404 Media

2025-09-18 17:46:58

Contractor Used Classified CIA Systems as ‘His Own Personal Google’

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

A former CIA official and contractor, who at the time of his employment dug through classified systems for information he then sold to a U.S. lobbying firm and foreign clients, used access to those CIA systems as “his own personal Google,” according to a court record reviewed by 404 Media and Court Watch.

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Dale Britt Bendler, 68, was a long running CIA officer before retiring in 2014 with a full pension. He rejoined the agency as a contractor and sold a wealth of classified information, according to the government’s sentencing memorandum filed on Wednesday. His clients included a U.S. lobbying firm working for a foreigner being investigated for embezzlement and another foreign national trying to secure a U.S. visa, according to the court record.

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Contractor Used Classified CIA Systems as ‘His Own Personal Google’

Dale Britt Bendler “​​earned approximately $360,000 in private client fees while also working as a full-time CIA contractor with daily access to highly classified material that he searched like it was his own personal Google,” according to a court re…

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-09-18 17:19:49

Union Warns Professors About Posting In the ‘Current Climate’

A union that represents university professors and other academics published a guide on Wednesday tailored to help its members navigate social media during the “current climate.” The advice? Lock down your social media accounts, expect anything you post will be screenshotted, and keep things positive. The document ends with links to union provided trauma counseling and legal services.

The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) published the two page document on September 17, days after the September 10 killing of right-wing pundit Charlie Kirk. The list of college professors and academics who've been censured or even fired for joking about, criticizing, or quoting Kirk after his death is long.
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Clemson University in South Carolina fired multiple members of its faculty after investigating their Kirk-related social media posts. On Monday the state’s Attorney General sent the college a letter telling it that the first amendment did not protect the fired employees and that the state would not defend them. Two universities in Tennessee fired multiple members of the staff after getting complaints about their social media posts. The University of Mississippi let a member of the staff go because they re-shared a comment about Kirk that people found “insensitive.” Florida Atlantic University placed an art history professor on administrative leave after she posted about Kirk on social media. Florida's education commissioner later wrote a letter to school superintendents warning them there would be consequences for talking about Kirk in the wrong way. “Govern yourselves accordingly,” the letter said.

AAUP’s advice is meant to help academic workers avoid ending up as a news story. “In a moment when it is becoming increasingly difficult to predict the consequences of our online speech and choices, we hope you will find these strategies and resources helpful,” it said.

Here are its five explicit tips: “1. Set your personal social media accounts to private mode. When prompted, approve the setting to make all previous posts private. 2. Be mindful that anything you post online can be screenshotted and shared. 3. Before posting or reposting online commentary, pause and ask yourself: a. Am I comfortable with this view potentially being shared with my employer, my students, or the public? Have I (or the person I am reposting) expressed this view in terms I would be comfortable sharing with my employer, my students, or the public?”

The advice continues: “4. In your social media bios, state that the views expressed through the account represent your own opinions and not your employer. You do not need to name your employer. Consider posting positive statements about positions you support rather than negative statements about positions you disagree with. Some examples could be: ‘Academic freedom is nonnegotiable,’ ‘The faculty united will never be divided,’ ‘Higher ed research saves lives,’ ‘Higher ed transforms lives,’ ‘Politicians are interfering with your child’s education.’”

The AAUPthen provides five digital safety tips that include setting up strong passwords, installing software updates as soon as they’re available, using two-factor authentication, and never using employer email addresses outside of work.

The last tip is the most revealing of how academics might be harassed online through campaigns like Turning Point USA’s “Professor Watchlist.” “Search for your name in common search engines to find out what is available about you online,” AAUP advises. “Put your name in quotation marks to narrow the search. Search both with and without your institution attached to your name.”

After that, the AAUP provided a list of trauma, counseling, and insurance services that its members have access to and a list of links to other pieces of information about protecting themselves.

“It’s good basic advice given that only a small number of faculty have spent years online in my experience, it’s a good place to start,” Pauline Shanks Kaurin, the former military ethics professor at the U.S. Naval War College told 404 Media. Kaurin resigned her position at the college earlier this year after realizing that the college would not defend academic freedom during Trump’s second term.

“I think this reflects the heightened level of scrutiny and targeting that higher ed is under,” Kaurin said. “While it’s not entirely new, the scale is certainly aided by many platforms and actors that are engaging on [social media] now when in the past faculty might have gotten threatening phone calls, emails and hard copy letters.”

The AAUP guidance was co-written by Isaac Kamola, an associate professor at Trinity College and the director of the AAUP’s Center for Academic Freedom. Kamola told 404 Media that the recommendations came for years of experience working with faculty who’ve been on the receiving end of targeted harassment campaigns. “That’s incredibly destabilizing,” he said. “It’s hard to explain what it’s like until it happens to you.”

Kamola said that academic freedom was already under threat before Kirk’s death. “It’s a multi-decade strategy of making sure that certain people, certain bodies, certain dies, are not in higher education, so that certain other ones can be, so that you can reproduce the ideas that a political apparatus would prefer existed in a university,” he said.

It’s telling that the AAUP felt the need to publish this, but the advice is practical and actionable, even for people outside of academia. Freedom of expression is under attack in America and though academics and other public figures are perhaps under the most threat, they aren’t the only ones. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said the Pentagon is actively monitoring the social media activity of military personnel as well as civilian employees of the Department of Defense.

“It is unacceptable for military personnel and Department of War civilians to celebrate or mock the assassination of a fellow American,” Sean Parnell, public affairs officer at the Pentagon, wrote on X, using the new nickname for the Department of Defense. In the private sector, Sony fired one of its video game developers after they made a joke on X about Kirk’s death and multiple journalists have been fired for Kirk related comments.

AAUP did not immediately respond to 404 Media’s request for comment.

MSNBC fires analyst Matthew Dowd over Charlie Kirk shooting remarks

Dowd said the slain activist’s words may have fueled the violence that claimed his life, sparking backlash

^{Joseph Gedeon (The Guardian)}

404 Media

2025-09-18 13:25:45

Librarians Are Being Asked to Find AI-Hallucinated Books

Reference librarian Eddie Kristan said lenders at the library where he works have been asking him to find books that don’t exist without realizing they were hallucinated by AI ever since the release of GPT-3.5 in late 2022. But the problem escalated over the summer after fielding patron requests for the same fake book titles from real authors—the consequences of an AI-generated summer reading list circulated in special editions of the Chicago Sun-Times and The Philadelphia Inquirer earlier this year. At the time, the freelancer told 404 Media he used AI to produce the list without fact checking outputs before syndication.

“We had people coming into the library and asking for those authors,” Kristan told 404 Media. He’s receiving similar requests for other types of media that don’t exist because they’ve been hallucinated by other AI-powered features. “It’s really, really frustrating, and it’s really setting us back as far as the community’s info literacy.”

AI tools are changing the nature of how patrons treat librarians, both online and IRL. Alison Macrina, executive director of Library Freedom Project, told 404 Media early results from a recent survey of emerging trends in how AI tools are impacting libraries indicate that patrons are growing more trusting of their preferred generative AI tool or product, and the veracity of the outputs they receive. She said librarians report being treated like robots over library reference chat, and patrons getting defensive over the veracity of recommendations they’ve received from an AI-powered chatbot. Essentially, like more people trust their preferred LLM over their human librarian.

“Librarians are reporting this overall atmosphere of confusion and lack of trust they’re experiencing from their patrons,” Macrina told 404. “They’re seeing patrons having seemingly diminished critical thinking and curiosity. They’re definitely running into some of these psychosis and other mental health issues, and certainly seeing the people who are more widely adopting it also being those who have less digital literacy about it and a general sort of loss of retention.”

As a reference librarian, Kristan said he spends a lot of time thinking about how fallible the human mind can be, especially as he’s fielding more requests for things that don’t exist than ever before. Fortunately, he’s developed a system: Search for the presumed thing by title in the library catalog. If it’s not in the catalog, he checks the global library catalog WorldCat. If it isn’t there, he starts to get suspicious.

“Not being in WorldCat might mean it’s something that isn’t catalogued like a Zine, a broadcast, or something ephemeral, but if it’s parading as a traditional book and doesn’t have an entry in the collective library catalog, it might be AI,” Kristan explained.

From there, he might connect the title to a platform like Kindle Direct Publishing—one way AI-generated books enter the market—or the patron will tell him their source is an AI-powered chatbot, which he will have to explain, likely hallucinated the name of the thing they’re looking for. A thing that doesn't exist.

As much as library workers try to shield their institutions from the AI-generated content onslaught, the situation is and has been, in many ways, inevitable. Companies desperate to rush generative AI products to market are pushing flawed products onto the public that are predictably being used to pollute our information ecosystems. The consequences are that AI slop is entering libraries, everyone who uses AI products bears at least a little responsibility for the swarm, and every library worker, regardless of role, is being asked to try and mitigate the effects.

Collection development librarians are requesting digital book vendors like OverDrive, Hoopla and CloudLibrary to remove AI slop titles as they’re found. Subject specialists are expected to vet patron requested titles that may have been written in part with AI without having to read every single title. Library technology providers are rushing to implement tools that librarians say are making library systems catalogs harder to use.

Jaime Taylor, an academic library resource management systems supervisor with the University of Massachusetts, says vendors are shoehorning Large Language Models (LLMs) into library systems in one of two ways. The first is a natural language search (NLS) or a semantic search that attempts to draw meaning from the words to find complementary search results. Taylor says these products are misleading in that they claim to eliminate the need for the strict keyword searches or Boolean operators when searching library catalogs and databases, when really the LLM is doing the same work on the backend.

“These companies all advertise these tools as knowing your intent,” Taylor told 404 Media. “Understanding what you meant when you put those terms in. They don’t know. They don’t understand. None of those things are true. There is no technical way these tools can do that.”

The other tool Taylor is seeing in library technology are AI-generated summaries based on journal articles, monographs, and other academic sources through a product called AI Insights, which incorporates new information into an existing LLM with a system called retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Taylor and colleagues have found RAG doesn’t really help improve the accuracy of AI-generated summaries through beta testing AI tools in library tech for companies like Clarivate, Elsevier and EBSCO.

“It reads everything on both pages,” she added. “It can’t tell where the article you’re looking for starts and stops, so it gives you takeaways from every word on the page. This was really bad when we tested it with book reviews, because book reviews are often very short and there’ll be half a dozen on one page, which would end up giving us really mixed up information about every book review on the page, even though the record we were looking at was only looking for one of them, because it was a scanned page from an older journal.”

Taylor says neither type of product is ready for market, but especially not the AI summaries that do what an abstract does but a lot worse. She’s turned what ones she can off, but expects fewer vendors will allow her and other librarians to do so in the future to record more favorable use cases. The problem, she says, is these companies are rushing products to market, making the skills academic librarians are trying to teach students and researchers to use obsolete.

“We are trying to teach how to construct useful, exact searching,” she said. “But really [these products’ intent] is to make that not happen. The problem with that in a university library is we’re trying to teach those skills but we have tools that negate that necessity. And because those tools don’t work well, you’ve not learned the skill and you’re still getting crap results, so you’re never going to get better results because you didn’t learn the skill.”

Plenty of library workers remain cautiously optimistic about the potential for generative AI integrations and what that could mean for information retrieval and categorization. But for most librarians, the rollout has been clunky, error-filled and disorienting, for them and their patrons.

“As someone who feels like a big part of my job is advocacy for the position, for the principles of the profession, I am here to not look at whether a resource is good or bad,” said Kristan. “I don’t look at the output, the relationship that it has with the patrons, and what it’s being used for in the long run of the future. Like, I’m not out here just breaking looms and machine weaving machinery just for the hell of it. I’m saying this is not good for the community and we need to find equitable alternatives to ensure that things are going well for the lives of our patrons.”

Readers Annoyed When Fantasy Novel Accidentally Leaves AI Prompt in Published Version, Showing Request to Copy Another Writer's Style

A scammer left glaringly obvious evidence of using AI to write portions of a fantasy novel and even tried to copy the style of a real author.

^{Victor Tangermann (Futurism)}