Starting wars and spying at home

In a time of perpetual breaking news, two developments in the last week have been particularly huge. Last Friday, the public got word that AI company Anthropic was refusing to go along with government requests to be allowed to use its LLM Claude in ways that violated the company’s safety guardrails. Employees from OpenAI and Google sent a letter of support urging their leadership to adopt Anthropic’s stance. Late that night, Sam Altman spoke up for OpenAI to say that they had made a deal with the government.

Why did Anthropic balk? They were concerned over measures related to the conduct of war and the possibility that the government would be able to conduct domestic surveillance inside the United States. Altman’s deal was met with fury as his company’s concessions to government demands were followed by military strikes on Iran.

The other new crisis was the assassination of Iran’s governing elite, including Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, amid a wave of bombing. The U.S. government seems not to have thought through what the operation it has named “Epic Fury” will lead to, or the real risk that it will create a much worse situation for not only Iranians and the global economy but also the administration itself.

Today I’ll write about U.S. bombing and assassinations in Iran and this other question of domestic surveillance of American citizens. I’ll consider how these issues reveal Trump’s boneheaded yet dangerous authoritarian ambitions, and why they might not work the way he hopes they will. As always, at the end, I’ll address how to figure out what you can be doing right now to push back on all of this.

AI battles

Late last week, a statement from the tech company Anthropic made clear there were two limitations on use of their AI tools, limitations they claimed were part of their agreement with the U.S. government and cases in which it was either not safe or not lawful to use their tools: mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons. As the company’s statement announced, “The Department of War has stated they will only contract with AI companies who accede to ‘any lawful use’ and remove safeguards in the cases mentioned above. They have threatened to remove us from their systems if we maintain these safeguards.”

After some back and forth, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth declared that Anthropic was a supply-chain risk, and Trump ordered every federal agency to stop using Anthropic’s products. He later threatened Anthropic with “major civil and criminal consequences” if they didn’t remain supportive during the period in which the government would transition to new providers.

After having initially supported Anthropic’s position, Sam Altman of OpenAI reversed course and cut a deal with the U.S. government himself. Altman expressed confusion as to why Anthropic hadn’t made the same deal, claiming OpenAI had adhered to similar ethical principles.

But Techdirt’s Mike Masnick suggested that OpenAI had, in fact, caved—and had done so specifically on domestic surveillance inside the United States. Masnick wrote, “You get the sense that someone at Anthropic knows how the intel community misleads by using definitions of words that are different than everyone else believes. And the people at OpenAI simply don't know or don't care about that.”

Hours after OpenAI cut a deal, the U.S. bombed Iran.

According to the Pentagon, over a hundred aircraft were launched, attacking more than a thousand targets. The attacks killed key Iranian leaders, including Defense Minister Amir Nasirzadeh and Revolutionary Guards Commander Mohammed Pakpour, and most significantly in terms of governance, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei. Several hundred civilians also appeared to have been slaughtered, including more than 153 people—many of them children—after a strike hit a girls’ school in southern Iran.

Despite the condemnations of Anthropic from Hegseth and Trump in the leadup to the unprovoked strike, it was later reported that the Department of Defense used Claude, Anthropic’s LLM, for the attacks. There appear to be few plans for next steps, other than encouraging the Iranian people, thousands of whom have been slaughtered in recent weeks by their government, to rise up against it. The administration has expressed a willingness to continue bombing Iran for the next several weeks, though munition inventories are reportedly an issue, which might complicate planning.

The medium is the message

These two developments—the attacks on Iran and the weakening of safeguards on using AI for domestic surveillance—are related events, and bound up with the larger authoritarian power grab underway in the country.

It took no time at all for Republicans to try to use Trump’s war provocations to their own ends. Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) appeared Sunday on ABC News, using the administration’s attack on Iran to try to force progress on funding the Department of Homeland Security’s budget, which Democrats have been blocking due to abuses by ICE. During the interview, he said, “Let’s get DHS funded. We need to make sure we’re defending the homeland by also funding what’s here at home.” Republican Congressman from Nebraska Don Bacon put out a statement saying about DHS funding, that “If Hakeem Jeffries votes no, then it is on him.”

The argument seems to be that the government may have to defend Americans against attacks from outside the country, and that Trump’s overseas provocations means that it’s riskier to have DHS unfunded at this moment. But what they’re saying in reality is that Democrats should let our government’s own attacks on on its own people by ICE (and the U.S. attacks on Iran) continue due to the potential of outside attacks attacks on Americans that might materialize in response to our aggression.

The government wants us to let ICE abuse U.S. residents, detain noncitizens and citizens alike without censure or punishment, shoot American citizens without investigation, and let the camp system expand indefinitely—all ostensibly in order to keep Americans safe. That argument is made no stronger by deliberately adding the death of civilians overseas and the threat of foreign terror groups on top of the current violence by law enforcement inside U.S borders.

The medium is the message, and it’s not subtle. They are currently harming countless people on the streets, from assault to murder, and in dozens of cases killing detainees in detention. They are assassinating and kidnapping foreign tyrants, along with murdering schoolchildren over the weekend. The harm is the message. They want the seize the power of life and death over everyone—the truly evil and truly innocent, and and all the everyday people in between, who are just trying to live their lives.

Authoritarianism 101

Increasing domestic surveillance and ginning up wars with other countries are tactics drawn straight from the authoritarian’s handbook. They tend to work in different ways.

Starting foreign wars and entanglements traditionally unify the country. The theory is that faced with a greater outside threat, the people will rally to their problematic leader. Citizens can be prevailed upon to put patriotism over politics. The leader becomes heroic in his defense of the nation. Violence overseas makes (in concept, if not in execution) a positive argument, offering a plea for unity and a vision of the nation’s identity in a time of trouble, even when the trouble has been engineered.

Domestic surveillance, however, works in the opposite fashion. It’s meant to intimidate opposition directly and also to strike fear into the hearts of the president’s foes. But intelligence is required to do this, much of it not allowed under current law.

Authoritarians have always sought to solidify or expand their power by spying on their own people. And they also tend to seek foreign entanglements—think Mussolini in Ethiopia, the entire Nazi enterprise, or Argentina in the Falklands.

And when it comes to bombing abroad and spying at home, the U.S. has its own history with both. Our foreign policy has included assassinations, bombings, and governments overthrown entirely. This country similarly has a grim record when it comes to surveillance: the monitoring of civil rights groups and campus leftists, along with the surveillance of students who came out against genocide in Gaza.

Reining in abuses

The high point of accountability for authoritarian-style actions both foreign and domestic took place when I was a child, with the Church Committee hearings in the 1970s, which hampered use of these tactics. As President, Jimmy Carter carried some of the Committee’s concerns forward in the years that followed.

Since that time, Ronald Reagan’s presidency dealt deliberate blows to the Church Committee advances and Carter’s executive orders in terms of illegal international entanglements. The War on Terror did even more damage, as well as the drone attacks that became commonplace under Republicans and Democrats alike.

Meanwhile, surveillance likewise became a perpetual tug of war, with the rights of Americans all too often threatened by the government’s or corporations’ ability to profit (literally or metaphorically) off information that can be clandestinely gathered. Wannabe and established authoritarians have to keep a lot of plates spinning to stay in power, and they’re loath to give up their best tools for doing so.

The likely outcomes

Will the current bombing work for Trump? Will he be able to get away with expanding U.S. surveillance as a result of OpenAI caving?

Whatever happens, Trump is sure to do a lot of damage. But the president’s biggest problem right now is that he is already in many ways a lame duck. He is profoundly, chronically unpopular.

In contrast, after the 9/11 terror attacks, George W. Bush’s popularity was stunningly high, reaching 90 percent by the end of September. Much of the world joined the U.S. in grieving the dramatic loss of so many civilians in a terror attack.

The situation could hardly be more different today. Though Europe and Canada have been hedging their disapproval on Iran, it’s clear that the U.S. did not gather support—or in some cases even inform—its allies.

After instigating war-on-terror torture and black sites and escalating violations of human rights in the wake of 9/11, George W. Bush unleashed an unnecessary and destructive war on Iraq in 2003, deeply misrepresenting the nuclear capability and threat represented by Saddam Hussein. And even then, Bush managed to get reelected by the American people.

But Trump is not Bush, and we are not living in 2003. There was no 9/11 to lift Trump’s popularity before he began his bombing campaigns. The attack on Venezuela was deeply unpopular; the assault on Iran has somehow been even less popular. A Sunday poll from Reuters/Ipsos showed that roughly one in four Americans surveyed approved of the president’s actions.

Surveying surveillance

When it comes to domestic surveillance, how terrible it is that OpenAI was willing to cut the deal that Anthropic would not. There are certainly ways in which the use of AI for surveilling the resistance to Trump could do serious harm to the American people.

But a weak ruler is still a weak ruler. And recent work from political scientist Marcel Dirsus suggests that expanding surveillance that has been made possible through technological advances may have drawbacks for governments using them.

As Dirsus wrote, “Even the most technologically advanced dictatorships remain susceptible to internal fractures that no algorithm can anticipate or prevent.” But technology can give an authoritarian “the illusion of control.”

Surveillance may help secure a hold on power, he acknowledges, but also argues that power becomes brittle, closed-off, and paranoid. Further, relying on surveillance to suppress dissent undermines trust and legitimacy, something that has to be maintined even when a government is operating under competitive authoritarian model.

What bombing abroad and the threat of greater surveillance at home make clear is that in the end, Trump and his minions are pursuing both strategies for the same reasons. As Spencer Ackerman wrote for the Nation this week, “The War on Terror was always being waged simultaneously at home and overseas.”

We’re seeing U.S. foreign policy and domestic policy fusing together. I would add that the killings there and the killings we have recently seen here at home serve the same purpose, and it is not the safety or well-being of Americans.

What you can do

We can and should express our fury over Iran and Venezuela (and over the threats the administration has been spouting about Cuba). There is, of course, the devastation of lives lost. But damage is also being inflicted on the very idea of solving political conflicts without resorting to war, and on any concept of international relations that doesn’t consist oligarchs plotting together in the ruins of political institutions and accountability.

The standard responses I’ve mentioned on here many times remain useful. You can demonstrate to let your representatives know how deeply you disapprove of these military strikes. You can let your representatives know directly by calling them. You can work to elect people who are committed to end this kind of warmongering. And when it comes to surveillance, you can support the legal work of organizations like the ACLU that challenge government surveillance of American citizens.

And for hands-on tactics to address the broader, tangible, and growing threat from our increasingly authoritarian government, you can join a 50501 call I’ll be speaking on at 7pm ET on Thursday, March 5. We’ll share concrete strategies on how to push back against ICE kidnapping and the expansion of immigrant detention in ways large and small. (And if you’re not on Bluesky to get the above link, you can just click here: https://bit.ly/march5masscall.)

With me will be Frank Abe, who has dedicated decades to memorializing detainees of the U.S. concentration camps for Japanese Americans established during World War II, and following their legacy. On the call, too, will be Sarah Parker, national coordinator for 50501, who has done astounding work in Florida to secure reproductive rights and more recently to resist this administration. We may also hear from on-the-ground organizers who have successfully repelled attempts to secure a warehouse for detention purposes in their community. I hope you’ll sign up to join us. 

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