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April 23, 2025

- The Man Who Wants AI to Help You ‘Cheat on Everything’

- 'They Sometimes Worry That I’m Dead Already:' Deep-Sea Fishers Fight for Wi-Fi

- Podcast: Cops Are Using AI Bots to Surveil People

NEWS | MATTHEW GAULT | MATTHEW GAULT | APR 23, 2025, 10:30 AM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The Man Who Wants AI to Help You ‘Cheat on Everything’ (free)

Roy Lee used AI to beat challenging technical interviews, now he wants people to do the same thing with every human interaction. We tested the tool and it kinda sucks.

Last month, Roy Lee was suspended from Columbia after he was accused of using AI to “cheat” on technical job interviews for Amazon, Meta, and TikTok. On Sunday, he announced that he raised $5.3 million to start Cluely, a new startup that aims to allow users to similarly “cheat on everything.”

Cluely went viral when it launched earlier this week thanks to a commercial Lee posted on X. In the video, Lee bumbles his way through a date. A large UI sits between him and his date, feeding him information about the woman’s interests and coaching him on how to talk to her.

In an interview, however, Lee told me that his AI tool is not really cheating.

“Initially it will feel like cheating, but if we win, nobody will think this is cheating,” Lee told me.

Cheating or not, after testing Cluely myself, I’m not sure it will help anyone land a job.

“Everytime you ask me something I just hit command+enter and you can’t really see that I’m using it and you also can’t really see that I’m reading any responses, but Cluely is kind of just sitting here, helping along,” Lee said when I spoke to him on Zoom on Tuesday.

Lee wants people to use Cluely on “Sales calls. Meetings. Negotiations,” the “manifesto” on the software’s website says. “If there’s a faster way to win—we’ll take it. We built Cluely so you never have to think alone again. It sees your screen. Hears your audio. Feeds you answers in real time. While others guess—you’re already right.”

Cluely is out. cheat on everything. pic.twitter.com/EsRXQaCfUI

— Roy (@im_roy_lee) April 20, 2025

Cluely’s viral video racked up more than 10 million views on X. A lot of the reactions were negative.

I guess I just didn't fully grasp how many losers there are in the world. Like I knew there were a lot of losers out there, but the amount of losers that would have to exist to, one, make this product feasible and, two, to make this ad's existence possible is hard to process. https://t.co/RxM8X8wgAW

— Ryan Broderick (@broderick) April 21, 2025

I don’t understand why a guy would commission an expensive commercial about his AI app in which he goes on a date, lies to a girl about his age, pays for her fancy dinner, and then despite all this couldn’t get laid. He willingly chose this script. Can someone please explain? https://t.co/by5PE2Ghcb

— Eli Schiff (@eli_schiff) April 21, 2025

Lee said he expected the critiques that he’d created a dystopian piece of software that would “destroy the human connection and the essence of humanity.”

“I’m pretty comfortable taking that negative PR,” he told me.

Cluely is the latest attempt to bring large language models into the “real world” after products like the Humane Pin and Rabbit R1 were widely hyped but were widely disappointing. It’s also reminiscent of a project that Joseph wrote about out of Harvard, where students put facial recognition software into a pair of Meta smart glasses.

“The second realm of negative feedback is that ‘cheating is inherently unethical and immoral.’ This is where we’re trying to do a lot of reframing around what exactly defines cheating, what cheating really is, and what cheating will look like in a future that is AI native,” he said.

Lee also went viral earlier this year when he used an AI program of his own designed to pass the brutal technical interviews of Amazon, Meta, and TikTok. He claimed he landed gigs at several of the companies but didn’t take any of them. Instead he uploaded a video of himself using the tool to YouTube and used the buzz to launch Interview Coder, a commercial version of the software.

At the time, Lee was a student at Columbia, and someone sent a letter to the university claiming to be a concerned Amazon executive. The letter accused Lee of “cheating” in the interview. Columbia took disciplinary action. Lee dropped out of the University and struck out on his own with another former student Neel Shanmugam.

Interview Coder worked by watching your screen, pinging ChatGPT, and then giving you an answer to the coding problem it saw in an overlay. Cluely is the same thing but the use case is expanded beyond code.

I tried out a test version of Cluely in a mock interview with Emanuel Maiberg. We pretended Emanuel was interviewing me for a position at 404 Media and I used Cluely to shape my answers. Emanuel would hit me with a basic interview question: “What are your strengths? What do you need to work on?” And I’d hit “command+enter” after he spoke.

Then Cluely would answer the question it had just heard Emanuel ask me and put its answers in an overlay at the top of my screen. It would come in two pieces: a bright white script I could read verbatim and a darker piece of text below that explained the AI’s reasoning. Because of the way Cluely is programmed, it doesn’t show up in recordings or even screenshots.

It also wasn’t that impressive. A few questions into the conversation and Emanuel and I realized it was just feeding me ChatGTP answers to the questions as if I’d typed them in a browser. It also took 20 seconds each time to generate, with Emanuel and I staring at each other while we waited. Not the kind of thing that would work in a real world situation.

Lee said that the company’s top priority was removing latency from the system and that it moves much faster if the user turns off screen recording and just has Cluely listen. I asked if his software was just pinging ChatGPT on the backend. “We have a bit of fine tuning that happens and there’s a couple of other models going on, but essentially yes,” he said.

Cluely’s major innovation is user experience. Most of the systems it's using already exist. “The only thing the product really showcased [in the commercial] was ChatGPT in your glasses,” Lee said. “The only reason it was sort of crazy was because it was just a different experience layer. I think it would be foolish to think that there is a future where ChatGPT doesn’t come in your glasses.”

Lee described himself as an AI maximalist. As I transcribed this part of our conversion, I remembered that Lee had Cluely overlaid on his screen, helping him craft his answers as we spoke, meaning some portion of his answers were crafted by AI. “I think the pessimistic case is to think, ‘Okay, now all of humanity is just gone and there’s nothing I can do. I’m just going to be a walking flesh machine for AI to regurgitate AI’s thoughts,” he said. “I don’t think that’s what makes us human at all. In fact, I think the true essence of what makes us human is our taste and our preferences and our sparks of inspiration and thoughts. That’s just supercharged by AI.”

What we have seen from AI so far, though, is that it gives a sheen of sameness to everything. There are some creative people who have found uses for generative AI, but they have often incorporated it into their ideation process and then use their own creativity or taste to create a finished product; Cluely is being developed for time-sensitive, real-world uses where there is unlikely to be much time for refinement.

Both Lee and the marketing copy for Cluely hammer home that technical innovations are often thought of as cheating. Math teachers worried about the advent of calculators. “I would really question whether you think what we’re doing and enabling here is cheating,” he said. “I think, fundamentally, the product is not different from a better version of ChatGPT voice mode.”

I pointed out that his own marketing for Cluely says that the software allows users to “cheat on everything.”

“It’s a viral hook and it’s super tied into my origin story with Interview Coder, right?” Lee said. “We want to make everybody use AI. We are true AI maximalists.”

I asked him to tell me his vision of the future.

“I will never have to remember when the American Revolution was,” Lee said. “I will never have to remember what the capital of Wisconsin is. Every single thing that is rote memorization, that relies on facts that you don’t need in the moment, that are not intrinsically necessary for a human to learn, you won’t need that anymore.”

“Entire school systems will be gone. The entire K-12 education. Everybody sits in a room eight hours a day, takes multiple choice exams. In my future, everything we understand education to be, will be completely gone.” He said that people will explore whatever topics they want from the earliest ages in the “most efficient way possible.”

“History will be on the side of the maximalists,” he said.

According to Lee, 80,000 people have signed up for a free Cluely account. An additional 700 are paying for it.

About the author

Matthew Gault is a writer covering weird tech, nuclear war, and video games. He’s worked for Reuters, Motherboard, and the New York Times.

This article was downloaded from https://www.404media.co/the-man-who-wants-ai-to-help-you-cheat-on-everything/ at Apr 23, 2025 at 12:27 PM EDT.

UNIONS | JULES ROSCOE | JULES ROSCOE | APR 23, 2025, 9:13 AM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

'They Sometimes Worry That I’m Dead Already:' Deep-Sea Fishers Fight for Wi-Fi (free)

Distant-water fishers are out on the ocean for up to 10 months at a time, with no contact to the outside world.

A fishing port in Taiwan. Photo credit: Global Labor Justice

Adrian Basar did not want to become a distant-water fisherman. With 22-hour workdays and pay of around 450 dollars per month, it’s not the most glamorous—or fulfilling, or generally safe—job. But Basar took it to help support his seven-sibling family. One of them is currently in university, studying mathematics.

“I support them so they can go to school,” Basar told me, speaking in Indonesian through an interpreter. I met him at a major seafood industry conference last month, where he and another fisherman had come to tell corporate executives about their lives on the ships.

“I took these steps because I figure, if I can support them, they can get a better education than I did,” he said.

Basar is part of a distant-water fleet of Indonesian migrant fishermen who work for Taiwan’s massive fishing market. They fish thousands of pounds of tuna that is sold all over the world, including in some cases to U.S. consumers.

But for 10 months out of the year, when he’s out at sea, Basar can’t talk to his siblings, or anyone in his family, because he’s not allowed to use the Wi-Fi on the ship.

“I think the companies that don’t want to put Wi-Fi on their ships pray for things not to be revealed,” Basar said. “There are many companies that don’t want Wi-Fi.”

A coalition between a self-organized Indonesian fishers’ union, a Taiwanese human rights group and multiple global labor organizations is trying to change that.

The “Wi-Fi Now for Fishers’ Rights” campaign, which has been organizing since 2023, wants to make Wi-Fi access a standard in the industry, both to help improve working conditions through union organizing and to allow the workers to have contact with other human beings for more than two months per year.

A fishing port in Taiwan. Photo credit: Global Labor Justice

“We spend a long time in the ocean,” another fisherman, Silwanus Tangkotta, told me in Indonesian through an interpreter. He recalled one of his voyages that had lasted over a year. “For more than one year, I didn’t have any contact with my family. When I came to shore, I didn’t know that my family member had passed away. My family is very worried. Three or four years, no news—they sometimes worry that I’m dead already. So, Wi-Fi is very important.”

Zacari Edwards, a senior strategist for Global Labor Justice (GLJ), which has taken on the Wi-Fi campaign, said the lack of internet access on ships makes it difficult for any sort of union organizing to take place.

“ We have the unions, but then when they’re out at sea, at their place of work, where the companies need to know what the working conditions are, they’re isolated by design,” Edwards told a group of seafood executives at the Seafood Expo North America conference in March. The Indonesian fishers’ union, Forum Silaturahmi Pelaut Indonesia (FOSPI), first organized 18 years ago.

"We cannot ask for help, we cannot use our phones. But the captain is in charge, and the captain can use it. The only one that has access is the captain.”

“ Workers can’t contact their unions,” Edwards continued. “It just seems a bit nonsensical to me, especially when it is an easy ask, it’s an ask that’s been delivered clearly. I really do doubt the validity of any company’s human rights protections policy when they’re not addressing that ‘black box’ place at work.”

The fishers’ working conditions are often grim. Basar, for example, said he works 22-hour days, often with broken equipment. The ship’s food supply is also usually made to last for three months, which means that the fishermen must eat fish bait for the remaining seven. Without Wi-Fi, Basar said, he can’t communicate with anyone outside of the boat, either about his working conditions or anything else.

“No one can actually oversee what’s going on on the ships,” Basar told me. “We feel very isolated out there. We cannot ask for help, we cannot use our phones. But the captain is in charge, and the captain can use it. The only one that has access is the captain.”

In some cases, the lack of Wi-Fi is a legitimate medical concern. Under international law, all workers aboard a vessel must be given reasonable access to communication, particularly for medical reasons. Basar lost a friend to illness on the ship last year, because he could not contact anyone in the outside world to try to get him medication. Tangkotta lost two fingers to a slamming door in a storm, and couldn’t get access to medical treatment for two months. For the first month, he kept working.

“ It was really terrible and scary because I could see the bones coming out,” Tangkotta said, speaking to the same group of seafood executives. “There was a lot of blood, and I had to take care of it myself with limited resources. I did a surgery by myself using nail clippers and toothpicks, and it took four days. Maybe if I had Wi-Fi, I might have been able to contact someone to help me.”

But technology isn’t the problem. According to GLJ, there’s no difficulty in putting Wi-Fi on boats—around 60 percent of the boats they’re involved with already have it installed.

“It’s not a barrier to get the technology installed,” Edwards said. “But [FOSPI] has reported back that only about two percent of all the vessels their members are on have reported any form of access.”

And according to a GLJ briefing paper, there’s no cost barrier to installing it either. For example, Iridium Communications, one of the major technology companies that provides maritime Wi-Fi, has a total cost of $14,960 for installation and the first year of fees.

“The costs of installing Wi-Fi and the monthly fees…are within an affordable range for the Taiwanese distant water fishing industry,” the briefing states. “The construction fee for a small tuna longline fishing vessel is around $500,000 USD.” The monthly fee costs are also equivalent to the salary of one worker aboard the ship.

“The problem is when  access to Wi-Fi on the high seas is not embedded in an agreement,” Edwards said. “You’re always going to lose it when the workers need it most. We see it get switched off. We hear those stories from fishers.”

Global Labor Justice has proposed a set of Wi-Fi guidelines for Taiwanese fisheries to sign on to, in order to have some form of legally enforceable agreement. Those guidelines suggest a minimum of 3GB free per month per worker, with more data purchasable. With a crew of around 15, that would amount to a total of 45GB per month, or 450GB for a full trip. For comparison, an average household in the U.S. uses a minimum of 500GB per month.

The guidelines also include equal access regardless of crew rank and guaranteed data privacy, and stipulate that any data used for health issues should not be deducted from a worker’s data allowance.

As of now, though, those guidelines do not constitute a legally enforceable agreement. To get one, a trade union representing the fishers would have to sign agreements with individual Taiwanese fisheries, or possibly the Taiwanese government.

“ We as fishermen, we do not need empty promises,” Tangkotta said. “We need full protection that is real, starting with the access of Wi-Fi that is free, that is guaranteed on all vessels. If I had the Wi-Fi, I’d be able to reach my family.”

About the author

Jules is 404 Media’s first fellow. They care about unions, global politics, and how AI is changing the world of labor.

This article was downloaded from https://www.404media.co/they-sometimes-worry-that-im-dead-already-deep-sea-fishers-fight-for-wi-fi/ at Apr 23, 2025 at 12:27 PM EDT.

PODCAST | JOSEPH COX | JOSEPH COX | APR 23, 2025, 9:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Podcast: Cops Are Using AI Bots to Surveil People (free)

A company selling cops AI undercover bots; a visit to the millennial saint; and the state of 404 Media.

Image: 404 Media and WIRED.

We start this week with Emanuel and Jason's big story on Massive Blue, a company that is selling AI-powered undercover bots posing as protesters and children to the cops. After the break, Sam tells us about visiting the millennial saint. In the subscribers-only section, we talk business and the state of 404 Media.

Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube. Become a paid subscriber for access to this episode's bonus content and to power our journalism. If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.

- Leaked: Palantir’s Plan to Help ICE Deport People

- ICE Plans Central Database of Health, Labor, Housing Agency Data to Find Targets

- This ‘College Protester’ Isn’t Real. It’s an AI-Powered Undercover Bot for Cops

- I Went to See ‘God’s Influencer,’ the Millennial Saint Carlo Acutis

- How 404 Media Is Navigating 'Economic Headwinds'

About the author

Joseph is an award-winning investigative journalist focused on generating impact. His work has triggered hundreds of millions of dollars worth of fines, shut down tech companies, and much more.

This article was downloaded from https://www.404media.co/podcast-cops-are-using-ai-bots-to-surveil-people/ at Apr 23, 2025 at 12:27 PM EDT.

April 22, 2025

- Hackers are Injecting Mass Shooting Videos Into Random StarCraft 2 Matches (paid)

- Business Insider Founder Creates AI Exec For His New Newsroom, Immediately Hits On Her (paid)

- How 404 Media Is Navigating 'Economic Headwinds'

NEWS | EMANUEL MAIBERG | EMANUEL MAIBERG | APR 22, 2025, 1:40 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Hackers are Injecting Mass Shooting Videos Into Random StarCraft 2 Matches (paid)

Players are reporting seeing graphic videos and hate symbols hacked into the game.

Image: Blizzard

An exploit in Activision-Blizzard’s popular real-time strategy game StarCraft II is allowing people to inject disturbing videos into multiplayer matches and show them to other players without warning, according to several accounts in the StarCraft II community and one player who talked to 404 Media. Some of the videos people said they saw in game include real footage of a mass shooting in a supermarket and a video with rapidly flashing lights, seemingly an attempt to trigger seizures in people with photosensitive epilepsy.

“We loaded up with a few regulars and some randos who I didn't know,” a user named Tad0422, who saw one of these videos said, said on Reddit. Tad0422 said they were playing a custom map called Monobattles, which is shared via Starcraft II Arcade, an official hub for sharing custom StarCraft maps. “About 3 min a video appeared on my screen. I have never seen this before but it took up the whole screen. It was a Russian pop video or something that played for 20 seconds or so. Most of us were talking in chat about what the heck was happening.”

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This article was downloaded from https://www.404media.co/hackers-are-injecting-mass-shooting-videos-into-random-starcraft-2-matches/ at Apr 23, 2025 at 12:27 PM EDT.

NEWS | MATTHEW GAULT | MATTHEW GAULT | APR 22, 2025, 12:45 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Business Insider Founder Creates AI Exec For His New Newsroom, Immediately Hits On Her (paid)

‘Did the same rules apply to AI colleagues and native-AI workplaces? I didn’t know yet. That was one of the things I needed to figure out.’

Alt text: Blodget's AI-generated team in an AI-generated picture.

Blodget and his AI-generated team at Yosemite. Image via ChatGPT and Regenerator.

On Monday, the co-founder of Business Insider Henry Blodget published a blog on his new Substack about a “native-AI newsroom.” Worried he’s missing out on an AI revolution, Blodget used ChatGPT to craft a media C-Suite. Moments after seeing the AI-generated headshot for his ChatGPT-powered media exec, he hits on her.

Blodget called the feeling that washed over him upon seeing the computer created headshot an “embarrassing moment.” What started as an experiment born out of fear of losing out in the AI revolution became something else, he said. “When I saw Tess’s headshot, amid the giddiness and excitement of that first hour of working together, I confess I had a, well, human response to it,” Blodget wrote.

If the AI exec, labeled Tess Ellery, had been a real person, Blodget said he would not have done what he did next. “But did the same rules apply to AI colleagues and native-AI workplaces?” He wrote. “I didn’t know yet. That was one of the things I needed to figure out.”

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This article was downloaded from https://www.404media.co/business-insider-founder-creates-ai-exec-for-his-new-newsroom-immediately-hits-on-her/ at Apr 23, 2025 at 12:27 PM EDT.

PSA | EMANUEL MAIBERG , JASON KOEBLER , SAMANTHA COLE , JOSEPH COX | EMANUEL MAIBERG | APR 22, 2025, 12:27 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

How 404 Media Is Navigating 'Economic Headwinds' (free)

The economy is bad. Here's how we're doing, and how you can help us.

Image: Sharon Attia

Something that we’ve been thinking a lot about since we founded 404 Media was how one of the worst parts of working at a big company like VICE was the regular layoffs. A cruel aspect of the job was that whenever there was some kind of cataclysmic event that affected the economy—COVID, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, etc—we had the unique pleasure of having to closely follow and cover news that could and often would ultimately result in members of our teams getting laid off. This was always justified with the term “economic headwinds,” a now-famous euphemism that executives used to absolve them of their mismanagement and which were always impossible to "navigate." The implication was that there was simply nothing they could do to prevent this.

We worked hard and did our jobs as best we could but we could also feel the axe about to fall, usually in the form of an email from upper management about “economic headwinds” or something like that, followed by a brutal day of slowly finding out who still had a job. Soon after COVID started, some of us were on a call with executives who told us that despite traffic being higher than ever because of the essential work we were doing, our department was millions of dollars behind its expected ad sales goals, which was not anything the writers and editors had any control over, of course. Pay reductions soon followed, and, after that, there were mass layoffs.

Donald Trump’s tariffs and their manic fluctuating between total global trade war to more limited but still devastating focus on China, stocks taking a nosedive, companies announcing they’re going to stop doing some business in the US, and CEOs putting everything on hold until we’re out of this zone of “economic uncertainty,” means the “headwinds” are here, or it’s at least looking stormy.

We launched 404 Media in August of 2023, and a lot of wild stuff has happened here and in the world since then, but this is the first time we’ve experienced what looks like an imminent recession. What is becoming clear is that, already, there is a significant enough shift in the economy to impact our business.

For that reason, we wanted to give a small update on the state of 404 Media ahead of our second anniversary in August. The short version is that the state of 404 Media is strong. The support of our subscribers has allowed us to make 404 Media our full time jobs since the beginning. One of the reasons we started the company instead of trying to get new jobs at other media companies is because most have many of the problems that VICE did. We believed there was a better way to run a media company, and we are thankfully not in a position where we need to lay ourselves off. In fact, we are in a position where we can continue to focus on making 404 Media better.

From the beginning, we have said that we want to build something that lasts a long time, and that part of our strategy would be to be very conservative with growing the company and to be conservative with how we spend our money, because it makes no sense to have a company that succeeds only when financial times are good but has to fire everyone at the slightest downturn. Our company is doing better than we ever expected it to, but we also have been in the business long enough to know that we cannot expect growth forever, that the advertising market fluctuates wildly, and that the ways people find and consume news are constantly changing. We know that this is a dangerous “macroenvironment” for journalism, as they say, with news outlets being threatened with existentially costly litigation from the president, his regulators and his Department of Justice, state politicians, and rich and powerful people who do not want to face accountability for their actions. We have already been threatened by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.

We feel we are currently in a strong financial position and feel endlessly grateful to our subscribers for helping to put us in this position. But the terrible news is that thousands and thousands of people, including federal workers who maintain and operate crucial parts of the government, are losing their jobs. People are either cutting expenses because they lost their jobs, because they are expecting to lose their jobs, or because they are bracing themselves for the rest of the Trump administration now that it’s apparent the dog who caught the car is driving it too.

We know this is what people are thinking and doing because many of them tell us why they are canceling their subscriptions to 404 Media. The notes we get about this are very generous and heartbreaking. People tell us that they really appreciate the work we do and that they will continue to support us when they can, but that at the moment they feel like they have to cut costs. We have all been there, are grateful for the kind words, and will always be grateful for anyone who is or was willing to support us to any degree. We hope it goes without saying, but we never want or expect anyone to support us if it causes them financial hardship.

The good news is that while we’re definitely seeing the impact of all this economic chaos, we are still in a very strong, resilient position. Our growth has slowed for the moment, and it might level off or shrink if the economy keeps going off a cliff, but we still have a ton of support thanks almost entirely to thousands of individual subscribers that make up the vast majority of our revenue and a few other streams of revenue like advertising and merchandise.

We are writing this article to let you know that we are thinking proactively about our business inside of the larger economy, and that we’re in good shape. We have begun to cautiously get more ambitious by bringing on new contributors. About six months ago, science journalist Becky Ferreira started writing The Abstract, our Saturday science-focused newsletter.  Last year, Case Hartsfield joined us to help with social media and audience engagement, and has since grown our TikTok, Instagram, and Bluesky accounts significantly so we can reach more people. Most recently, journalist Matthew Gault has started contributing regularly, and we’re taking more commissions as bandwidth allows. One year ago, Jules Roscoe came aboard as the first 404 Media fellow, and in June, we'll have a new intern (stay tuned!). We threw a panel and party at SXSW, which was the first time we’ve thrown an event in a city we didn’t live in; it went very well and we hope to do more of this in the future. We are thinking about how we can bring you more of the journalism we do at a time when the stakes feel higher than ever.

There are also a few things we’re going to try that have worked for other businesses like ours that we haven’t done yet.

Chief among these is a referral program, which companies like Morning Brew have used to build their newsletter lists. The reason a referral program is attractive to us is because, as we have railed endlessly against the algorithmic lottery of social media, we’ve found that the best way for us to grow is from direct, person-to-person recommendations. We have lost count of the number of people who have told us that they found us because a friend or family member told them about us in a group chat, forwarded one of our emails, or was chatting about one of our stories at a party. We want to incentivize this type of recommendation by giving 404 Media merch to people who ask their friends to sign up for our newsletters. We’re not sure how well this will work, but it’s something we want to try and that will start showing up at the bottom of our email newsletters, beginning with this one. There may be some bumps as we get this off the ground and we’re open to feedback on it; we’re using some software that may or may not play well with our email provider, so if you see anything buggy, let us know.

More importantly, since we launched 404 Media we have talked endlessly about how our goal was to do journalism sustainably, and we’ve been extremely conservative precisely because of our experience at VICE and the inevitable, seasonal “headwinds” in the economy.

It’s windy as hell right now but we are prepared. We didn’t overextend ourselves, we aren’t relying on investors who are waiting for a 10x return and are now getting cold feet, and we don’t have to change anything about how we do our journalism because every single business decision we’ve made the entire time was in the service of doing that work as best as possible, for as long as possible.

We want to thank you again if you are already a paid subscriber. If you’re not one yet, you can sign up here. On that page you should see a list of all the benefits you get by becoming a subscriber.

If you’re unable to pay for subscription but still want to support us, there are still plenty of other things we need help with:

- First and always, please tell people about 404 Media. This is how we have built our audience, and it is very, very helpful. Share our stories, share our podcast, forward our newsletter, follow us on Bluesky, TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube and share our posts there. And please, try out the referral program and let us know how it goes.

- Please keep sending us tips. Some of our best stories started as tips from readers, and nothing helps us grow as much as a good scoop. Our contact info is here.

- Please subscribe to our podcast and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. We are proud of how good the podcast is getting, and know we have a following that only gets our stories via our free podcast. We think we still have a lot of room to grow there. Just a few more subscribers and reviews can be more helpful than most people can probably imagine.

- Please become a free subscriber if you’re not one already! It’s free, but is very helpful for us in order to reach you with our newsletter directly.

- Advertise with us. If you own or work for a company, tell your marketing team that you read us and that they should consider placing an ad in our podcast or in our newsletter!

- Tell your company / university / school about us. We offer discounted group subscriptions to organizations. Please just tell them to get in touch by emailing emanuel@404media.co or jason@404media.co

- If you’re unable to pay for a subscription but still want to give us money in some other way, we have a tip jar where you can give any amount you want and a merch store with really nice stuff! We have restocked this store and added a few new items in the last few days.

An earlier version of this post originally appeared as part of our weekly Behind the Blog series, available only to paying subscribers. We’ve expanded on it for a wider release.

About the author

Emanuel Maiberg is interested in little known communities and processes that shape technology, troublemakers, and petty beefs. Email him at emanuel@404media.co

About the author

Jason is a cofounder of 404 Media. He was previously the editor-in-chief of Motherboard. He loves the Freedom of Information Act and surfing.

About the author

Sam Cole is writing from the far reaches of the internet, about sexuality, the adult industry, online culture, and AI. She's the author of How Sex Changed the Internet and the Internet Changed Sex.

About the author

Joseph is an award-winning investigative journalist focused on generating impact. His work has triggered hundreds of millions of dollars worth of fines, shut down tech companies, and much more.

This article was downloaded from https://www.404media.co/how-404-media-is-navigating-economic-headwinds/ at Apr 23, 2025 at 12:27 PM EDT.

April 21, 2025

- The FBI Can't Find ‘Missing’ Records of Its Hacking Tools (paid)

NEWS | JOSEPH COX | JOSEPH COX | APR 21, 2025, 9:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The FBI Can't Find ‘Missing’ Records of Its Hacking Tools (paid)

The FBI bought multiple hacking tools for $250,000. Despite that, the FBI says it can't find any more records about the tools.

Photo by David Trinks on Unsplash.

📄

This article was primarily reported using public records requests. We are making it available to all readers as a public service. FOIA reporting can be expensive, please consider subscribing to 404 Media to support this work. Or send us a one time donation via our tip jar here.

The FBI says it is unable to find records related to its purchase of a series of hacking tools, despite spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on them and those purchases initially being included in a public U.S. government procurement database before being quietly scrubbed from the internet.

The news highlights the secrecy the FBI maintains around its use of hacking tools. The agency has previously used classified technology in ordinary criminal investigations, pushed back against demands to provide details of hacking operations to defendants, and purchased technology from surveillance vendors.

“Potentially responsive records were identified during the search,” a response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request I sent about a specific hacking tool contract says. “However, we were advised that they were not in their expected locations. An additional search for the missing records also met with unsuccessful results. Since we were unable to review the records, we were unable to determine if they were responsive to your request.”

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This article was downloaded from https://www.404media.co/the-fbi-cant-find-missing-records-of-its-hacking-tools/ at Apr 23, 2025 at 12:27 PM EDT.

April 19, 2025

- ICE Plans Central Database of Health, Labor, Housing Agency Data to Find Targets (paid)

- Behold, a Genuinely Promising Sign of Alien Life

NEWS | JOSEPH COX | JOSEPH COX | APR 19, 2025, 11:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

ICE Plans Central Database of Health, Labor, Housing Agency Data to Find Targets (paid)

A document viewed by 404 Media describes ICE's plans to incorporate data from the Department of Labor (DOL), Health and Human Services (HHS), and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) into a tool called ATrac.

Image: Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is planning to bring together data from a wide variety of other U.S. government agencies, including the Department of Labor (DOL), Health and Human Services (HHS), Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to make a centralized database to identify immigration targets, according to a document viewed by 404 Media.

The news signals ICE’s heavy emphasis on bringing disparate datasets together in order to carry out President Trump’s mass deportation effort. The tool, called ATrac and “Alien Tracker” in the document, is planned to allow for the management of all enforcement priorities, and provide near real-time tracking of both targets on a local level and the broader set of immigration enforcement targets around the country.

💡

Do you work for a government agency or contractor connected to this? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at joseph.404 or send me an email at joseph@404media.co.

The document says ATrac is an ICE tool that displays information on a geospatial interface for officials to identify potential enforcement targets, and then task that enforcement to a particular team. Once a team is sent out, they are required to report the ultimate outcome, such as the target being arrested; the target being located but not arrested; or the target not being located.

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This article was downloaded from https://www.404media.co/ice-plans-central-database-of-health-labor-housing-agency-data-to-find-targets/ at Apr 23, 2025 at 12:27 PM EDT.

THE ABSTRACT | BECKY FERREIRA | BECKY FERREIRA | APR 19, 2025, 9:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Behold, a Genuinely Promising Sign of Alien Life (free)

One of the most compelling cases for extraterrestrial life has been found on K2-18b, a planet 124 light years from Earth.

Concept art of K2-18b orbiting its red dwarf host star. Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, Joseph Olmsted (STScI) Science: Nikku Madhusudhan (IoA)

Welcome back to the Abstract!

It was a good week for the Fox Mulders among us. We want to believe, and a new study has given us some empirical grist along those lines. I shall say no more, and let the giant planet K2-18b speak for itself.

Next, remember the time that Earth partied so hard that the Northern Lights showed up in the Sahara and humans had to invent sunscreen? Hahaha…our planet just DGAF sometimes. Then, the Perseus cluster thought it could get away with eating a subcluster, but we have the EVIDENCE. Last, dino-walk with me.

“It’s Never Aliens”...Oh Shoot, This Time It Actually Might Be Aliens

Madhusudhan, Nikku et al. ‘New Constraints on DMS and DMDS in the Atmosphere of K2-18b from JWST MIRI.’ The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Scientists have reported some of the most compelling evidence for extraterrestrial life ever identified, teasing what would be the most anticipated scientific breakthrough in history.

The possibly life-bearing world in question is K2-18b, a giant planet about eight or nine times as massive as Earth located about 124 light years away. It belongs to a tantalizing class of “Hycean” planets that may host global liquid water oceans under thick hydrogen-rich atmospheres.

K2-18b has attracted a lot of interest in recent years because water vapor, carbon dioxide, and methane have been detected in its skies at concentrations that hint at the presence of life. That said, planets can bake up those compounds in all kinds of ways that don’t involve beasties. That’s why scientists decided to put this world into the sights of the James Webb Space Telescope, the most sensitive observatory ever, to see if they could find anything more concrete.

Webb delivered by confirming the presence of dimethyl disulfide (DMDS) and dimethyl sulfide (DMS)—compounds that are concocted by microbes here on Earth— in the skies of K2-18b. It’s not yet an alien slam dunk, because there are a few abiotic processes that also can make this stuff. But there are simply fewer ways to explain their sustained presence in a planet’s skies without invoking biological processes, compared to water, carbon dioxide, or methane.

“We present a mid-infrared transmission spectrum of K2-18b with JWST, the first for a habitable-zone exoplanet,” said researchers led by Nikku Madhusudhan of the University of Cambridge. “The spectrum shows multiple spectral features…that are best explained by a combination of DMDS and DMS in the atmosphere, both molecules uniquely produced by life on Earth and predicted as promising biosignatures in habitable exoplanets.”

DMDS and DMS are largely produced by marine microbes, such as phytoplankton. It’s alluring to envision a massive ocean world blushing with colorful microbial blooms as it orbits its red dwarf star, just 124 light years away (an immense distance for humans, but just down the street on galactic scales).

Still, the team emphasized that abiotic sources of these compounds should be rigorously explored, and noted that they can be found on barren comets in our own solar system. It’s possible that similar comets in the K2-18 system may have recently crashed into this massive world, producing some transient signatures captured by Webb, though it would be a bit of a coincidence. Future observations may distinguish the likely sources of the compounds, and perhaps find even more signs of life (or signs of not-life).

Humans have often imagined our “first contact” moment with aliens as irrefutable. We receive an unambiguously artificial transmission. An ancient alien artifact is unearthed from a nearby planet. Aliens straight-up show up on Earth to invade or enlighten us.

But it seems much more likely that this vexing mystery—is life on Earth a fluke or the norm?—will be constrained through a slow and grinding probabilistic framework. We may never conclusively determine if K2-18b hosts life; the best we might get is a gradient of more to less probable. As scientists accumulate reams of data from other planets, we will get a lot more smoke signals but may never find an actual smoking gun.

“Overall, our findings present an important step forward in the search for signatures of life on exoplanets,” according to the study. “However, robustly establishing both the veracity of the present findings and their possible association with life on K2-18 b needs a dedicated community effort in multiple directions—observational, theoretical, and experimental.”

“The central question now is whether we are prepared to identify the signatures of life on such worlds,” the team concluded. “The opportunity is at our doorstep.”

A Tale of Auroral Escapes and Neanderthal Capes

Mukhopadhyay, Agnit et al. “Wandering of the auroral oval 41,000 years ago.” Science Advances.

Even Mother Earth, the one world that we know hosts life, can be a bit of a chaotic parent at times. For instance, our planet went on a little bender about 41,000 years ago, called the Laschamps geomagnetic excursion, in which it temporarily lost its magnetic bearings for about 2,000 years.

As the magnetic poles shifted from the geographic poles, Earth’s magnetic shield was reduced to 10 percent of its strength, exposing everything on its surface to a flood of cosmic radiation. The excursion also caused auroras to become unmoored from the poles, thereby drifting to lower latitudes and causing the Northern Lights to dance over the Sahara.

Auroras wandering all over the dang place. Image: Mukhopadhyay, Agnit et al.

This bizarre episode may have inspired our human ancestors to invent sunscreen out of ochre and develop tailored clothing to avoid radiation exposure, according to a new study. The work also suggests that Neanderthals may have failed to adapt to the changes, perhaps contributing to their extinction around the same time as the Laschamps excursion.

Ochre shows “increased frequency in archaeological sites dating to the peri-Laschamps” which “could be due in part to its use as a sunscreen” by anatomically modern humans (AMH), said researchers led by Agnit Mukhopadhyay of the University of Michigan.

“Although both Neanderthals and contemporary AMH produced technologies associated with clothing manufacture, only AMH appear to have produced technologies consistent with the manufacture of tailored clothing; Neanderthals are assumed to have produced only relatively simple, draped clothing (e.g., capes)...Neanderthals’ decline was almost certainly multifactorial, but it is possible that topical sunscreens and tailored clothing provided AMH essential photoprotection and access to resources in places and at times they would otherwise have been inaccessible” which may have been “a competitive advantage.”

First of all, we need to bring back Neanderthal capes. They have been out of fashion for 41,000 years, so a revival is frankly overdue. Second, it would be wild if humans outlived Neanderthals in part because we wore sunscreen. Has there ever been a better advertisement for Big SPF?

But that is only the skin-deep part of this cool and expansive study, which also speculated that the excursion may have inspired new forms of art and music. “Others have noted co-occurrence of the Laschamps with the earliest known representational cave art—which depicts animals, anthropomorphs, and other figures or scenes, as opposed to abstract marks or designs—including images of animals,” the team said. “To this, we add that the Laschamps event coincides with early examples of portable art and musical instruments.”

The researchers also warned that if the same event happened today, we would be up a magnetic creek without a paddle. “Considering the probable impact of the Laschamps excursion on early humans and their way of life, a similar event today would likely have dire consequences for modern humans,” the team noted. “The ramifications of a Laschamps-like magnetospheric configuration and auroral oval would reverberate across all facets of modern communication, satellite infrastructure, and intercontinental travel.”

I know, I know, you really needed one more thing to worry about. You had so many wonderful worries, but to fill out your collection, I present you with this one about Earth’s magnetic field shutting down for a millennium or two. No geomagnetic excursions are imminent, according to the study, but it will eventually happen again, so something to be aware of, I guess.

In the meantime, honor your ancestors by wearing sunscreen!

SOLVED: The Case of the Missing Subcluster Halo

Hyeonghan, Kim et al. “Direct evidence of a major merger in the Perseus cluster.” Nature Astronomy.

We’ll now zoom out from planetary scales all the way up to the mind-detonating expanse of the Perseus Cluster, one of the most massive objects in the known universe. This thing is just a lot of galaxies—at least 1,000, probably a lot more—that are all gravitationally jostling around each other some 240 million light years from Earth.

Based on its dynamics, it looks like the cluster ate a smaller “subcluster” in the past as part of a “major merger.” But until now, scientists have not been able to track down the companion that was absorbed into the Perseus whole, which is a missing piece that has really been bugging them.

The Perseus cluster is about 11 million light years wide. Image: VLA-Radio, Chandra-X-ray, Hubble-Visible, SDSS-Infrared

“Although the Perseus cluster has often been regarded as an archetypical relaxed galaxy cluster, several lines of evidence ...suggest that the cluster might have experienced a major merger,” said researchers led by Kim HyeongHan of Yonsei University. (I also identify as an “archetypical relaxed” entity).

“However, the absence of a clear merging companion identified so far hampers our understanding of the evolutionary track of the Perseus cluster consistent with these observational features,” the team said.

We simply must not be hampered in our understanding of the evolutionary track of the Perseus cluster. To that end, the team used weak lensing, an observational technique based on gravitational distortions, to locate the swallowed companion.

Well, everyone: We got ‘em. “Here, through careful weak-lensing analysis, we successfully identified the missing subcluster halo,” which is located about 430 kiloparsecs (1.4 million light years) west of the Perseus main cluster core,” the team said. “This discovery resolves the long-standing puzzle of Perseus’s dynamical state.”

And to think, Perseus would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for those meddling weak lenses. Another cosmic cold case closed.

Slap a “Coexist” Bumper Sticker on These Armoured Dinosaurs

Arbour, Victoria et al. “A new thyreophoran ichnotaxon from British Columbia, Canada confirms the presence of ankylosaurid dinosaurs in the mid Cretaceous of North America.” Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

We’ll close by walking in the footsteps of an ankylosaurus, the dinosaurian equivalent of a tank. Some 100 million years ago, these giant armored dinosaurs left footprints in what is now the Canadian Rockies, which paleontologists have identified as the only known ankylosaurid ankylosaur tracks in the world.

The name “ankylosaurid ankylosaur” may seem a bit redundant, but it exists because there is such a thing as—you guessed it—a non-ankylosaurid ankylosaur (also known as a nodosaurid). These two major ankylosaur lineages differed in many ways, including in the number of digits on their hind feet (ankylosaurids had three, nodosaurids had four).

Paleontologists had previously identified the footprints of Tetrapodosaurus borealis, the four-toed variety, in mid-Cretaceous trackways near the town of Tumbler Ridge, in British Columbia, and at Dunvegan Bridge, Alberta. Now, a team has pinpointed the tell-tale “tridactyl” prints of an ankylosaurid ankylosaur representing a new species, named Ruopodosaurus clava.

Figures of the new tracks. Image: Arbour, Victoria et al

“This new taxon is currently known exclusively from the Cenomanian of northeastern British Columbia and northwestern Alberta, and provides confirmation that ankylosaurid ankylosaurs were present in North America prior to the Campanian–Maastrichtian,” said researchers led by Victoria Arbour of the Royal BC Museum. “Ruopodosaurus clava is found in the same localities and deposits as Tetrapodosaurus borealis, indicating that both ankylosaurid and non-ankylosaurid ankylosaurs co-existed in the mid Cretaceous of the Peace Region.”

Co-existence between giant armoured dinosaurs in a place now named the Peace Region? The reality simulation writers did well with this one.

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

This article was downloaded from https://www.404media.co/behold-a-genuinely-promising-sign-of-alien-life/ at Apr 23, 2025 at 12:27 PM EDT.

April 18, 2025

- Behind the Blog: Chat, Are We Cooked? (paid)

- AI Slop Is Breaking the Internet as We Know It (404 Media Live at SXSW)

- Judge Rules Blanket Search of Cell Tower Data Unconstitutional

BEHIND THE BLOG | SAMANTHA COLE , JOSEPH COX , JASON KOEBLER , EMANUEL MAIBERG | SAMANTHA COLE | APR 18, 2025, 1:17 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Behind the Blog: Chat, Are We Cooked? (paid)

This week, we discuss Palantir scoops, coping mechanisms, and feeling God in this Samsung television.

Collage via 404 Media. Images from Cory Doctorow, GETTY IMAGES for Unsplash+, and SCREENSHOT FROM INTOUCH'S WEBSITE.

This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss Palantir scoops, coping mechanisms, and feeling God in this Samsung television.

JOSEPH: I’m going to talk about how our Palantir leak story came about, Leaked: Palantir’s Plan to Help ICE Deport People, because I think it shows the value of just hammering on a broader story, finding a way in, then getting more and more specifics on it.

It really starts with Jason’s story on April 9 called Inside a Powerful Database ICE Uses to Identify and Deport People. This was about ICE’s tool called the Investigative Case Management (ICM) system. The tool was not new. It had been around for multiple years and other outlets had covered it. What was new was that we got to see actual parts of the database. This provided an opportunity for us to cover it in new, specific detail.

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This article was downloaded from https://www.404media.co/behind-the-blog-chat-are-we-cooked/ at Apr 23, 2025 at 12:27 PM EDT.

PODCASTS | JASON KOEBLER , SAMANTHA COLE | JASON KOEBLER | APR 18, 2025, 11:37 AM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

AI Slop Is Breaking the Internet as We Know It (404 Media Live at SXSW) (free)

Here's our live panel and podcast from SXSW!

We're excited to share audio and video of our panel at SXSW, where Jason, Sam, and our friend Brian Merchant of Blood in the Machine discuss how AI slop has taken over the internet, how it is a brute-force attack against the algorithms that control what we see on social media, and what we can do to fight back against it.

Here's the panel:

It's better with the video, because there are some visual aids, but we also released an audio-only version of this on our podcast feed:

This was our first big live event, and we hope to do more in the future. If you're throwing a conference or event, hit us up! We had a wonderful time talking about AI spam, labor, and the future of the internet. Thanks to everyone who came out to meet and party with us.

This panel was held at Speakeasy in Austin, Texas at SXSW on March 10, 2025. Thanks to our friends at Flipboard for giving us the space and to DeleteMe for sponsoring the event.

And here's a bunch of photos, taken by Case Hartsfield:

About the author

Jason is a cofounder of 404 Media. He was previously the editor-in-chief of Motherboard. He loves the Freedom of Information Act and surfing.

About the author

Sam Cole is writing from the far reaches of the internet, about sexuality, the adult industry, online culture, and AI. She's the author of How Sex Changed the Internet and the Internet Changed Sex.

This article was downloaded from https://www.404media.co/ai-slop-is-breaking-the-internet-as-we-know-it-404-media-live-at-sxsw/ at Apr 23, 2025 at 12:27 PM EDT.

NEWS | MATTHEW GAULT | MATTHEW GAULT | APR 18, 2025, 9:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Judge Rules Blanket Search of Cell Tower Data Unconstitutional (free)

Judge says tower dumps violate the 4th amendment, but will let the cops do it this one time, as a treat.

Alt text: A cell tower amongst the trees.

A cell tower amongst the trees. Image: Wikideas1 via Wikimedia Commons.

This article was produced in collaboration with Court Watch, an independent outlet that unearths overlooked court records. Subscribe to them here.

A judge in Nevada has ruled that “tower dumps”—the law enforcement practice of grabbing vast troves of private personal data from cell towers—is unconstitutional. The judge also ruled that the cops could, this one time, still use the evidence they obtained through this unconstitutional search.

Cell towers record the location of phones near them about every seven seconds. When the cops request a tower dump, they ask a telecom for the numbers and personal information of every single phone connected to a tower during a set time period. Depending on the area, these tower dumps can return tens of thousands of numbers.

Cops have been able to sift through this data to solve crimes. But tower dumps are also a massive privacy violation that flies in the face of the Fourth Amendment, which protects people from unlawful search and seizure. When the cops get a tower dump they’re not just searching and seizing the data of a suspected criminal, they’re sifting through the information of everyone who was in the location.

A Nevada man, Cory Spurlock, is facing charges related to dealing marijuana and a murder-for-hire scheme. Cops used a tower dump to connect his cellphone with the location of some of the crimes he is accused of. Spurlock’s lawyers argued that the tower dump was an unconstitutional search and that the evidence obtained during it should not be. The cops got a warrant to conduct the tower dump but argued it wasn’t technically a “search” and therefore wasn’t subject to the Fourth Amendment.

U.S. District Juste Miranda M. Du rejected this argument, but wouldn’t suppress the evidence. “The Court finds that a tower dump is a search and the warrant law enforcement used to get it is a general warrant forbidden under the Fourth Amendment,” she said in a ruling filed on April 11. “That said, because the Court appears to be the first court within the Ninth Circuit to reach this conclusion and the good faith exception otherwise applies, the Court will not order any evidence suppressed.”

Du argued that the officers acted in good faith when they filed the warrant and that they didn’t know the search was unconstitutional when they conducted it. According to Du, the warrant wasn’t unconstitutional when a judge issued it.

Du’s ruling is the first time the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has ruled on the constitutionality of tower dumps, but this isn’t the first time a federal judge has weighed in. One in Mississippi came to the same conclusion in February. A few weeks later, the Department of Justice appealed the ruling.

There’s a decent chance that one of these cases will wind its way up to the Supreme Court and that SCOTUS will have to make a ruling about tower dumps. The last time the issue was in front of them, they kicked the can back to the lower courts.

In 2018, the Supreme Court considered Carpenter v. United States, a case where the FBI used cell phone location data to investigate a series of robberies. The Court decided that law enforcement agencies violate the Fourth Amendment when they ask for cell phone location data without a warrant. But the ruling was narrow and the Court declined to rule on the issue of tower dumps.

According to the court records for Spurlock’s case, the tower dump that caught him captured the private data of 1,686 users. An expert who testified before the court about the dump noted that “the wireless company users whose phones showed up in the tower dump data did not opt in to sharing their location with their wireless provider, and indeed, could not opt out from appearing in the type of records received in response to [the] warrant.”

About the author

Matthew Gault is a writer covering weird tech, nuclear war, and video games. He’s worked for Reuters, Motherboard, and the New York Times.

This article was downloaded from https://www.404media.co/judge-rules-blanket-search-of-cell-tower-data-unconstitutional/ at Apr 23, 2025 at 12:27 PM EDT.

April 17, 2025

- Leaked: Palantir’s Plan to Help ICE Deport People (paid)

- This ‘College Protester’ Isn’t Real. It’s an AI-Powered Undercover Bot for Cops (paid)

NEWS | JOSEPH COX | JOSEPH COX | APR 17, 2025, 10:56 AM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Leaked: Palantir’s Plan to Help ICE Deport People (paid)

Internal Palantir Slack chats and message boards obtained by 404 Media show the contracting giant is helping find the location of people flagged for deportation, that Palantir is now a “more mature partner to ICE,” and how Palantir is addressing employee concerns with discussion groups on ethics.

Image: Cory Doctorow via Flickr.

Palantir, the surveillance giant, is taking on an increased role with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), including finding the physical location of people who are marked for deportation, according to Palantir Slacks and other internal messages obtained by 404 Media.

The leak shows that Palantir’s work with ICE includes producing leads for law enforcement to find people to deport and keeping track of the logistics of Trump’s mass deportation effort, and provides concrete insight into the Trump administration’s wish to leverage data to enforce its immigration agenda. The internal communications also show Palantir leadership preparing for a potential backlash from employees or outsiders, with them writing FAQs that can be sent to friends or family that start to ask about Palantir’s work with ICE.

“Hey all, wanted to provide a quick update on our work with ICE,” Akash Jain, the Chief Technology Officer of Palantir Technologies and President of Palantir USG, wrote in a Slack message several days ago. “Over the last few weeks we prototyped a new set of data integrations and workflows with ICE.”

💡

Do you work at Palantir? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at joseph.404 or send me an email at joseph@404media.co.

“The new administration’s focus on leveraging data to drive enforcement operations has accelerated those efforts,” Jain wrote.

A page of an internal Palantir wiki obtained by 404 Media says Palantir participated in a three-week sprint, where developers rapidly work on new projects, with Homeland Security Investigations’ (HSI) Innovation Lab, which is the agency’s centralized hub for developing new advanced analytics capabilities and tools. The primary focus of that sprint was providing immigration agents with “improved awareness about the criminality and location of individuals who have already received a final order of removal,” the wiki says.

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This article was downloaded from https://www.404media.co/leaked-palantirs-plan-to-help-ice-deport-people/ at Apr 23, 2025 at 12:27 PM EDT.

FOIA | EMANUEL MAIBERG , JASON KOEBLER | EMANUEL MAIBERG | APR 17, 2025, 6:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

This ‘College Protester’ Isn’t Real. It’s an AI-Powered Undercover Bot for Cops (paid)

Massive Blue is helping cops deploy AI-powered social media bots to talk to people they suspect are anything from violent sex criminals all the way to vaguely defined “protesters.”

Image: WIRED

This article was produced with support from WIRED. This reporting was also the product of dozens of public records requests.

📄

This article was primarily reported using public records requests. We are making it available to all readers as a public service. FOIA reporting can be expensive, please consider subscribing to 404 Media to support this work. Or send us a one time donation via our tip jar here.

American police departments near the United States-Mexico border are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for an unproven and secretive technology that uses AI-generated online personas designed to interact with and collect intelligence on “college protesters,” “radicalized” political activists, and suspected drug and human traffickers, according to internal documents, contracts, and communications 404 Media obtained via public records requests.

Massive Blue, the New York-based company that is selling police departments this technology, calls its product Overwatch, which it markets as an “AI-powered force multiplier for public safety” that “deploys lifelike virtual agents, which infiltrate and engage criminal networks across various channels.” According to a presentation obtained by 404 Media, Massive Blue is offering cops these virtual personas that can be deployed across the internet with the express purpose of interacting with suspects over text messages and social media.

A screenshot from a Massive Blue presentation to the Texas Department of Public Safety, obtained using a public records request.

Massive Blue lists “border security,” “school safety,” and stopping “human trafficking” among Overwatch’s use cases. The technology—which as of last summer had not led to any known arrests—demonstrates the types of social media monitoring and undercover tools private companies are pitching to police and border agents. Concerns about tools like Massive Blue have taken on new urgency considering that the Trump administration has revoked the visas of hundreds of students, many of whom have protested against Israel’s war in Gaza.

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This article was downloaded from https://www.404media.co/this-college-protester-isnt-real-its-an-ai-powered-undercover-bot-for-cops/ at Apr 23, 2025 at 12:27 PM EDT.

April 16, 2025

- LAPD Publishes Crime Footage It Got From a Waymo Driverless Car

LAPD | JASON KOEBLER | JASON KOEBLER | APR 16, 2025, 3:34 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

LAPD Publishes Crime Footage It Got From a Waymo Driverless Car (free)

Police are starting to realize they can demand footage from driverless cars.

Image: LAPD

The Los Angeles Police Department obtained video footage from a Waymo driverless car as part of its investigation into a hit-and-run in which a separate, human-driven car hit a pedestrian.

The LAPD published the footage, which has a note on it that reads “Waymo Confidential Commercial Information,” on its YouTube page to ask the public for help identifying the driver of the vehicle. The short clip shows what video footage that law enforcement requests from Waymo looks like.

The situation shows that police in Los Angeles are now looking at Waymo robotaxis as potential sources of surveillance footage to investigate crimes that the vehicles’ cameras and sensors may have witnessed. In 2023, Bloomberg reported that police in both San Francisco and Maricopa County, Arizona, had issued search warrants for Waymo footage. Police have also requested footage from Teslas, extremely pervasive Ring cameras, and Cruise autonomous vehicles.

Waymo is rapidly expanding in Los Angeles; anecdotally, I see many Waymos driving around town every day, and the company just announced that the autonomous vehicles have expanded the geographic region in which they would operate in the city and that it would soon begin testing them on Los Angeles freeways. The proliferation of Waymo cars also means the proliferation of roving surveillance cameras. LAPD has shown an interest in obtaining footage from autonomous vehicles that operate in the city; last year we reported on a case in which the LAPD obtained footage from an autonomous food delivery robot to investigate a crime.

A Waymo spokesperson told 404 Media that it does not proactively give footage to police.

“Waymo does not provide information or data to law enforcement without a valid legal request, usually in the form of a warrant, subpoena, or court order. These requests are often the result of eyewitnesses or other video footage that identifies a Waymo vehicle at the scene,” the spokesperson said. “We carefully review each request to make sure it satisfies applicable laws and is legally valid. We also analyze the requested data or information, to ensure it is tailored to the specific subject of the warrant. We will narrow the data provided if a request is overbroad, and in some cases, object to producing any information at all.”

Waymo’s website explains that it conducts training sessions for law enforcement and emergency responders, which is designed to teach them about Waymo and explains what they should do in case they are responding to a car crash or other emergency involving a Waymo. The page says it had “conducted in-person training for 18,000+ first responders at 75+ agencies.”

The Los Angeles Police Department did not respond to a request for comment.

About the author

Jason is a cofounder of 404 Media. He was previously the editor-in-chief of Motherboard. He loves the Freedom of Information Act and surfing.

This article was downloaded from https://www.404media.co/lapd-publishes-crime-footage-it-got-from-a-waymo-driverless-car/ at Apr 23, 2025 at 12:27 PM EDT.

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LAPD Publishes Crime Footage It Got From a Waymo Driverless Car