Our Zine About ICE Surveillance Is Here
We are very proud to present 404 Media’s zine on the surveillance technology used by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. While we have always covered surveillance and privacy, for the last year, you may have noticed that we have spent an outsized amount of our attention and time reporting on the ways technology companies are powering Donald Trump’s deportation raids.
When we announced this zine in early December, we hoped that people would want it. Trump’s dehumanizing mass deportation campaign is perhaps the bleakest, most horrifying aspect of an administration that has reveled in its attacks on civil liberties, science, and government expertise. We did not know just how many of you would want a copy. We originally intended to print 1,000 copies, and to hand most of them out at a benefit concert in Los Angeles for CHIRLA, a human rights organization that helps immigrants. When those sold out in a few hours, we asked Punch Kiss Press, our printer, if they could make 2,500. When those sold out just as fast, we increased our order to 3,500. If you preordered a print zine, I put it in the mail last week and it should be arriving soon. Thank you everyone for your patience in waiting for the zine and we’d love to know what you think of it. We have a handful more copies that we’ve put up for sale on our Shopify. They will almost certainly sell out today and we will probably not reprint them.
We never intended to make this zine a scarce resource. We wanted to make a print product as an experiment for the reasons we explained when we announced it: Print is cool, it’s human, it’s enduring, and it’s shareable.
404ICEZINE
Full-sized zine in English
404ICEZINE.pdf
62 MB
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ICEZineEspanol
Zine en español
ICEZineEspanol.pdf
5 MB
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zinesmallfile
Zine in English, small file size
zinesmallfile.pdf
5 MB
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Each of these zines was printed, assembled, and cut down to size by hand, and each of them was stuck in the mail by me or a friend of mine over the course of the last few weeks. We printed this on a riso printer, a Japanese duplicator from the early 1990s that anyone who is into will talk your ear off about endlessly, to the point that it has become a meme. I also printed all the envelopes on a riso printer from 1995 that I have painstakingly spent the last few months repairing. Basically, making and shipping these was labor intensive and DIY by design; we never thought we would need to print so many. They were made with a considerable amount of love. And for this first one, we don’t really have the capability to make and ship more than we’ve already made.
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So for that reason, we’re releasing a PDF of the zine for free to everyone, because we think the information contained within it is important and should be shared as widely as possible. We have also paid to have the zine translated into Spanish by human translators, thanks in part to a donation from one of our subscribers. You can find the Spanish version of the zine here. If you have a riso printer or are a riso print shop and are interested in printing additional copies at scale to distribute to your community, please email me and I may be able to share the print files with you.
We could not have made this zine without the support of our subscribers, our friends, and our local community. The zine was laid out by our friend Ernie Smith, who is one of the best to ever do it. The cover art was done by Veri Alvarez, whose work you can find here and whose anti-ICE art is frankly very fucking good and who deserves your support. The printing and assembly of the zine was done by Karina Richardson at Punch Kiss Press in Los Angeles and a few of her friends. I met Karina at a print festival in Los Angeles a few months ago and then asked her if she could take on this very complicated project on a short timeline. I then asked her to more than triple the number of copies, all over the holidays. It cannot be overstated how much Karina and Punch Kiss knocked it out of the park on this, and how thankful we are to her. And we made the zine to support LA Fights Back, a concert series dedicated to raising money for communities affected by ICE. We are thankful that we were invited to participate.
This being a print product, our work has been frozen in time. We wrote these pieces before DHS agents killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, and before several other people died in ICE custody in the last few weeks. The horrors we are facing are evolving and changing every day and we are committed to continuing to cover the ways that big tech and the surveillance state empowers ICE. You can find most of our most recent work on ICE here:
- Here is the User Guide for ELITE, the Tool Palantir Made for ICE
- DHS Says Critical ICE Surveillance Footage From Abuse Case Was ...
- Feds Create Drone No Fly Zone That Would Stop People Filming ICE
- ICE's Facial Recognition App Misidentified a Woman. Twice
- 'ELITE': The Palantir App ICE Uses to Find Neighborhoods to Raid
- Inside ICE's Tool to Monitor Phones in Entire Neighborhoods
- DHS Is Lying To You About ICE Shooting a Woman
- Here is the Agreement Giving ICE Medicaid Patients' Data
- How a US Citizen Was Scanned With ICE's Facial Recognition Tech
- ICE Contracts Company Making Bounty Hunter AI Agents
- ICE Taps into Nationwide AI-Enabled Camera Network, Data Shows
We’ve been overwhelmed and heartened by the support and interest in our reporting and in this zine. This project was a lot of work, and we’ve learned a lot about making and distributing a physical product at scale. We don’t have anything concrete to announce yet but I think we’d love to do more print products and issues in the future. So if you liked this please let us know. If you want to support our work specifically, the best thing you can do is subscribe to 404 Media. We also have a tip jar and, if you are interested in making a larger tax-deductible donation, please email us at donate@404media.co.
404 Media Is Making a Zine
404 Media is making a print zine about the surveillance tactics used by ICE, and the ways people are resisting this technology. It will be 16 pages and printed on a risograph printer by a printshop in Los Angeles. It contains both reworked versions of our best reporting on ICE and some new articles for the zine. It will be available at the beginning of January.I have been somewhat obsessed with making a print product for the last year or so, and we’re really excited to try this experiment. If it goes well, we hope to make more of our journalism available in print. We are doing this in part because we were invited to help throw a benefit concert by our friends at heaven2nite in Los Angeles on January 4, with the proceeds going to the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA), an LA-based nonprofit providing support to Dreamers, immigrant families, and low-wage workers in California. We are going to be giving away copies of the zine at that concert and are selling copies on our Shopify page to ship in early January.
Presale: ICE Surveillance Zine
**THIS WILL SHIP IN EARLY JANUARY** We are making a print zine about the surveillance tactics used by ICE, and the ways people are resisting this technology. It is 16 pages and printed on a risograph printer by Punch Kiss Press in Los Angeles. It contains both reworked versions of our best reporting on ICE and some new404 Media404 Media
Why are we doing this? Well, zines are cool, and print media is cool. We have joked about wanting to print out our blogs and hand them out door-to-door or staple them to lamp posts. Handing out zines at a concert or sending them to you in the mail will get the job done, too.We have spent the last two-and-a-half years trying to build something more sustainable and more human in a world and on an internet that feels more automated and more artificial than ever. We have shown that it’s possible for a small team of dedicated reporters to do impactful, groundbreaking accountability journalism on the companies and powers that are pushing us to a more inhumane world without overwhelmingly focusing on appeasing social media and search algorithms. Nevertheless, we still spend a lot of our time trying to figure out how to reach new audiences using social media and search, without making ourselves feel totally beholden to it. Alongside that, we put a huge amount of effort into convincing people who find our stuff on Instagram or TikTok or YouTube or Reddit (and Bluesky and Mastodon) to follow our work on platforms where we can directly reach them without an algorithmic intermediary. That’s why we focus so much on building our own website, our own direct email newsletters, our own full-text RSS feeds, and RSS-based podcast feeds.
This has gone well, but we have seen our colleagues at The Onion and other independent media outlets bring back the printed word, which, again, is cool, but also comes with other benefits. Print can totally sidestep Big Tech’s distribution mechanisms. It can be mailed, sold in stores, and handed out at concerts. It can be read and passed to a friend, donated to a thrift store and discovered by someone killing time on a weekend, or tossed in a recycling bin and rescued by a random passerby. It is a piece of physical media that can be organically discovered in the real world.
Print does come with some complications, most notably it is significantly more expensive to make and distribute a print product than it is to make a website, and it’s also a slower medium (duh). Ghost, our website and email infrastructure, also doesn’t have a native way to integrate a print subscription into a membership. This is a long way of saying that the only way this first print experiment makes sense is if we sell it as a separate product. Subscribers at the Supporter level will get a discount; we can’t yet include print in your existing subscription for all sorts of logistical and financial reasons, but we will eventually make a PDF of the zine available to subscribers. If you're a subscriber, your code is at the bottom of this post.
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Some other details: Our cover art was made by Veri Alvarez, a super talented LA-based artist whose work you can find here. The interior of the magazine was designed and laid out by our old friend Ernie Smith, who runs the amazing Tedium newsletter and who was willing to unretire from his days of laying out newspapers to help us with this. We are printing it at Punch Kiss Press, a DIY risograph studio here in Los Angeles. For those unfamiliar, risograph printing is sort of like silkscreening on paper, where you print one color at a time and layer them on top of each other to get very cool color mixing effects.We did not originally set out to spend most of the last year reporting on ICE. But we have watched the agency grow from an already horrifying organization into a deportation force that is better funded than most militaries. We have seen full-scale occupations of Los Angeles and Chicago, daily raids playing out in cities, towns, and workplaces across the country, and people getting abducted while they are at work, shopping, or walking down the street.
As this has played out, we have focused on highlighting the ways that the Trump administration has used the considerable power of the federal government and the vast amounts of information it has to empower ICE’s surveillance machine. Technologies and databases created during earlier administrations for one governmental purpose (collecting taxes, for example) have been repurposed as huge caches of data now used to track and detain undocumented immigrants. Privacy protections and data sharing walls between federal agencies have been knocked down. Technologies that were designed for local law enforcement or were created to make rich people feel safer, like license plate tracking cameras, have grown into huge surveillance dragnets that can be accessed by ICE. Surveillance tools that have always been concerning—phone hacking malware, social media surveillance software, facial recognition algorithms, and AI-powered smart glasses—are being used against some of society’s most vulnerable people. There is not a ton of reason for optimism, but in the face of an oppressive force, people are fighting back, and we tried to highlight their work in the zine, too.
Again, this is an experiment, so we can’t commit at the moment to a print subscription, future zines, future magazines, or anything like that. But we are hopeful that people like it and that we can figure out how to do more print products and to do them more often. If you have a connection at a newspaper printing press, a place that prints magazines or catalogs, or otherwise have expertise in printmaking, design, layout, or other things that deal with the printed word, please get in touch, it will help us as we explore the feasibility of doing future print products (jason@404media.co).
We are also hoping that groups who work with immigrants throughout the United States will be interested in this; if that’s you please email me (jason@404media.co). We are also exploring translating the zine into Spanish.
If you are a subscriber, your discount code is below this:
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We are publishing a risograph-printed zine about the surveillance technologies used by ICE.Jason Koebler (404 Media)
