things like that. So, you know, 4-4 broke that story. The name of this weird, spooky border patrol unit surfaced in those court records. But what wasn't clear in their reporting was sort of how what they mentioned was financial information was incorporated into their surveillance effort. And working with a colleague, we were able to

interview some people who work in that sort of banking regulatory space, right? And, you know, people might remember from the Epstein saga, Senator Ron Wyden was talking about these suspicious activity reports, which are basically things that banks are forced to file when they kind of come across these suspicious transactions. And a lot of the times, as was the case with Epstein, these things are completely ignored. But what we saw here was, you know, a normal work working class person, working on a weed form, having their banking information basically hoovered up by Border Patrol, conveyed to the state police, but then restricted due to the laws that govern the way that that type of confidential banking information can be shared. And so what

we were able to write about is the fact that they are using something called parallel construction to make these cases, right? So they can't introduce this banking information into court. They can't reveal it to people outside of the banking or federal law enforcement system, but what they can do is basically use it as a predicate to create a flag on someone and then pull them over and charge them with other things, right? And we know that the feds do this with all kinds of, you know, you use parallel construction all over the place. It's been an issue with 702, the big surveillance authorization that allows for surveilling U.S. persons. under a statute that's meant for foreign surveillance.

But this was kind of my first foray into this really dark and murky world where you have a huge volume of individuals' banking records getting flagged all the time and increasingly getting flagged for crazy stuff under NSPN7, right, the presidential directive that effectively criminalizes anti-Christian speech, anti-American speech, anti-traditional values, anti-capitalism, right? those things are now all basically fair game for reporting should financial institutions want to align themselves with the directives they're getting from the federal government. And so, you know, really this gives one tiny look into the fact that, you know, it's not just your social media

browsing history, it's not just your cookies, it's not just the ad tech watching you. It's also the banks. And, you know, every credit card swipe you have, every transaction you have to grandma carries the potential for being flagged. Okay, so my understanding, like, I understand SARS in terms of a suspicious activity report can be triggered by pulling out $10,000 cash or some version of, like, they did $9,000 yesterday or $900,9,9,990. Like, this is, they got Rush Limbaugh on this when he was buying Oxy back in the day. They got Elliot Spitzer on this when he was using that money for prostitutes.

What else triggers it? I mean, are they actually getting as granular as this guy just donated $200 to whatever, you know, fight AI or this guy just spent $200 at a dispensary? or like what how like what else is triggering these reports from the banks? I mean, so there's there's kind of two different systems. One I think is much broader. It's and these are currency transaction reports. And those are kind of what you're talking about in terms of, you know, just like massive volumes of cash transaction.

I think anything over $10,000 like you said, instantly triggers a CTR. But then the suspicious activity reports are, like, they're much, they're much vaguer. You know, like, institutions that are just, like, freaked out can basically create their own suspicious activity report guidelines. And so, for example, like, you could imagine, you know, right after NSPM 7, there were all these guidances from, like, nonprofit law firms, you know, talking about how you kind of, like, had to be really careful about where you're transferring money. and, you know, like a good example would be like the State Department designated all these left-wing groups in Europe as FTOs, right, as foreign terrorist organizations.

And let's say you're a bank that's like working in the nonprofit sector, right, and just working with left-wing causes. Like you might create a SAR protocol where you're kind of covering your ass to just like file SARS about suspicious transactions that you think might be going to or might be connected to some of these groups. So the reporting criteria are much more broad and are also can be based on individual financial institutions discretion. But they're also hyper-secretive, right? Like even when Ron Wyden got the SARS from, sorry, I'm totally blanking on the main Epstein bank, J.P. Morgan, he couldn't release them, right? Or, I mean, he could have. He didn't want to because he was saying that it wouldn't be legal to release them. But these are governed by federal statute, right, that you can't release them. So we don't really have a good sense of like what financial institutions are filing on right now, you know?

Interesting. I mean, I've talked to some people in that space, in the AML space, like actual auditors. And they've kind of said, like, most of the banks think that a lot of this stuff is just like totally absurd and that they're not going to actually catch any heat for it. and then it's going to end, you know, after this administration. But that doesn't mean that some people in more niche spaces aren't filing them and that the feds can't then reach down into those for their prosecutions against, I don't know, are you guys on one of the lists yet, against the sun, against, not quite, whatever, Sesame Street.

Or I guess not as radical as Karen Bass who made the list. That one pisses me off. That one pisses me off. Maybe you'll get there next year. Yeah, I guess so. Well, it's disturbing and fascinating stuff. Daniel Bogoslav, the substack is deeper states. We will link to that, and we will link to your piece in the American prospect about

Anthropic building a predictive surveillance system to monitor activists. Really appreciate your time today. Hey, thanks for having me. Thanks, Daniel. I guess this interview just goes into the database. I guess so. All right, folks. That's it for the free house.

of the program. We're going to take a quick break and head into the fun half. But just a reminder, if you want to support the program, be a part of the fun half, IAM us in the fun half. Have me ignore your IMs to the point where you wonder if it works. Go to join the majority report.com. When you do, you not only help this show survive and thrive, but you also get the free show free of commercials. And again, you get the fun half. And you keep this. this show trucking on, as it were. Also, just coffee.coop. Fair trade coffee, hot chocolate.

Use the coupon code majority. You get 10% off. Great coffee. Great coffee. Great coffee. I have texted Francesca just now to see if I'm able to yet reveal who the special guest is for our show. And it's my fault. She's not immediately responding.

so I don't know. Wait, when is your show? It's on the fourth. Okay, that's three weeks away. I know. You got to tease it for a day or two and say, I'm going to reveal who the special guest is. Okay, I'm sorry.

I didn't think you were that invested in it. Oh, yeah. That's the way you do it. Okay, well, there's a special guest. A pretty, pretty dang good one. I'll tease it. Comedian. Whoa.

Has been on this show before. On this show? Mm-hmm. Oh, that could be anybody. It could be anybody. Judy Gold. Where is the show? Where is the show?

Oh, sorry. The lodge room in L.A. It's down below. 1 p.m., the 4th of October. It'll be a matinee Sunday situation. So it's basically brunch with your girls from the bituation room with Francesca Furentini, plus myself. Plus, somebody who could be a female could also not. be a female. You'll have to see.

Can't wait to see Amy Schumer. All right, folks. What's happening in the Matt is not with us today, although he is. He's on call. He's on call. We literally have them online. Oh, Jim Brewer. I'm joking. Oh, oh, oh, for the comedian. Okay.

The most recent Matt show is the Jacobin show, which they are joined by I guess guests we're having on this Thursday Clarissa Redwine and J.S. Tan. Really? You could go prep for our show on Thursday by watching their show from a couple days ago. Great minds.

Talk about the many ways the tech industry has set itself up against workers and how we can beat the power of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos by organizing. Dennis Miller. Yes. Oh, wait, we've never had them on the show, though. Rob Schneider.

Folks, see you in the fun half.