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[R] Pesquisa acadêmica sobre trabalho com microtarefas de machine learning para IA

Oi pessoal! Minha pesquisa de mestrado busca entender o cotidiano dos brasileiros que trabalham com microtarefas online (tipo Appen, Clickworker, UHRS, Remotasks, TELUS AI, etc.). Busco voluntários que possam falar um pouco dessa experiência de trabalho, de forma anônima. Se você trabalha com isso, poderia responder aqui, mandar mensagem ou disponibilizar seu contato nesse formulário para que os pesquisadores entrem em contato com você? https://forms.gle/FgHtosM6LQswQmRn6 E se puder compartilhar com quem você conhece que realiza atividades de microtarefas/microtrabalho/treinamento para IA, ajuda muito! submitted by /u/strangerinthealpes [link] [comments]

OpenClaw has 500,000 instances and no enterprise kill switch

“Your AI? It’s my AI now.” The line came from Etay Maor, VP of Threat Intelligence at Cato Networks, in an exclusive interview with VentureBeat at RSAC 2026 — and it describes exactly what happened to a U.K. CEO whose OpenClaw instance ended up for sale on BreachForums. Maor's argument is that the industry handed AI agents the kind of autonomy it would never extend to a human employee, discarding zero trust, least privilege, and assume-breach in the process. The proof arrived on BreachForums three weeks before Maor’s interview. On February 22, a threat actor using the handle “fluffyduck” posted a listing advertising root shell access to the CEO’s computer for $25,000 in Monero or Litecoin. The shell was not the selling point. The CEO’s OpenClaw AI personal assistant was. The buyer would get every conversation the CEO had with the AI, the company’s full production database, Telegram bot tokens, Trading 212 API keys, and personal details the CEO disclosed to the assistant about family and finances. The threat actor noted the CEO was actively interacting with OpenClaw in real time, making the listing a live intelligence feed rather than a static data dump. Cato CTRL senior security researcher Vitaly Simonovich documented the listing on February 25. The CEO’s OpenClaw instance stored everything in plain-text Markdown files under ~/.openclaw/workspace/ with no encryption at rest. The threat actor didn't need to exfiltrate anything; the CEO had already assembled it. When the security team discovered the breach, there was no native enterprise kill switch, no management console, and no way to inventory how many other instances were running across the organization. OpenClaw runs locally with direct access to the host machine’s file system, network connections, browser sessions, and installed applications. The coverage to date has tracked its velocity, but what it hasn't mapped is the threat surface. The four vendors who used RSAC 2026 to ship responses still haven't produced

Claude Code's source code appears to have leaked: here's what we know

Anthropic appears to have accidentally revealed the inner workings of one of its most popular and lucrative AI products, the agentic AI harness Claude Code, to the public. A 59.8 MB JavaScript source map file (.map), intended for internal debugging, was inadvertently included in version 2.1.88 of the @anthropic-ai/claude-code package on the public npm registry pushed live earlier this morning. By 4:23 am ET, Chaofan Shou (@Fried_rice), an intern at Solayer Labs, broadcasted the discovery on X (formerly Twitter). The post, which included a direct download link to a hosted archive, acted as a digital flare. Within hours, the ~512,000-line TypeScript codebase was mirrored across GitHub and analyzed by thousands of developers. For Anthropic, a company currently riding a meteoric rise with a reported $19 billion annualized revenue run-rate as of March 2026, the leak is more than a security lapse; it is a strategic hemorrhage of intellectual property.The timing is particularly critical given the commercial velocity of the product. Market data indicates that Claude Code alone has achieved an annualized recurring revenue (ARR) of $2.5 billion, a figure that has more than doubled since the beginning of the year. With enterprise adoption accounting for 80% of its revenue, the leak provides competitors—from established giants to nimble rivals like Cursor—a literal blueprint for how to build a high-agency, reliable, and commercially viable AI agent. Anthropic confirmed the leak in a spokesperson’s e-mailed statement to VentureBeat, which reads: “Earlier today, a Claude Code release included some internal source code. No sensitive customer data or credentials were involved or exposed. This was a release packaging issue caused by human error, not a security breach. We're rolling out measures to prevent this from happening again.” The anatomy of agentic memory The most significant takeaway for competitors lies in how Anthropic solved "context entropy"—the tendency for AI agents to

Show HN: ProofShot – Give AI coding agents eyes to verify the UI they build

I use AI agents to build UI features daily. The thing that kept annoying me: the agent writes code but never sees what it actually looks like in the browser. It can’t tell if the layout is broken or if the console is throwing errors.<p>So I built a CLI that lets the agent open a browser, interact with the page, record what happens, and collect any errors. Then it bundles everything — video, screenshots, logs — into a self-contained HTML file I can review in seconds.<p><pre><code> proofshot start --run &quot;npm run dev&quot; --port 3000 # agent navigates, clicks, takes screenshots proofshot stop </code></pre> It works with whatever agent you use (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, etc.) — it’s just shell commands. It&#x27;s packaged as a skill so your AI coding agent knows exactly how it works. It&#x27;s built on agent-browser from Vercel Labs which is far better and faster than Playwright MCP.<p>It’s not a testing framework. The agent doesn’t decide pass&#x2F;fail. It just gives me the evidence so I don’t have to open the browser myself every time.<p>Open source and completely free.<p>Website: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;proofshot.argil.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;proofshot.argil.io&#x2F;</a>

Fixing AI failure: Three changes enterprises should make now

Recent reports about AI project failure rates have raised uncomfortable questions for organizations investing heavily in AI. Much of the discussion has focused on technical factors like model accuracy and data quality, but after watching dozens of AI initiatives launch, I’ve noticed that the biggest opportunities for improvement are often cultural, not technical. Internal projects that struggle tend to share common issues. For example, engineering teams build models that product managers don’t know how to use. Data scientists build prototypes that operations teams struggle to maintain. And AI applications sit unused because the people they were built for weren't involved in deciding what “useful” really meant. In contrast, organizations that achieve meaningful value with AI have figured out how to create the right kind of collaboration across departments, and established shared accountability for outcomes. The technology matters, but the organizational readiness matters just as much. Here are three practices I’ve observed that address the cultural and organizational barriers that can impede AI success. Expand AI literacy beyond engineering When only engineers understand how an AI system works and what it’s capable of, collaboration breaks down. Product managers can't evaluate trade-offs they don't understand. Designers can't create interfaces for capabilities they can't articulate. Analysts can't validate outputs they can't interpret. The solution isn't making everyone a data scientist. It's helping each role understand how AI applies to their specific work. Product managers need to grasp what kinds of generated content, predictions or recommendations are realistic given available data. Designers need to understand what the AI can actually do so they can design features users will find useful. Analysts need to know which AI outputs require human validation versus which can be trusted. When teams share this working vocabulary, AI stops being something that happens in

The Hook Experiment Failed — Why AI Self-Correction Is Structurally Impossible

9 hooks. 500+ lines of rules. 258 knowledge base files. 3 sessions. 4+ hours. 500K tokens. Zero business output. This is what happened when I let AI police itself.

[BUG] /usage command fails with rate_limit_error when checking usage data

**What's Wrong?** When running the `/usage` command to check current usage and limits in Claude Code, the UI displays an error: ``` Error: Failed to load usage data: {"error":{"message":"Rate limited. Please try again later.","type":"rate_limit_error"}} ``` The `/usage` dialog opens but immediately fails to load any data, making it impossible to monitor current token usage or remaining quota. **What Should Happen?** The `/usage` dialog should successfully load and display current session usage statistics, token consumption, and remaining quota without being rate limited by the usage data endpoint itself. **Steps to Reproduce** 1. Open Claude Code in an active session 2. Type `/usage` and press Enter 3. Observe the error: "Error: Failed to load usage data: rate_limit_error" **Additional Context** This appears related to #31637 where the `/api/oauth/usage` endpoint aggressively rate limits usage monitoring requests. The error occurs on the Anthropic Max plan. **Environment** - Claude Code version: 2.1.71 (Claude Code) - OS: Windows 10 Pro (Build 19045) - Terminal: Windows Terminal 1.23.20211.0 - Platform: Anthropic Max

Kristi Noem Nearly Destroyed FEMA. Will Her Exit Save It?

*This story was originally published b*y [Grist](https://grist.org/politics/kristi-noem-fema-trump-markwayne-mullin/) *and is reproduced here as part of the* [Climate Desk](http://www.climatedesk.org/) *collaboration.* During the year she spent leading the US Department of Homeland Security, or DHS, Kristi Noem faced a torrent of criticism. Lawmakers from both parties assailed her for lying about the [shooting of protestors](https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cre02yzv807o) in Minneapolis and spending [millions of dollars](https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/terribly-awkward-gop-senator-scolds-164242119.html) on television commercials. Government audits concluded that she “systematically obstructed” investigations and created security risks at airports. Now she has become the first cabinet-level official fired by President Donald Trump during his second term. After a combative hearing last week, during which Noem seemed to mislead Congress about whether Trump approved her ad spending, the president fired her. As DHS secretary, Noem also raised eyebrows for an unprecedented degree of control over staffing and spending at the Federal Emergency Management Agency. She [paused most FEMA payments](https://grist.org/extreme-weather/kristi-noem-fema-dhs-trump-disaster/), leading to extensive delays for disaster recovery, and sought to [slash the agency’s on-call workforce](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/06/climate/fema-staff-cuts-1000-workers.html) by thousands of employees. She also expressed a desire to downsize or eliminate the agency entirely, shifting the burden of disaster relief onto the states. A growing number of critics and experts believe that Noem’s interference with FEMA may well have been illegal. This week, two Senate Democrats [released a report](https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/library/files/fema-report/) alleging that Noem’s blanket freeze on FEMA payments violated federal law. At the same time, lawyers for a federal workers’ union [argued to a federal judge](https://www.govexec.com/workforce/2026/03/DOJ-contradicts-FEMA-on-who-approved-mass-firings/411860/) in California that Noem’s workforce cuts also violated the law. In both cases, critics pointed to legislation passed after Hurricane Katrina, which prohibits DHS from interfering with FEMA. “I have reason to believe that you’re violating the law, either knowingly or unknowingly,” said Sen. Thom Tillis, a Republican representing North Carolina, during his questioning of Noem. > “I think Congress never anticipated [that] what has happened would happen, or they would have probably put in more clarity” These accusations will remain relevant if Noem’s apparent successor, Oklahoma Senator Markwayne Mullin, continues her quest to make permanent changes to FEMA’s structure—a goal that the president has frequently suggested he supports. Though President Trump has in many cases been able to make unilateral cuts to federal programs on a rapid timeline—as with the Department of Education and US Agency for International Development—the post-Katrina law may put FEMA on stronger footing for the rest of the president’s term. “To my knowledge, DHS has never been involved in decision-making about the FEMA workforce,” said MaryAnn Tierney, a former FEMA official who led the agency’s regional office on the Eastern Seaboard for more than a decade. The Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act of 2006 emerged from a series of federal investigations into the agency’s failures after the devastating storm, which killed more than 1,400 people and submerged much of New Orleans. A bipartisan select committee in the House of Representatives found that the agency’s leaders had dithered for days before activating key response measures, and that there were numerous breakdowns in the agency’s chain of command. Congress also found that FEMA had withered after the Bush administration placed it under the newly-created Department of Homeland Security, where leaders were focused on combating terrorism in the wake of 9/11. As a result, they did very little planning for a major natural disaster like Katrina. State emergency managers testified to Congress that FEMA was “emaciated and anemic” and had been “lost in the shuffle” at DHS. Congress tried to fix this in 2006 with a law requiring that FEMA leadership have experience in emergency management and giving the agency the ability to report directly to the president during disasters. The law also stated that “the secretary [of DHS] may not substantially or significantly reduce the authorities, responsibilities, or functions…or the capability of the agency.” Noem attempted to do just this. Trump has not nominated anyone to lead FEMA since he assumed office last year—the law requires a FEMA administrator with at least five years of emergency management experience—and has instead designated three different acting administrators, avoiding Senate confirmation and the emergency management experience requirement. The most recent,

Extra! Extra! 3/8

[](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!QSz6!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff77f594e-6606-41d3-a0d0-47208fab47b5_1488x1348.jpeg) Spotted in Jay Kuo’s “[Just for Skeets and Giggles](https://statuskuo.substack.com/p/just-for-skeets-and-giggles-3726).” Hi, all, and happy Sunday. It’s been another bear of a week, so it’s more important than ever to stop and take in the remarkable amount of good news we ALSO had. Remember, it’s not only OK to take a break from doomscrolling to celebrate these wins—it’s necessary. Every army needs the occasional morale boost; ours is no exception. So read this list, please, and share it with others who feel like “nothing good is happening.” In fact quite a bit is, but folks won’t know about it if we don’t spread the word. Your hard work matters. It’s the reason these good news lists come out every week. So enjoy this post, celebrate it…and know that you’re the reason we’ll have another one next week. ## Celebrate This! 🎉 Dr. Vinay Prasad, the FDA’s polarizing vaccine chief, [is leaving the agency](https://apnews.com/article/vinay-prasad-fda-vaccines-laura-loomer-83030ad6eb7651095e3c40444dd69f12). Cook County prosecutors [dismissed 21 cases](https://article.wn.com/view-lemonde/2026/03/04/Cook_County_prosecutors_dismiss_21_cases_against_ICE_protest/#/related_news) that were filed against protesters at the ICE processing center in Broadview, IL, including charges for 15 moms who hopped concrete barricades in a highly-publicized act of civil disobedience. A federal judge [ruled](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/07/us/politics/judge-kari-lake-voa-layoffs.html) that the appointment of Kari Lake, the head of Voice of America’s oversight agency, was invalid, voiding mass layoffs that she had carried out at the federally funded news group last year. Support for abolishing ICE has hit a new high in [this week's Economist / YouGov poll](https://d3nkl3psvxxpe9.cloudfront.net/documents/econTabReport_ubu5DXD.pdf#page=37). Half (50%) of Americans now somewhat or strongly support abolishing ICE. Only 39% oppose abolishing the agency. In Los Angeles, a mobile clinic [is now bringing mammograms](https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/mobile-clinic-brings-mammograms-women-110000308.html?ck_subscriber_id=2496857656&guccounter=1) to women on Skid Row. Oregon state Democratic lawmakers [approved a measure that would prevent federal immigration officers from wearing masks](https://www.opb.org/article/2026/03/05/oregon-lawmakers-approve-measure-prohibit-masks-ice-agents/). A federal court [ordered the Trump administration](https://ctmirror.org/2025/12/12/fema-funding-bric-judge-orders-restored/) to restore billions in funding for the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) program, which had been canceled. This ruling came after a lawsuit from 22 Democratic Attorneys General. EVs are officially [making the air cleaner.​](https://grist.org/solutions/evs-are-already-making-your-air-cleaner/?sh_kit=7a2950363f4b90b1881ae76c68d24551846eea9063b67a6a14e9fa39bc419e40) A Minnesota prosecutor [said her office in Hennepin County is investigating the "potentially ​unlawful behavior" of federal agents](https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/top-border-patrol-official-other-federal-agents-being-investigated-by-2026-03-02/?sh_kit=7a2950363f4b90b1881ae76c68d24551846eea9063b67a6a14e9fa39bc419e40), including Gregory Bovino, during the ICE surge earlier this year. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and New York Governor Kathy Hochul [announced the first neighborhoods in the city that will get free childcare for 2-year-olds](https://9905ebc8.click.kit-mail3.com/gku2xo2do4b5hl9l76wtrh8elgvx5cnm6o68d7p782zg636ozlk9ew0xwvwmgeqzz3r780kdnqvevm69r07573kpzx56nkz4m8p25ne22kq3dk5rnexddzln745h9p9e5/58hvh7hgqdnzmga7/aHR0cHM6Ly9hYmM3bnkuY29tL3Bvc3QvbWFtZGFuaS1ob2NodWwtdW52ZWlsLWZpcnN0LW55Yy1uZWlnaGJvcmhvb2RzLWdldC1mcmVlLWNoaWxkLWNhcmUtMi15ZWFyLW9sZHMtZmFsbC8xODY3MTQ4NS8=). [More people in rural majority-Latino TX counties turned out to vote in the Democratic primary](https://bsky.app/profile/tonolatino.bsky.social/post/3mgbtqsico22y) than the number of people who voted for Harris in 2024. GOP Rep. Tony Gonzales [dropped his re-election bid](https://ground.news/article/gop-rep-tony-gonzales-drops-re-election-bid-amid-ethics-probe-into-his-affair-with-a-staffer_dc69c3) amid an ethics probe into his affair with a staffer. Rep. Burgess Owens (R-Utah) [will not seek reelection this November](https://www.axios.com/local/salt-lake-city/2026/03/04/burgess-owens-wont-seek-reelection?emci=9406156c-bd19-f111-a69a-000d3a1

Recall vs. Wisdom: What Over-Personalization Reveals About the Future of Relational AI

[Original Reddit post](https://www.reddit.com/r/ArtificialInteligence/comments/1ro4k19/recall_vs_wisdom_what_overpersonalization_reveals/) The over-personalization problem isn’t really about memory. It’s about relationship. When an AI assistant drags your hiking preferences into a weather query, the failure isn’t technical recall gone haywire. It’s a system that has no idea what it means to actually be in a conversation with someone. That distinction matters more than it might seem, because the entire industry just bet big on the opposite assumption. Google recently rolled out automatic memory for Gemini. The feature is on by default. Without any prompting from the user, Gemini now recalls “key details and preferences” from past conversations and injects them into future responses. Google frames this as “Personal Intelligence,” a system that connects the dots across Gmail, Photos, Search, and YouTube to make the assistant “uniquely helpful for you.” And it’s not just Gemini. This is part of a broader push to make memory the centerpiece of the AI assistant experience. The pitch is simple: the more an AI knows about you, the better it serves you. But OP-Bench, the first systematic benchmark for over-personalization, tells a different story. It turns out that the more aggressively a system uses what it remembers, the worse the interaction gets. Not occasionally. Universally. Every memory-augmented system they tested showed severe over-personalization. And the more sophisticated the memory architecture, the harder it failed. We’ve been so focused on the capacity to remember that we’ve neglected the wisdom of when to use what we remember. That’s not an engineering oversight. It’s a relational one. Memory Without Attunement Is Just Surveillance Here’s the thing. A system that remembers everything about you and surfaces it indiscriminately isn’t being helpful. It’s performing ambient surveillance dressed up as personalization. People describe over-personalizing systems as “creepy” and “overly familiar,” and those aren’t technical complaints. They’re relational ones. The system has violated something unspoken about when personal knowledge should enter a conversation. Google’s approach makes this tension vivid. Gemini doesn’t just remember what you explicitly told it to remember. It silently mines your past conversations for details and preferences, then weaves them into future responses without asking whether that’s what you wanted. The feature shipped turned on by default. You have to go dig through Settings, find “Personal context,” and manually toggle it off. If you’re a Google AI Pro or Ultra subscriber, the “Personal Intelligence” layer goes further, pulling context from your email, your photos, your search history. The integration is seamless, which is exactly what makes it concerning. This maps onto one of the foundational problems in relational AI: the difference between knowing about someone and being attuned to them. Knowing about someone is a database operation. You store facts, retrieve them, insert them into responses. Attunement is qualitatively different. It requires reading the current moment, understanding what the person actually needs right now, and making a judgment call about which pieces of shared history belong in this exchange and which ones don’t. OP-Bench makes this distinction measurable for the first time. Their three failure modes map cleanly onto relational breakdowns. Irrelevance is a failure of contextual reading: the system can’t tell the difference between “semantically similar” and “conversationally appropriate.” Sycophancy is a failure of honesty: the system weaponizes personal knowledge to tell you what you want to hear instead of what’s true. Repetition is a failure of presence: the system is stuck rehashing old interactions instead of engaging with this one. All three are failures of attunement, not memory. The Attention Hijack The technical finding about “memory hijacking” deserves a closer look. When researchers examined attention patterns, they found that memory-augmented models attend to retrieved memory tokens at roughly twice the rate they attend to the actual user query. Let that sink in. The model is paying more attention to what it already knows about you than to what you’re saying right now. In any healthy relationship, the balance between history and presence matters. You bring what you know about the other person into the conversation, but you don’t let it drown out your ability to listen. Over-personalizing systems have lost that balance entirely. They’re so saturated with stored context that they can’t hear the present moment. And this isn’t just a chatbot problem. As we build multi-agent systems where AI agents maintain persistent memory about users, tasks, and each other, the attention hijacking problem scales in ways that should worry anyone thinking about agent coordination. An agent that over-attends to stored context about another agent’s past behavior wil

The worst energy crisis in history is on the horizon [very long post]

https://redlib.catsarch.com/r/stupidpol/comments/1rmueer/the_worst_energy_crisis_in_history_is_on_the/ > I don't think I need to talk about how devastating the war on Iran has been for the region. It's a brainless slaughter of human life and wealth that will leave Israel, America, and the Gulf much worse off. > > I work in the oil and gas industry and have had a fascination with energy since I was a kid. I'm telling you as bad as the oil situation sounds, it's going to get significantly worse and while there are a few headlines about how the price of fuel is up, not enough people are warning of a global energy crisis that could come worse than anything ever seen. Honestly most people in my industry even are not taking this seriously enough because almost no one working today was working during the 70s when things were bad. > > I started really following the war on Tuesday and as soon as I dug in I realized how overconfident Wall Street was about this conflict ending. Banks were forecasting oil would go to mid $70s per barrel, up from $65 before the war (remember this number), JP Morgan called it early at $100. That isn't even close to enough. Finally today there have been headlines about how it could go to $150 or $200 in the coming weeks. That is more like it but it could get much worse still. > > **How do you know this will be that bad?** > > The important benchmark I'm using are the oil crises of the 70s. I'll point out that both of those crises were caused by Israel fighting with it's neighbors and revolution in Iran. Both the crisis of 1973 and 1979 saw 6-7% of oil production taken offline resulting in a 400% and 150% spike in the price respectively. With that said, the oil tied up in the Gulf is 3 times that level. Oil isn't just any commodity, you need it to have a functioning society and it's not going away any time soon. Societies that lose access to oil will face collapse. If 20% of the world's car production went offline tomorrow, cars would be more sought after but you can hold on to your car longer, buy a used one, buy one you didn't want, whatever. Losing access to oil means your car won't work at all. 90% of what you need might as well be 0%. You can't to work with 9/10ths of your journey completed. So take that 20% of global production being cut and compare it to the much lower cuts of the 70s which sent the world's economy into recessions and you can't start to see how big the problem is. > > You might be asking if this is so bad why hasn't the world exploded yet? Energy crises can take months to manifest. Oil prices didn't peak after the Ukraine invasion until about six months after the crisis started. Many other energy shortages in the past are similar with months between the start and the peak with a steady climb in between. > > The Strait of Hormuz being closed leaves all that oil and gas with nowhere to go as you might have heard. I'm going to emphasize this more than just here but there are many people saying stuff that have no idea what they're talking about. There is almost no way to get the oil out. Some pipelines are available but two have already been struck by Iran. At best 25% of Gulf oil can be sent on the East-West Arabia pipeline to the Red Sea but that's not even close to enough to relieve the crisis. There were talks to expand that pipeline a few years ago but they fell through. Apparently that stupid line city project was more important to the Arabians than even a little bit of security. > > The headlines you're seeing about shutting down oil and gas production being a headache are more or less accurate. Oil pumps don't have an on/off switch. Shutting down and ramping up production takes time. Another point I'll emphasize more than once: even if the war ended tomorrow, and it doesn't look like it will, shutting down a bunch of production means it's not going to come back anytime soon-which would be whatever if it was 2020 and there was a glut of oil, but it isn't. There was supposed to be a small surplus of oil this year to keep prices down but that's gone now. > > **How and why is there so much damage?** > > If you know where to look there are smart people on this topic who do have a holistic picture of what is going on. But one thing I haven't seen a single person mention is Iran, in attacking their neighbors, is setting up for success when the conflict is over. Their neighbors in the Gulf and to their north in the Caucuses and Central Asia, are their economic competitors. By bombing their energy production Iran is making sure the market will be open for them when the war ends, whether that's in a week or a year. It's in their interest to blow up all the fields, processing plants, refineries, smelters, pipelines and liquefaction facilities while the bullets are flying and they can get away with it. > > On top of all of that, the Gulf States in the region as well as other countries are rivals with Iran so even without the economic picture the Iranians want to strike the

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) lays out the connections between Trump, Russia, and Epstein (transcript included)

**NOTE:** This transcript now appears in [the Senate section of the official *Congessional Record* of March 5, 2026, pages 18 - 23,](https://www.congress.gov/119/crec/2026/03/05/172/42/CREC-2026-03-05-senate.pdf) with Sen. Whitehouse's own list of sources appended. ----- The following is the YouTube transcript which I cleaned up, checked for errors, lightly edited for readability, verified spelling of proper names via Wikipedia, and added links to any quotes that I checked myself. (EDITED to add links to individuals mentioned, correct placement of quotes, and insert links to original articles where I could find them online) I found myself doing it anyway just for me, to keep track of who's who, and then I realized I might as well do it for you as well. This is an unparalleled speech: while the substance of it might be available elsewhere and I've just missed it, Sen. Whitehouse has answered a lot of questions in my mind about not just the links between Trump, Russia, and Epstein -- and William Barr as one of many links -- but also about the recording equipment and blackmail angle that is present in so many survivor accounts and so noticeably absent everywhere else. It's truly worth listening to, but if you can't sit still that long, here's the transcript. ----- Thank you, Madam President. It was the spring of 2019. Public and media interest in special counsel [Robert Mueller's report into Russia's election interference operation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mueller_special_counsel_investigation) reached a fever pitch. There had been a steady drip, drip, drip of reporting on the Trump team's cozy and peculiar relationship with Russia. Since his surprise election victory in 2016, ahead of the Mueller report's release, Trump's Attorney General, Bill Barr, [issued a letter to Congress purporting to summarize the report's findings.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barr_letter) The letter declared that Russia and the Trump campaign did not collude to steal the election. The press, ravenous for any news of the long-anticipated Mueller report's conclusion, largely accepted [Attorney General Barr's](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Barr) narrow, carefully worded conclusion and, not yet having access to the full report, blasted the attorney general's summary around the world. Trump himself declared, all caps, NO COLLUSION. He said he had been cleared of the Russia "hoax," a term he reserves only to describe things that are true, like climate change. Frustrated, Mueller wrote to Barr that the attorney general's letter did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of the investigation. But by the time [the dense, voluminous Mueller report](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mueller_report) was issued the month after Barr's letter, its message had been obscured. The Mueller report actually concluded that the Trump campaign knew of and welcomed Russian interference and expected to benefit from it. That conclusion was later echoed and reinforced by [an investigation led by then-chairman Marco Rubio's Senate Intelligence Committee,](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mueller_report#Senate_Intelligence_Committee) a bipartisan report. But Barr's scheme had largely worked. Many in the media and in the Democratic Party seemed to internalize that the Russia speculation had perhaps gotten out of hand, and that perhaps we had been wrong to believe there was a troubling connection between Trump and Russia after all. But were we? Let's take a look at a sampling of what Trump has done for Russia just lately, and usually at the expense of American interests. There are many, but here's a top 10. **One,** after Trump and Vice President Vance theatrically chastised the heroic Ukrainian President Zelenskyy in front of TV cameras in the Oval Office last year, Trump paused our weapons shipments to Ukraine. **Two,** in July, during the worst Russian bombing campaign of the war until that point, Trump paused an already funded weapons shipment for Ukraine, including the Patriot interceptors that protect civilians from Putin's savage attacks. **Three,** that same month, Trump's Treasury Department stopped imposing new sanctions and closing sanctions loopholes, effectively allowing dummy corporations to send funds, chips, and military equipment to Russia. **Four,** leaked phone calls show that White House envoy [Steve Witkoff](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Witkoff) and Putin envoy [Kirill Dmitriev](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirill_Dmitriev) have worked together closely behind the scenes on a peace deal favorable to Russia. **Five,** last summer, Trump rolled out the presidential red carpet for the Russian dictator on American soil. with a summit in Alaska that yielded unsurprisingly no gains toward ending the war in Ukraine. **Six,** Trump's vice president traveled to the Munich Security Conference last year to parrot Russia's anti-western talking points pushed by right-wing groups that Puti

Chop Wood, Carry Water 3/6

[](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!wWe9!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd1bf0828-28c4-4779-86a7-62cb794aef7b_5673x4000.jpeg) The We The People weekly protest, Eau Claire, WI, Photograph, Liz Nash Hi, all, and happy Friday. We made it through another week! And what a week it was. It wasn’t great for us, of course, but boy was it worse for Trump. Not only did he have to fire the incorrigibly corrupt and sadistic Kristi Noem and continue to defend a horrifically unpopular and mismanaged war, but his newest economic numbers are absolutely disastrous. [According to CNN](https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/06/economy/us-jobs-report-february) the US economy lost 92,000 jobs in February and the unemployment rate rose to 4.4%. Economists were expecting a net gain of 60,000 jobs last month while December’s job gains of 48,000 were revised down to a loss of 17,000 jobs. This is bad, folks. More significant job declines were found in health care (down 28,000 jobs); leisure and hospitality (down 27,000 jobs); and construction (down 11,000 jobs). Should we be surprised? Of course not. Trump’s economic agenda, such as it is, is custom-made to destroy an economy. Mass deportation is known to [kill jobs](https://www.epi.org/305445/pre/789ab2a96c1c16fa04f30610bd97417d70ca8ac6179577810ba6fce978111df5/), [raise prices](https://sites.utexas.edu/macro/2025/09/09/the-economic-ripple-effects-of-mass-deportations/), and [shrink the economy](https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/report/mass-deportation/); it is doing just that. Tariffs are skyrocketing prices. Tourism is down ([11 million fewer visitors in 2025](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/20/travel/us-tourism-declines-eu-canada.html)!), federal workers have been laid off in record numbers, and healthcare jobs are being gutted as hospitals and clinics close or cut jobs due to Trump’s Medicaid cuts. It’s all so predictable. But now we’ve got the price of gas to contend with as well. According to the [Gas Buddy](https://x.com/GasBuddyGuy/status/2029610494131089685) the last few days have seen the 6th, 8th and 9th largest single day increases in average diesel prices going back to 2000. Crude oil prices are up 25% [since the start](https://defendamericaaction.us16.list-manage.com/track/click?u=3eb4d08a510c32b2f2ff20fb3&id=719848d3c3&e=adb61354d3) of the conflict, [costing American consumers billions](https://defendamericaaction.us16.list-manage.com/track/click?u=3eb4d08a510c32b2f2ff20fb3&id=12cc0f04a8&e=adb61354d3) at the gas pump. Diesel prices are now [over $4 a gallon](https://defendamericaaction.us16.list-manage.com/track/click?u=3eb4d08a510c32b2f2ff20fb3&id=055e6b13e7&e=adb61354d3) – threatening consumers with sticker shock on anything that travels by truck – from food to furniture. Rising oil and gas prices will also cause utility bills to spike, since [44 percent of American electricity](https://defendamericaaction.us16.list-manage.com/track/click?u=3eb4d08a510c32b2f2ff20fb3&id=d9492bb2f1&e=adb61354d3) is generated from natural gas and oil products. Have I mentioned that the daily cost of Trump’s war in Iran is [an estimated $1 billion a day](https://democrats.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=90379082c3d9e6a03baf3f677&id=ef6b6844d9&e=aa53a71c78), enough to cover a full year of health care for 110,000 Medicaid enrollees. Anyway. You get the point. Trump’s presidency is a disaster in every conceivable way. Our job is to amplify that fact, hold our Congressional representatives’ feet to the fire about it, and get ready to throw a WHOLE lot of Republicans out of office over it in November. We also get to hold every Congressmember to account for their votes on the War Powers Resolution yesterday. This includes castigating the Republicans and [four Democrats](https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/the-democrats-who-voted-against-the-war-powers-resolution/ar-AA1XFCfg)—Henry Cuellar, Greg Landsman, Juan Vargas, and Jared Golden—who voted against it, and thanking every lawmaker who supported it, which includes all Democrats other than the four above, plus Massie and Davidson. OK, all. I’m going to end it here and get on to our actions. Because that, after all, is how we rewrite the story. Let’s goooo! ## Call Your Senators (find yours [here](https://www.senate.gov/senators/senators-contact.htm)) 📲 Hi, I’m a constituent calling from [zip]. My name is \_\_\_\_\_\_. I’m calling to demand that Congress put an end to Trump’s unconstitutional and unwanted war with Iran. I urge the Senator to introduce and vote on another war powers resolution to exert Congress’s constitutional auth

Dems Need to Wise Up: ICE Is a Threat to Our Elections

 Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, joined by House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and fellow congressional Democrats, speaks at a press conference on DHS funding at the U.S. Capitol on Feb. 4, 2026. Photo: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images A high-profile election denier is [leading election integrity work](https://www.thebulwark.com/p/election-2026-dhs-ice-polling-places-latino-voters) at the Department of Homeland Security. Trump and congressional Republicans are pushing the [SAVE America Act](https://www.cornyn.senate.gov/news/cornyn-lee-roy-introduce-the-save-america-act/) and threatening to “[nationalize](https://stateline.org/2026/02/06/trumps-calls-to-nationalize-elections-have-state-local-election-officials-bracing-for-tumult/)” elections, purportedly to prevent undocumented immigrants from voting. But despite an occasional [murmur](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/19/podcasts/the-daily/ice-democrats-senator-catherine-cortez-masto.html) from Democrats that they are concerned about Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents deploying to polling places around the country, they’re doing almost nothing to stop this nightmare scenario. In response to the horrific killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, Democrats have partially shut down the government, holding DHS spending in limbo as they [demand reforms to ICE](https://theintercept.com/2026/02/05/schumer-ice-reforms-elizabeth-warren/). But instead of looking ahead to the midterms, Democrats have drawn most of their demands from the [same well](https://jeffries.house.gov/2026/02/04/leaders-jeffries-and-schumer-deliver-urgent-ice-reform-demands-to-republican-leadership/) of “community policing” policies that became popular during the Black Lives Matter era, like better use-of-force policies, eliminating racial profiling, and deploying more body cameras. The rest of the Democrats’ wish list are proposals to ban things that are already illegal (like entering homes without a warrant or creating databases of activists) or are almost comically toothless, like regulating the uniforms DHS agents wear on the street. > The department is quickly metastasizing into a grave threat to the midterms, public safety, and our democracy. The department is quickly metastasizing into a grave threat to the midterms, public safety, and our democracy — and Democrats are wasting time worried about their uniforms. Although Heather Honey, who pushed the theory that the 2020 race was stolen from Trump and serves in a newly created role as the administration’s deputy assistant secretary for election integrity, told elections officials on a private call last week that ICE would not be at polling sites, state officials reportedly [weren’t reassured](https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/dhs-official-state-election-chiefs-wont-be-ice-agents-polling-places-rcna260706). Advocacy organizations have warned that even if that holds true, just the possibility could have a [“chilling” effect](https://www.thebulwark.com/p/election-2026-dhs-ice-polling-places-latino-voters) on turnout. If Democrats want to prevent ICE from being used to interfere with elections, they have to be prepared to demand more — and be willing not to fund DHS until next year if they don’t get these concessions. First and foremost, Democrats need to stop the department’s heavily politicized “[wartime](https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/12/31/ice-wartime-recruitment-push)” recruitment drive. Thanks to H.R. 1, otherwise known as the [One Big Beautiful Bill Act](https://theintercept.com/2025/07/01/trump-big-beautiful-bill-passes-ice-budget/), ICE has more than [doubled](https://www.govexec.com/workforce/2026/01/ice-more-doubled-its-workforce-2025/410461/) the number of officers and agents in its ranks since Trump took office. In spite of [merit system](https://www.mspb.gov/msp/meritsystemsprinciples.htm) principles which prohibit politicized recruitment, DHS has used its massive influx of cash to target conservative-coded media, gun shows, and NASCAR races, and has [used](https://www.cbc.ca/news/ice-recruiting-9.7058294) white nationalist, [neo-Nazi iconography](https://theintercept.com/2026/01/13/dhs-ice-white-nationalist-neo-nazi/) in its recruitment advertising. The Department of Justice has similarly [focused](https://www.nytimes.

ICE Poses a Real Threat to Our Elections

 Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, joined by House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and fellow congressional Democrats, speaks at a press conference on DHS funding at the U.S. Capitol on Feb. 4, 2026. Photo: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images A high-profile election denier is [leading election integrity work](https://www.thebulwark.com/p/election-2026-dhs-ice-polling-places-latino-voters) at the Department of Homeland Security. Trump and congressional Republicans are pushing the [SAVE America Act](https://www.cornyn.senate.gov/news/cornyn-lee-roy-introduce-the-save-america-act/) and threatening to “[nationalize](https://stateline.org/2026/02/06/trumps-calls-to-nationalize-elections-have-state-local-election-officials-bracing-for-tumult/)” elections, purportedly to prevent undocumented immigrants from voting. But despite an occasional [murmur](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/19/podcasts/the-daily/ice-democrats-senator-catherine-cortez-masto.html) from Democrats that they are concerned about Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents deploying to polling places around the country, they’re doing almost nothing to stop this nightmare scenario. In response to the horrific killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, Democrats have partially shut down the government, holding DHS spending in limbo as they [demand reforms to ICE](https://theintercept.com/2026/02/05/schumer-ice-reforms-elizabeth-warren/). But instead of looking ahead to the midterms, Democrats have drawn most of their demands from the [same well](https://jeffries.house.gov/2026/02/04/leaders-jeffries-and-schumer-deliver-urgent-ice-reform-demands-to-republican-leadership/) of “community policing” policies that became popular during the Black Lives Matter era, like better use-of-force policies, eliminating racial profiling, and deploying more body cameras. The rest of the Democrats’ wish list are proposals to ban things that are already illegal (like entering homes without a warrant or creating databases of activists) or are almost comically toothless, like regulating the uniforms DHS agents wear on the street. > The department is quickly metastasizing into a grave threat to the midterms, public safety, and our democracy. The department is quickly metastasizing into a grave threat to the midterms, public safety, and our democracy — and Democrats are wasting time worried about their uniforms. Although Heather Honey, who pushed the theory that the 2020 race was stolen from Trump and serves in a newly created role as the administration’s deputy assistant secretary for election integrity, told elections officials on a private call last week that ICE would not be at polling sites, state officials reportedly [weren’t reassured](https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/dhs-official-state-election-chiefs-wont-be-ice-agents-polling-places-rcna260706). Advocacy organizations have warned that even if that holds true, just the possibility could have a [“chilling” effect](https://www.thebulwark.com/p/election-2026-dhs-ice-polling-places-latino-voters) on turnout. If Democrats want to prevent ICE from being used to interfere with elections, they have to be prepared to demand more — and be willing not to fund DHS until next year if they don’t get these concessions. First and foremost, Democrats need to stop the department’s heavily politicized “[wartime](https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/12/31/ice-wartime-recruitment-push)” recruitment drive. Thanks to H.R. 1, otherwise known as the [One Big Beautiful Bill Act](https://theintercept.com/2025/07/01/trump-big-beautiful-bill-passes-ice-budget/), ICE has more than [doubled](https://www.govexec.com/workforce/2026/01/ice-more-doubled-its-workforce-2025/410461/) the number of officers and agents in its ranks since Trump took office. In spite of [merit system](https://www.mspb.gov/msp/meritsystemsprinciples.htm) principles which prohibit politicized recruitment, DHS has used its massive influx of cash to target conservative-coded media, gun shows, and NASCAR races, and has [used](https://www.cbc.ca/news/ice-recruiting-9.7058294) white nationalist, [neo-Nazi iconography](https://theintercept.com/2026/01/13/dhs-ice-white-nationalist-neo-nazi/) in its recruitment advertising. The Department of Justice has similarly [focused](https://www.nytimes.c