Behind the Blog: Exercises in OSINT and Storage Pains
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 OSINT for chat groups, Russell Crowe films, and storage problems.
JOSEPH: On Wednesday we recorded a subscribers podcast about the second anniversary of 404 Media. That should hit your feeds next week or so. Towards the end of recording, I went silent for a bit. I said on air sorry about that, a source just sent me an insane tip, or something like that.
That tip led to ICE Adds Random Person to Group Chat, Exposes Details of Manhunt in Real-Time. Definitely read the piece if you haven’t already. It presented an interesting verification challenge. Essentially I was given these screenshots which included phone numbers but I didn’t know exactly who was behind each one. I didn’t know their names, nor their agencies. It sure looked like a conversation involving ICE though, because it included a “Field Operations Worksheet” covered in ICE branding. But I needed to know who was involved. I didn’t think DHS or ICE would help because they are taking multiple days to reply to media requests if they do at all at the moment. So I had to do something else.
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ICE Adds Random Person to Group Chat, Exposes Details of Manhunt in Real-Time
Members of a law enforcement group chat including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other agencies inadvertently added a random person to the group called “Mass Text” where they exposed highly sensitive information about an active search for a convicted attempted murderer seemingly marked for deportation, 404 Media has learned.The texts included an unredacted ICE “Field Operations Worksheet” that includes detailed information about the target they were looking for, and the texts showed ICE pulling data from a DMV and license plate readers (LPRs), according to screenshots of the chat obtained and verified by 404 Media. The person accidentally added to the group chat is not a law enforcement official or associated with the investigation in any way, and said they were added to it weeks ago and initially thought it was a series of spam messages.
The incident is a significant data breach and operational security failure for ICE, which has ramped up arrest efforts across the U.S. as part of the Trump administration’s mass deportation efforts. The breach also has startling similarities to so-called Signal Gate, in which a senior administration official added the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic to a group chat that contained likely classified information. These new ICE messages were MMS, or Multimedia Messaging Service messages, meaning they weren’t end-to-end encrypted, like texts sent over Signal or WhatsApp are.
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Subscribe nowICE Adds Random Person to Group Chat, Exposes Details of Manhunt in Real-Time
The texts were sent to a group called “Mass Text” and show ICE using DMV and license plate reader data in an attempt to find their target, copies of the messages obtained by 404 Media show.Joseph Cox (404 Media)
