404 Media

2025-11-03 16:33:17

arXiv Changes Rules After Getting Spammed With AI-Generated 'Research' Papers

arXiv, a preprint publication for academic research that has become particularly important for AI research, has announced it will no longer accept computer science articles and papers that haven’t been vetted by an academic journal or a conference. Why? A tide of AI slop has flooded the computer science category with low-effort papers that are “little more than annotated bibliographies, with no substantial discussion of open research issues,” according to a press release about the change.

arXiv has become a critical place for preprint and open access scientific research to be published. Many major scientific discoveries are published on arXiv before they finish the peer review process and are published in other, peer-reviewed journals. For that reason, it’s become an important place for new breaking discoveries and has become particularly important for research in fast-moving fields such as AI and machine learning (though there are also sometimes preprint, non-peer-reviewed papers there that get hyped but ultimately don’t pass peer review muster). The site is a repository of knowledge where academics upload PDFs of their latest research for public consumption. It publishes papers on physics, mathematics, biology, economics, statistics, and computer science and the research is vetted by moderators who are subject matter experts.
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But because of an onslaught of AI-generated research, specifically in the computer science (CS) section, arXiv is going to limit which papers can be published. “In the past few years, arXiv has been flooded with papers,” arXiv said in a press release. “Generative AI / large language models have added to this flood by making papers—especially papers not introducing new research results—fast and easy to write.”

The site noted that this was less a policy change and more about stepping up enforcement of old rules. “When submitting review articles or position papers, authors must include documentation of successful peer review to receive full consideration,” it said. “Review/survey articles or position papers submitted to arXiv without this documentation will be likely to be rejected and not appear on arXiv.”

According to the press release, arXiv has been inundated by "review" submissions—papers that are still pending peer review—but that CS was the worst category. “We now receive hundreds of review articles every month,” arXiv said. “The advent of large language models have made this type of content relatively easy to churn out on demand.

The plan is to enforce a blanket ban on papers still under review in the CS category and free the moderators to look at more substantive submissions. arXiv stressed that it does not often accept review articles, but had been doing so when it was of academic interest and from a known researcher. “If other categories see a similar rise in LLM-written review articles and position papers, they may choose to change their moderation practices in a similar manner to better serve arXiv authors and readers,” arXiv said.

AI-generated research articles are a pressing problem in the scientific community. Scam academic journals that run pay-to-publish schemes are an issue that plagued academic publishing long before AI, but the advent of LLMs has supercharged it. But scam journals aren’t the only ones affected. Last year, a serious scientific journal had to retract a paper that included an AI-generated image of a giant rat penis. Peer reviewers, the people who are supposed to vet scientific papers for accuracy, have also been caught cutting corners using ChatGPT in part because of the large demands placed on their time.

ChatGPT Looms Over the Peer-Review Crisis

Research shows that academics might be using generative AI tools to cut corners on a fundamental pillar of the scientific process.

^{Emanuel Maiberg (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-10-30 16:22:42

Trump Orders Nuclear Testing As Nuke Workers Go Unpaid

Last night Trump directed the Pentagon to start testing nukes again. If that happens, it’ll be the first time the US has detonated a nuke in more than 30 years. The organization that would likely be responsible for this would be the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), a civilian workforce that oversees the American nuclear stockpile. Because of the current government shutdown, 1,400 NNSA workers are on furlough and the remaining 375 are working without pay.

America detonated its last nuke in 1992 as part of a general drawn down following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Four years later, it was the first country to sign the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) which bans nuclear explosions for civilian or military purposes. But Congress never ratified the treaty and the CTBT never entered into force. Despite this, there has not been a nuke tested by the United States since.
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Trump threatened to resume nuclear testing during his first term but it never happened. At the time, officials at the Pentagon and NNSA said it would take them a few months to get tests running again should the President order them.

The NNSA has maintained the underground tunnels once used for testing since the 1990s and converted them into a different kind of space that verifies the reliability of existing nukes without blowing them up in what are called “virtual tests.” During a rare tour of the tunnel with journalists earlier this year, a nuclear weapons scientist from Los Alamos National Laboratory told NPR that “our assessment is that there are no system questions that would be answered by a test, that would be worth the expense and the effort and the time.”

Right now, the NNSA might be hard pressed to find someone to conduct the test. It employs around 2,000 people and the shutdown has seen 1,400 of them furloughed and 375 working without pay. The civilian nuclear workforce was already having a tough year. In February, the Department of Government Efficiency cut 350 NNSA employees only to scramble and rehire all but 28 when they realized how essential they were to nuclear safety. But uncertainty continued and in April the Department of Energy declared 500 NNSA employees “non-essential” and at risk of termination.

That’s a lot of chaos for a government agency charged with ensuring the safety and effectiveness of America’s nuclear weapons. The NNSA is currently in the middle of a massive project to “modernize” America’s nukes, an effort that will cost trillions of dollars. Part of modernization means producing new plutonium pits, the core of a nuclear warhead. That’s a complicated and technical process and no one is sure how much it’ll cost and how dangerous it’ll be.

And now, it may have to resume nuclear testing while understaffed.

“We have run out of federal funds for federal workers,” Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said in a press conference announcing furlough on October 20. “This has never happened before…we have never furloughed workers in the NNSA. This should not happen. But this was as long as we could stretch the funds for federal workers. We were able to do some gymnastics and stretch it further for the contractors.”

Three days later, Rep. Dina Titus (D-NV) said the furlough was making the world less safe. “NNSA facilities are charged with maintaining nuclear security in accordance with long-standing policy and the law,” she said in a press release. “Undermining the agency’s workforce at such a challenging time diminishes our nuclear deterrence, emboldens international adversaries, and makes Nevadans less safe. Secretary Wright, Administrator Williams, and Congressional Republicans need to stop playing politics, rescind the furlough notice, and reopen the government.”

Trump announced the nuclear tests in a post on Truth Social, a platform where he announces a lot of things that ultimately end up not happening. “The United States has more Nuclear Weapons than any other country. This was accomplished, including a complete update and renovation of existing weapons, during my First Term in office. Because of the tremendous destructive power, I HATED to do it, but had no choice! Russia is second, and China is a distant third, but will be even within 5 years. Because of other countries testing programs, I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis. That process will begin immediately. Thank you for your attention to this matter! PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP,” the post said.

Matt Korda, a nuclear expert with the Federation of American Scientists, said that the President’s Truth social post was confusing and riddled with misconceptions. Russia has more nuclear weapons than America. Nuclear modernization is ongoing and will take trillions of dollars and many years to complete. Over the weekend, Putin announced that Russia had successfully tested a nuclear-powered cruise missile and on Tuesday he said the country had done the same with a nuclear-powered undersea drone. Russia withdrew from the CTBT in 2023, but neither recent test involved a nuclear explosion. Russia last blew up a nuke in 1990 and China conducted its most recent test in 1996. Both have said they would resume nuclear testing should America do it. Korda said it's unclear what, exactly, Trump means. He could be talking about anything from test firing non-nuclear equipped ICBMs to underground testing to detonating nukes in the desert. “We’ll have to wait and see until either this Truth Social post dissipates and becomes a bunch of nothing or it actually gets turned into policy. Then we’ll have something more concrete to respond to,” Korda said.

Worse, he thinks the resumption of testing would be bad for US national security. “It actually puts the US at a strategic disadvantage,” Korda said. “This moratorium on not testing nuclear weapons benefits the United States because the United States has, by far, the most advanced modeling and simulation equipment…by every measure this is a terrible idea.”

The end of nuclear detonation tests has spurred 30 years of innovation in the field of computer modeling. Subcritical computer modeling happens in the NNSA-maintained underground tunnels where detonations were once a common occurrence. The Los Alamos National Laboratories and other American nuclear labs are building massive super computers that are, in part, the result of decades of work spurred by the end of detonations and the embrace of simulation.

Detonating a nuclear weapon—whether above ground or below—is disastrous for the environment. There are people alive in the United States today who are living with cancer and other health conditions caused by American nuclear testing. Live tests make the world more anxious, less safe, and encourage other nuclear powers to do their own. It also uses up a nuke, something America has said it wants to build more of.

“There’s no upside to this,” Korda said. He added that he felt bad for the furloughed NNSA workers. “People find out about significant policy changes through Truth social posts. So it’s entirely possible that the people who would be tasked with carrying out this decision are learning about it in the same way we are all learning about it. They probably have the exact same kinds of questions that we do.”

Opinion | America Is Updating Its Nuclear Weapons. The Price: $1.7 Trillion.

The $1.7 trillion overhaul is already underway.

^{W.J. Hennigan (The New York Times)}

404 Media

2025-10-30 15:10:29

Someone Snuck Into a Cellebrite Microsoft Teams Call and Leaked Phone Unlocking Details

Someone recently managed to get on a Microsoft Teams call with representatives from phone hacking company Cellebrite, and then leaked a screenshot of the company’s capabilities against many Google Pixel phones, according to a forum post about the leak and 404 Media’s review of the material.

The leak follows others obtained and verified by 404 Media over the last 18 months. Those leaks impacted both Cellebrite and its competitor Grayshift, now owned by Magnet Forensics. Both companies constantly hunt for techniques to unlock phones law enforcement have physical access to.

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Someone Snuck Into a Cellebrite Microsoft Teams Call and Leaked Phone Unlocking Details

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-10-29 14:40:03

ICE and CBP Agents Are Scanning Peoples’ Faces on the Street To Verify Citizenship

“You don’t got no ID?” a Border Patrol agent in a baseball cap, sunglasses, and neck gaiter asks a kid on a bike. The officer and three others had just stopped the two young men on their bikes during the day in what a video documenting the incident says is Chicago. One of the boys is filming the encounter on his phone. He says in the video he was born here, meaning he would be an American citizen.

When the boy says he doesn’t have ID on him, the Border Patrol officer has an alternative. He calls over to one of the other officers, “can you do facial?” The second officer then approaches the boy, gets him to turn around to face the sun, and points his own phone camera directly at him, hovering it over the boy’s face for a couple seconds. The officer then looks at his phone’s screen and asks for the boy to verify his name. The video stops.

💡
Do you have any more videos of ICE or CBP using facial recognition? Do you work at those agencies or know more about Mobile Fortify? 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.

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ICE and CBP Agents Are Scanning Peoples’ Faces on the Street To Verify Citizenship

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-10-28 13:24:21

Lawsuit Accuses a16z of Turning Roblox Into a School Shooter's Playground

The mother of a teenager who died by suicide is suing Roblox, accusing the company of worrying more about its investors than the children in its audience. The complaint, filed this month, claims Kleiner Perkins and Andreessen Horowitz, who’ve collectively invested hundreds of millions of dollars into the gaming company, fostered a platform that monetizes children at the cost of their safety.
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Attorneys for Jaimee Seitz filed the lawsuit in the eastern district of Kentucky. Seitz is the mother of Audree Heine, a teen girl who committed suicide just after her 13th birthday in 2024. When detectives investigated Heine’s death they found she had a vast online social life that centered around groups in Discord and Roblox that idolized school shooters like Dylan Kleebold. Since Heine’s death, Seitz has been outspoken about the unique dangers of Roblox.

Heine’s family claims she would never have died had Roblox done a better job of moderating its platform. “Audree was pushed to suicide by an online community dedicated to glorifying violence and emulating notorious mass shooters, a community that can thrive and prey upon young children like Audree only because of Defendants’ egregiously tortious conduct,” the complaint said.

Seitz’s lawyers filed the 89 page lawsuit on October 20 and in it attempted to make the case that Roblox’s problems all stem from cause: corporate greed. “The reason that Roblox is overrun with harmful content and predators is simple: Roblox prioritizes user growth, revenue, and eventual profits over child safety,” it said. “For years, Roblox has knowingly prioritized these numbers over the safety of children through the actions it has taken and decisions it has made to increase and monetize users regardless of the consequences.”

According to the lawsuit, Roblox’s earning potential attracted big investors which encouraged it to abandon safety for quick cash. “Roblox’s business model allowed the company to attract significant venture capital funding from big-name investors like Kleiner Perkins and Andreessen Horowitz, putting enormous pressure on the company to prioritize growing and monetizing its users.”

Andreessen Horowitz, known as a16z is a venture capital firm whose previous investments include Civitai—a company that made money from noncensual AI porn—an “uncensored” AI project that offered users advice on how to commit suicide, and startup that’s selling access to thousands of “synthetic influencers” for use in manipulating public opinion.

In 2020, a16z led a round of funding that raised $150 million for Roblox. “Roblox is one of those rare platform companies with massive traction and an organic, high-growth business model that will advance the company, and push the industry forward for many years to come,” David George, a general partner at the investment firm, said in a press release at the time.

The lawsuit claims Roblox knows that kids are easy marks for low effort monetization efforts common in online video games. “Recognizing that children have more free time, underdeveloped cognitive functioning, and diminished impulse control, Roblox has exploited their vulnerability to lure them to its app,” it said.

The lawsuit notes that Roblox did not require age verification for years, nor did it restrict communication between children and adults and didn’t require an adult to set up an account for a child. Roblox rolled out age verification and age-based communications systems in July, a feature that uses AI to scan the faces of its users to check their age.

These kinds of basic safety features, however, have taken years to implement. According to the lawsuit, there’s a reason Roblox has been slow on safety. “In pursuit of growth, Roblox deprioritized safety measures even further so that it could report strong numbers to Wall Street,” it said. “For instance, Roblox executives rejected employee proposals for parental approval requirements that would protect children on the platform. Employees also reported feeling explicit pressure to avoid any changes that could reduce platform engagement, even when those changes would protect children from harmful interactions on the platform.”

Roblox is now the subject of multiple investigative reports that have exposed the safety problems on its platforms. It’s also the subject of multiple lawsuits, Seitz’s is the 12th such case filed by Anapol Weiss, the law firm representing her.

According to Seitz’s interviews with the press and the lawsuit, her daughter got caught up in a subculture on Roblox and Discord called The True Crime Community (TCC). “Through Roblox, Audree was exposed to emotional manipulation and social pressure by other users, including TCC members, who claimed to revere the Columbine shooters, depicted them as misunderstood outcasts who took revenge on their bullies, and encouraged violence against oneself and others,” the lawsuit said.

404 Media searched through Roblox’s game servers after the lawsuit was filed and found multiple instances of games named for the Columbine massacre. One server used pictures from Parkland, Florida and another was advertised using the CCTV picture of Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris from the Columbine shooting.

Andreessen Horowitz Funds ‘Uncensored’ AI That Will Tell You How to Kill Yourself

a16z funds open source AI developers who are building alternatives to OpenAI’s closed systems, but we still have no idea what’s going to happen when anyone can access uncensored LLMs.

^{Emanuel Maiberg (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-10-27 18:39:31

'House of Dynamite' Is About the Zoom Call that Ends the World

This post contains spoilers for the Netflix film ‘House of Dynamite.’

Netflix’s new Kathryn Bigelow-directed nuclear war thriller wants audiences to ask themselves the question: what would you do if you had 15 minutes to decide whether or not to end the world?

House of Dynamite is about a nuclear missile hitting the United States as viewed from the conference call where America’s power players gather to decide how to retaliate. The decision window is short, just 15 minutes. In the film that’s all the time the President has to assess the threat, pick targets, and decide if the US should also launch its nuclear weapons. It’s about how much time they’d have in real life too.
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In House of Dynamite, America’s early warning systems detect the launch of a nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. The final target is Chicago and when it lands more than 20 million people will die in a flash. Facing the destruction of a major American city, the President must decide what—if any—action to take in response.

The US has hundreds of nuclear missiles ready to go and plans to strike targets across Russia, China, and North Korea. But there’s a catch. In the film, America didn’t see who fired the nuke and no one is taking credit. It’s impossible to know who to strike and in what proportion. What’s a president to do?

House of Dynamite tells the story of this 15 minute Zoom call—from detection of the launch to its terminal arrival in Chicago—three different times. There’s dozens of folks on the call, from deputy advisors to the Secretary of Defense to the President himself, and each run through of the events gives the audience a bigger peak at how the whole machine operates, culminating, in the end, with the President’s view.

Many of the most effective and frightening films about nukes—Threads and The Day After—focus on the lives of the humans living in the blast zone. They’re about the crumbling of society in a wasteland, beholden to the decisions of absent political powers so distant that they often never appear on screen. House of Dynamite is about those powerful people caught in the absurd game of nuclear war, forced to make decisions with limited information and enormous consequences.

In both the movie and real life, America has ground-based interceptors stationed in California and Alaska that are meant to knock a nuke out of the sky should one ever get close. The early film follows missileers in Alaska as they launch the interceptor only to have it fail. It’s a horrifying and very real possibility. The truth of interceptors is that we don’t have many of them, the window to hit a fast moving ICBM is narrow, and in tests they only work about half the time.

“So it’s a fucking coin toss? That’s what $50 billion buys us?” Secretary of Defense Reid Baker, played by Jarred Harris, says in the film. This detail caught the eye of the Trump White House, which plans to spend around $200 billion on a space based version of the same tech.

Bloomberg reported on an internal Pentagon memo that directed officials to debunk House of Dynamite’s claims about missile defense. The Missile Defense Agency told Bloomberg that interceptors “have displayed a 100% accuracy rate in testing for more than a decade.” The Pentagon separately told Bloomberg that it wasn’t consulted on the film at all.

Director Bigelow worked closely with the CIA to make Zero Dark Thirty, but has tussled with the Pentagon before. The DoD didn’t like The Hurt Locker and pulled out of the project after showing some initial support. Bigelow has said in interviews that she wanted House of Dynamite to be an independent project.

Despite that independence, House of Dynamite nails the details of nuclear war in 2025. The acronyms, equipment, and procedures are all frighteningly close to reality and Bigelow did have help on set from retired US Army lieutenant general and former US Strategic Command (STRATCOM) Chief of Staff Dan Karbler.

Karbler is a career missile guy and as the chief of staff of STRATCOM he oversaw America’s nuclear weapons. He told 404 Media that he landed the gig by scaring the hell out of Bigelow and her staff on, appropriately, a Zoom call.

Bigelow wanted to meet Karbler and they set up a big conference call on Zoom. He joined the call but kept his camera off. As people filtered in, Karbler listened and waited. “Here’s how it kind of went down,” Karbler told 404 Media. “There’s a little break in the conversation so I click on my microphone, still leaving the camera off, and I just said: ‘This is the DDO [deputy director of operations] convening a National Event Conference. Classification of this conference TOP SECRET. TK [Talent Keyhole] SI: US STRATCOM, US INDOPACOM, US Northern Command, SecDef Cables, military system to the secretary.”

“SecDef Cables, please bring the secretary of defense in the conference. Mr. Secretary, this is the DDO. Because of the time constraints of this missile attack, recommend we transition immediately from a national event conference to a nuclear decision conference, and we bring the President into the conference. PEOC [Presidential Emergency Operations Center], please bring the President into the conference.”

“And I stopped there and I clicked on my camera and I said, ‘ladies and gentleman, that’s how the worst day in American history will begin. I hope your script does it some justice,’” Karbler said. The theatrics worked and, according to Karbler, he sat next to Bigelow every day on set and helped shape the movie.

House of Dynamite begins and ends with ambiguity. We never learn who fired the nuclear weapon at Chicago. The last few minutes of the film focus on the President looking through retaliation plans. He’s in a helicopter, moments from the nuke hitting Chicago, and looking through plans that would condemn millions of people on the planet to fast and slow deaths. The film ends as he wallows in this decision, we never learn what he chooses.

Karbler said it was intentional. “The ending was ambiguous so the audience would leave with questions,” he said. “The easy out would have been: ‘Well, let’s just have a nuclear detonation over Chicago.’ That’s the easy out. Leaving it like it is, you risk pissing off the audience, frankly, because they want a resolution of some sort, but they don’t get that resolution. So instead they’re going to have to be able to have a discussion.”

In my house, at least, the gambit worked. During the credits my wife and I talked about whether or not we’d launch the nukes ourselves (We’d both hold off) and I explained the unpleasant realities of ground based interceptors.

Karbler, too, said he wouldn’t have launched the nukes. It’s just one nuke, after all. It’s millions of people, sure, but if America launches its nukes in retaliation then there’s a good chance Russia, China, and everyone else might do the same. “Because of the potential of a response provoking a much, much broader response, and something that would not be proportional,” Karbler said. “Don’t get me wrong, 20 million people, an entire city, a nuclear attack that hit us, but if we respond back, then you’re going to get into im-proportionality calculus.”

Despite the horrors present on screen in House of Dynamite, Karbler isn’t a nuclear abolitionist. “The genie is out of the bottle, you’re not going to put it back in there,” he said. “So what do we do to ensure our best defense? It seems counterintuitive, you know, the best defense is gonna be a good offense. You’ve gotta be able to have a response back against the adversary.”

Basically, Karbler says we should do what we’re doing now: build a bunch more nukes and make sure your enemies know you’re willing to use them. “Classic deterrence has three parts: impose unacceptable costs on the adversary. Deny the adversary any benefit of attack, read that as our ability to defend ourselves, missile defense, but also have the credible messaging behind it,” he said.

These are weapons that have the power to end the world, weapons we make and pray we never use. But we do keep making them. Almost all the old nuclear treaties between Russia and America are gone. The US is spending trillions to replace old ICBM silos and make new nuclear weapons. After decades of maintaining a relatively small nuclear force, China is building up its own stockpiles.

Trump has promised a Golden Dome to keep America safe from nukes and on Sunday Putin claimed Russia had successfully tested a brand new nuclear-powered cruise missile. The people who track existential threats believe we’re closer to nukes ending the world than at any other time in history.

Scientists Explain Why Trump's $175 Billion Golden Dome Is a Fantasy

Shooting missiles out of the sky from space could require a constellation of 36,000 satellites.

^{Matthew Gault (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-10-27 15:32:37

Con Edison Refuses to Say How ICE Gets Its Customers’ Data

Con Edison, the energy company that serves New York City, refuses to say whether ICE or other federal agencies require a search warrant or court order to access its customers’ sensitive data. Con Edison’s refusal to answer questions comes after 404 Media reviewed court records showing Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), a division of ICE, has previously obtained such data, and the FBI performing what the records call ‘searches’ of Con Edison data.

The records and Con Edison’s stonewalling raise questions about how exactly law enforcement agencies are able to access the utility provider’s user data, whether that access is limited in any way, and whether ICE still has access during its ongoing mass deportation effort.

“​​We don’t comment to either confirm or deny compliance with law enforcement investigations,” Anne Marie, media relations manager for Con Edison, told 404 Media after being shown a section of the court records.

In September, 404 Media emailed Con Edison’s press department to ask if law enforcement officers have to submit a search warrant or court order to search Con Edison data. A few days later, Marie provided the comment neither confirming nor denying any details of the company’s data sharing practice.

💡
Do you know anything else about how ICE is accessing or using data? 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.

404 Media then sent several follow-up inquiries, including whether ICE requires a warrant or other legal mechanism to obtain user data. Con Edison did not respond to any of those follow-ups.

Con Edison’s user data is especially sensitive, and likely valuable to authorities, because in many cases it will directly link a specific person to a particular address. If someone is paying for electricity for a home they own or rent, they most likely do it under their real name.

Federal agencies have repeatedly turned to Con Edison data as part of criminal investigations, according to court records. In one case, the FBI previously said it believed a specific person occupied an apartment after performing a “search” of Con Edison records and finding a Con Edison account in that person’s name. Another case shows the FBI obtaining a Con Edison user’s email address after finding it linked to a utilities account. A third case says “a search of records maintained by Con Edison, a public utilities provider to the greater New York City area” revealed that a specific person was receiving utilities at a target address. Several other cases contain similar language.
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Court records also show HSI has accessed Con Edison data as part of criminal investigations. One shows HSI getting data from Con Edison that reveals the name associated with a particular Con Edison account and address. Another says “there was no indication in the records from Con Edison that the SUBJECT PREMISES is divided into multiple units.” A third shows that HSI “confirmed with Con Edison” who was a customer at an address at a particular point in time.

Ordinarily HSI is focused on criminal investigations into child abuse, money laundering, cybercrime, and other types of criminal networks. But in the second Trump administration’s mass deportation effort, the distinction between HSI and ICE is largely meaningless. HSI has reassigned at least 6,198 agents, or nearly 90 percent, and 12,353 personnel overall to assist the deportation arm of ICE, according to data published by the Cato Institute in September. HSI also performs worksite enforcement.

The court records don’t describe how the investigators obtained the Con Edison data exactly, whether they obtained a search warrant or court order, or elaborate on how some officials were able to “search” Con Edison records.

Usually companies and organizations readily acknowledge how and when law enforcement can access customer data. This is for the benefit of users, who can then better understand what legal mechanisms protect their data, but also for law enforcement officials themselves, so they know what information they need to provide during an investigation. Broadly, companies might require a law enforcement official to obtain a search warrant or send a subpoena before they provide the requested user data, based on its sensitivity.

Megaphone Embeddable Player

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404 Media

2025-10-22 17:20:41

Apple Removes Women Dating Safety App from the App Store

Apple has removed Tea, the women’s safety app which went viral earlier this year before facing multiple data breaches, from the App Store.

“This app is currently not available in your country or region,” a message on the Apple App Store currently says when trying to visit a link to the app.

Apple told 404 Media in an email it removed the app, as well as a copycat called TeaOnHer, for failing to meet the company’s terms of use around content moderation and user privacy. Apple also said it received an excessive number of complaints, including ones about the personal data of minors being posted in the apps.

💡
Do you know anything else about this removal? Do you work at Tea or did you used to? 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 company pointed to parts of its guidelines including that apps are not allowed to share someone’s personal data without their permission, and that apps need a mechanism for reporting objectionable content.

Randy Nelson, head of insights and media resources at app intelligence company Appfigures, first alerted 404 Media to the app’s removal.

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Apple Removes Women Dating Safety App from the App Store

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-10-21 16:49:29

Anthropic Promises Trump Admin Its AI Is Not Woke

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has published a lengthy statement on the company’s site in which he promises Anthropic’s AI models are not politically biased, that it remains committed to American leadership in the AI industry, and that it supports the AI startup space in particular.

Amodei doesn’t explicitly say why he feels the need to state all of these obvious positions for the CEO of an American AI company to have, but the reason is that the Trump administration’s so-called “AI Czar” has publicly accused Anthropic of producing “woke AI” that it’s trying to force on the population via regulatory capture.

The current round of beef began earlier this month when Anthropic’s co-founder and head of policy Jack Clark published a written version of a talk he gave at The Curve AI conference in Berkeley. The piece, published on Clark’s personal blog, is full of tortured analogies and self-serving sci-fi speculation about the future of AI, but essentially boils down to Clark saying he thinks artificial general intelligence is possible, extremely powerful, potentially dangerous, and scary to the general population. In order to prevent disaster, put the appropriate policies in place, and make people embrace AI positively, he said, AI companies should be transparent about what they are building and listen to people’s concerns.

“What we are dealing with is a real and mysterious creature, not a simple and predictable machine,” he wrote. “And like all the best fairytales, the creature is of our own creation. Only by acknowledging it as being real and by mastering our own fears do we even have a chance to understand it, make peace with it, and figure out a way to tame it and live together.”

Venture capitalist, podcaster, and the White House’s “AI and Crypto Czar” David Sacks was not a fan of Clark’s blog.

“Anthropic is running a sophisticated regulatory capture strategy based on fear-mongering,” Sacks said on X in response to Clark’s blog. “It is principally responsible for the state regulatory frenzy that is damaging the startup ecosystem.”

Things escalated yesterday when Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn’s co-founder and a megadonor to the Democratic party, supported Anthropic in a thread on X, saying “Anthropic was one of the good guys” because it's one of the companies “trying to deploy AI the right way, thoughtfully, safely, and enormously beneficial for society.” Hoffman also appeared to take a jab at Elon Musk’s xAI, saying “Some other labs are making decisions that clearly disregard safety and societal impact (e.g. bots that sometimes go full-fascist) and that’s a choice. So is choosing not to support them.”

Sacks responded to Hoffman on X, saying “The leading funder of lawfare and dirty tricks against President Trump wants you to know that ‘Anthropic is one of the good guys.’ Thanks for clarifying that. All we needed to know.” Musk hopped into the replies saying: “Indeed.”

“The real issue is not research but rather Anthropic’s agenda to backdoor Woke AI and other AI regulations through Blue states like California,” Sacks said. Here, Sacks is referring to Anthropic’s opposition to Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, which wanted to stop states from regulating AI in any way for 10 years, and its backing of California’s SB 53, which requires AI companies that generate more than $500 million in annual revenue to make their safety protocols public.

All this sniping leads us to Amodei’s statement today, which doesn’t mention the beef above but is clearly designed to calm investors who are watching Trump’s AI guy publicly saying one of the biggest AI companies in the world sucks.

“I fully believe that Anthropic, the administration, and leaders across the political spectrum want the same thing: to ensure that powerful AI technology benefits the American people and that America advances and secures its lead in AI development,” Amodei said. “Despite our track record of communicating frequently and transparently about our positions, there has been a recent uptick in inaccurate claims about Anthropic's policy stances. Some are significant enough that they warrant setting the record straight.”

Amodei then goes to count the ways in which Anthropic already works with the federal government and directly grovels to Trump.

“Anthropic publicly praised President Trump’s AI Action Plan. We have been supportive of the President’s efforts to expand energy provision in the US in order to win the AI race, and I personally attended an AI and energy summit in Pennsylvania with President Trump, where he and I had a good conversation about US leadership in AI,” he said. “Anthropic’s Chief Product Officer attended a White House event where we joined a pledge to accelerate healthcare applications of AI, and our Head of External Affairs attended the White House’s AI Education Taskforce event to support their efforts to advance AI fluency for teachers.”

The more substantive part of his argument is that Anthropic didn’t support SB 53 until it made an exemption for all but the biggest AI labs, and that several studies found that Anthropic’s AI models are not “uniquely politically biased,” (read: not woke).

“Again, we believe we share those goals with the Trump administration, both sides of Congress, and the public,” Amodei wrote. “We are going to keep being honest and straightforward, and will stand up for the policies we believe are right. The stakes of this technology are too great for us to do otherwise.”

Many of the AI industry’s most vocal critics would agree with Sacks that Clark’s blog and “fear-mongering” about AI is self-serving because it makes their companies seem more valuable and powerful. Some critics will also agree that AI companies take advantage of that perspective to then influence AI regulation in a way that benefits them as incumbents.

It would be a far more compelling argument if it didn’t come from Sacks and Musk, who found a much better way to influence AI regulation to benefit their companies and investments: working for the president directly and publicly bullying their competitors.

Americans Prioritize AI Safety and Data Security

Most Americans favor maintaining rules for AI safety and security, as well as independent testing and collaboration with allies in developing the technology.

^{Benedict Vigers (Gallup)}

404 Media

2025-10-20 15:16:50

Hackers Say They Have Personal Data of Thousands of NSA and Other Government Officials

A hacking group that recently doxed hundreds of government officials, including from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), has now built dossiers on tens of thousands of U.S. government officials, including NSA employees, a member of the group told 404 Media. The member said the group did this by digging through its caches of stolen Salesforce customer data. The person provided 404 Media with samples of this information, which 404 Media was able to corroborate.

As well as NSA officials, the person sent 404 Media personal data on officials from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), members of the Air Force, and several other agencies.

The news comes after the Telegram channel belonging to the group, called Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters, went down following the mass doxing of DHS officials and the apparent doxing of a specific NSA official. It also provides more clarity on what sort of data may have been stolen from Salesforce’s customers in a series of breaches earlier this year, and which Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters has attempted to extort Salesforce over.

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“That’s how we’re pulling thousands of gov [government] employee records,” the member told 404 Media. “There were 2000+ more records,” they said, referring to the personal data of NSA officials. In total, they said the group has private data on more than 22,000 government officials.

Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters’ name is an amalgamation of other infamous hacking groups—Scattered Spider, LAPSUS$, and ShinyHunters. They all come from the overarching online phenomenon known as the Com. On Discord servers and Telegram channels, thousands of scammers, hackers, fraudsters, gamers, or just people hanging out congregate, hack targets big and small, and beef with one another. The Com has given birth to a number of loose-knit but prolific hacking groups, including those behind massive breaches like MGM Resorts, and normalized extreme physical violence between cybercriminals and their victims.

On Thursday, 404 Media reported Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters had posted the names and personal information of hundreds of government officials from DHS, ICE, the FBI, and Department of Justice. 404 Media verified portions of that data and found the dox sometimes included peoples’ residential addresses. The group posted the dox along with messages such as “I want my MONEY MEXICO,” a reference to DHS’s unsubstantiated claim that Mexican cartels are offering thousands of dollars for dox on agents.

Hackers Dox Hundreds of DHS, ICE, FBI, and DOJ Officials
Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters—one of the latest amalgamations of typically young, reckless, and English-speaking hackers—posted the apparent phone numbers and addresses of hundreds of government officials, including nearly 700 from DHS.
404 MediaJoseph Cox

After publication of that article, a member of Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters reached out to 404 Media. To prove their affiliation with the group, they sent a message signed with the ShinyHunters PGP key with the text “Verification for Joseph Cox” and the date. PGP keys can be used to encrypt or sign messages to prove they’re coming from a specific person, or at least someone who holds that key, which are typically kept private.

They sent 404 Media personal data related to DIA, FTC, FAA, CDC, ATF and Air Force members. They also sent personal information on officials from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Health and Human Services (HHS), and the State Department. 404 Media verified parts of the data by comparing them to previously breached data collected by cybersecurity company District 4 Labs. It showed that many parts of the private information did relate to government officials with the same name, agency, and phone number.

Except the earlier DHS and DOJ data, the hackers don’t appear to have posted this more wide ranging data publicly. Most of those agencies did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The FTC and Air Force declined to comment. DHS has not replied to multiple requests for comment sent since Thursday. Neither has Salesforce.

The member said the personal data of government officials “originates from Salesforce breaches.” This summer Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters stole a wealth of data from companies that were using Salesforce tech, with the group claiming it obtained more than a billion records. Customers included Disney/Hulu, FedEx, Toyota, UPS, and many more. The hackers did this by social engineering victims and tricking them to connect to a fraudulent version of a Salesforce app. The hackers tried to extort Salesforce, threatening to release the data on a public website, and Salesforce told clients it won’t pay the ransom, Bloomberg reported.

On Friday the member said the group was done with extorting Salesforce. But they continued to build dossiers on government officials. Before the dump of DHS, ICE, and FBI dox, the group posted the alleged dox of an NSA official to their Telegram group.

Over the weekend that channel went down and the member claimed the group’s server was taken “offline, presumably seized.”

The doxing of the officials “must’ve really triggered it, I think it’s because of the NSA dox,” the member told 404 Media.

Matthew Gault contributed reporting.

How Google, Adidas, and more were breached in a Salesforce scam | Malwarebytes

Hackers tricked workers over the phone at Google, Adidas, and more to grant access to Salesforce data.

^{David Ruiz (Malwarebytes)}

404 Media

2025-10-17 02:34:33

Hackers Dox Hundreds of DHS, ICE, FBI, and DOJ Officials

A group of hackers from the Com, a loose-knit community behind some of the most significant data breaches in recent years, have posted the names and personal information of hundreds of government officials, including people working for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

“I want my MONEY MEXICO,” a user of the Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters Telegram channel, which is a combination of a series of other hacking group names associated with the Com, posted on Thursday. The message was referencing a claim from the DHS that Mexican cartels have begun offering thousands of dollars for doxing agents. The U.S. government has not provided any evidence for this claim.

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Hackers Dox Hundreds of DHS, ICE, FBI, and DOJ Officials

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404 Media

2025-10-16 14:00:39

Viral ‘Cheater Buster’ Sites Use Facial Recognition to Let Anyone Reveal Peoples’ Tinder Profiles

A number of easy to access websites use facial recognition to let partners, stalkers, or anyone else uncover specific peoples’ Tinder profiles, reveal their approximate physical location at points in time, and track changes to their profile including their photos, according to 404 Media’s tests.

Ordinarily it is not possible to search Tinder for a specific person. Instead, Tinder provides users potential matches based on the user’s own physical location. The tools on the sites 404 Media has found allow anyone to search for someone’s profile by uploading a photo of their face. The tools are invasive of anyone’s privacy, but present a significant risk to those who may need to avoid an abusive ex-partner or stalker. The sites mostly market these tools as a way to find out if their partner is cheating on them, or at minimum using dating apps like Tinder.

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Viral ‘Cheater Buster’ Sites Use Facial Recognition to Let Anyone Reveal Peoples’ Tinder Profiles

Videos demoing one of the sites have repeatedly gone viral on TikTok and other platforms recently. 404 Media verified they can locate specific peoples' Tinder profiles using their photo, and found that the viral videos are produced by paid creat…

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-10-16 13:00:05

ICE, Secret Service, Navy All Had Access to Flock's Nationwide Network of Cameras

A division of ICE, the Secret Service, and the Navy’s criminal investigation division all had access to Flock’s nationwide network of tens of thousands of AI-enabled cameras that constantly track the movements of vehicles, and by extension people, according to a letter sent by Senator Ron Wyden and shared with 404 Media. Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), the section of ICE that had access and which has reassigned more than ten thousand employees to work on the agency’s mass deportation campaign, performed nearly two hundred searches in the system, the letter says.

In the letter Senator Wyden says he believes Flock is uninterested in fixing the room for abuse baked into its platform, and says local officials can best protect their constituents from such abuses by removing the cameras entirely.

The letter shows that many more federal agencies had access to the network than previously known. We previously found, following local media reports, that Customs and Border Protection (CBP) had access to 80,000 cameras around the country. It is now clear that Flock’s work with federal agencies, which the company described as a pilot, was much larger in scope.

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ICE, Secret Service, Navy All Had Access to Flock's Nationwide Network of Cameras

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-10-14 18:06:54

The Surreal Practicality of Protesting As an Inflatable Frog

During a cruel presidency where many people are in desperate need of hope, the inflatable frog stepped into the breach. Everyone loves the Portland Frog. The juxtaposition of a frog (and people in other inflatable character costumes) standing up to ICE covered in weapons and armor is absurd, and that’s part of why it’s hitting so hard. But the frog is also a practical piece of passive resistance protest kit in an age of mass surveillance, police brutality, and masked federal agents disappearing people off the streets.

On October 2—just a few minutes shy of 11 PM in Portland, Oregon—a federal agent shot pepper spray into the vent hole of Seth Todd’s inflatable frog costume. Todd was protesting ICE outside of Portland’s U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office when he said he saw a federal agent shove another protester to the ground. He moved to help and the agent blasted the pepper spray into his vent hole.

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The Surreal Practicality of Protesting As an Inflatable Frog

^{Matthew Gault (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-10-13 13:00:47

What Happened When AI Came for Craft Beer

A prominent beer judging competition introduced an AI-based judging tool without warning in the middle of a competition, surprising and angering judges who thought their evaluation notes for each beer were being used to improve the AI, according to multiple interviews with judges involved. The company behind the competition, called Best Beer, also planned to launch a consumer-facing app that would use AI to match drinkers with beers, the company told 404 Media.

Best Beer also threatened legal action against one judge who wrote an open letter criticizing the use of AI in beer tasting and judging, according to multiple judges and text messages reviewed by 404 Media.

The months-long episode shows what can happen when organizations try to push AI onto a hobby, pursuit, art form, or even industry which has many members who are staunchly pro-human and anti-AI. Over the last several years we’ve seen it with illustrators, voice actors, music, and many more. AI came for beer too.

“It is attempting to solve a problem that wasn’t a problem before AI showed up, or before big tech showed up,” Greg Loudon, a certified beer judge and brewery sales manager, and who was the judge threatened with legal action, said. “I feel like AI doesn’t really have a place in beer, and if it does, it’s not going to be in things that are very human.”

“There’s so much subjectivity to it, and to strip out all of the humanity from it is a disservice to the industry,” he added. Another judge said the introduction of AI was “enshittifying” beer tasting.

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This story started earlier this year at a Canadian Brewing Awards judging event. Best Beer is the company behind the Canadian Brewing Awards, which gives awards in categories such as Experimental Beer, Speciality IPA, and Historic/Regional Beers. To be a judge, you have to be certified by the Beer Judge Certification Program (BJCP), which involves an exam covering the brewing process, different beer styles, judging procedures, and more.

Around the third day of the competition, the judges were asked to enter their tasting notes into a new AI-powered app instead of the platform they already use, one judge told 404 Media. 404 Media granted the judge anonymity to protect them from retaliation.

Using the AI felt like it was “parroting back bad versions of your judge tasting notes,” they said. “There wasn't really an opportunity for us to actually write our evaluation.” Judges would write what they thought of a beer, and the AI would generate several descriptions based on the judges’ notes that the judge would then need to select. It would then provide additional questions for judges to answer that were “total garbage.”

“It was taking real human feedback, spitting out crap, and then making the human respond to more crap that it crafted for you,” the judge said.

“On top of all the misuse of our time and disrespecting us as judges, that really frustrated me—because it's not a good app,” they said.

Screenshot of a Best Beer-related website.

Multiple judges then met to piece together what was happening, and Loudon published his open letter in April.

“They introduced this AI model to their pool of 40+ judges in the middle of the competition judging, surprising everyone for the sudden shift away from traditional judging methods,” the letter says. “Results are tied back to each judge to increase accountability and ensure a safe, fair and equitable judging environment. Judging for competitions is a very human experience that depends on people filling diverse roles: as judges, stewards, staff, organizers, sorters, and venue maintenance workers,” the letter says.

“Their intentions to gather our training data for their own profit was apparent,” the letter says. It adds that one judge said “I am here to judge beer, not to beta test.”

The letter concluded with this: “To our fellow beverage judges, beverage industry owners, professionals, workers, and educators: Sign our letter. Spread the word. Raise awareness about the real human harms of AI in your spheres of influence. Have frank discussions with your employers, colleagues, and friends about AI use in our industry and our lives. Demand more transparency about competition organizations.”

33 people signed the letter. They included judges, breweries, and members of homebrewer associations in Canada and the United States.

Loudon told 404 Media in a recent phone call “you need to tell us if you're going to be using our data; you need to tell us if you're going to be profiting off of our data, and you can't be using volunteers that are there to judge beer. You need to tell people up front what you're going to do.”
playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2…
At least one brewery that entered its beer into the Canadian Brewing Awards publicly called out Best Beer and the awards. XhAle Brew Co., based out of Alberta, wrote in a Facebook post in April that it asked for its entry fees of $565 to be refunded, and for the “destruction of XhAle's data collected during, and post-judging for the Best Beer App.”

“We did not consent to our beer being used by a private equity tech fund at the cost to us (XhAle Brew Co. and Canadian Brewers) for a for-profit AI application. Nor do we condone the use of industry volunteers for the same purpose,” the post said.

Ob Simmonds, head of innovation at the Canadian Brewing Awards, told 404 Media in an email that “Breweries will have amazing insight on previously unavailable useful details about their beer and their performance in our competition. Furthermore, craft beer drinkers will be able to better sift through the noise and find beers perfect for their palate. This in no way is aimed at replacing technical judging with AI.”

With the consumer app, the idea was to “Help end users find beers that match their taste profile and help breweries better understand their results in our competition,” Simmonds said.

Simmonds said that “AI is being used to better match consumers with the best beers for their palate,” but said Best Beer is not training its own model.

Those plans have come to a halt though. At the end of September, the Canadian Brewing Awards said in an Instagram post the team was “stepping away.” It said the goal of Best Beer was to “make medals matter more to consumers, so that breweries could see a stronger return on their entries.” The organization said it “saw strong interest from many breweries, judges and consumers” and that it will donate Best Beer’s assets to a non-profit that shows interest. The post added the organization used third-party models that “were good enough to achieve the results we wanted,” and the privacy policies forbade training on the inputted data.
A screenshot of the Canadian Beer Awards' Instagram post.
The post included an apology: “We apologize to both judges and breweries for the communication gaps and for the disruptions caused by this year’s logistical challenges.”

In an email sent to 404 Media this month, the Canadian Brewing Awards said “the Best Beer project was never designed to replace or profit from judges.”

“Despite these intentions, the project came under criticism before it was even officially launched,” it added, saying that the open letter “mischaracterized both our goals and approach.”

“Ultimately, we decided not to proceed with the public launch of Best Beer. Instead, we repurposed parts of the technology we had developed to support a brewery crawl during our gala. We chose to pause the broader project until we could ensure the judging community felt confident that no data would be used for profit and until we had more time to clear up the confusion,” the email added. “If judges wanted their data deleted what assurance can we provide them that it was in fact deleted. Everything was judged blind and they would have no access to our database from the enhanced division. For that reason, we felt it was more responsible to shelve the initiative for now.”

One judge told 404 Media: “I don’t think anyone who is hell bent on using AI is going to stop until it’s no longer worth it for them to do so.”

“I just hope that they are transparent if they try to do this again to judges who are volunteering their time, then either pay them or give them the chance ahead of time to opt-out,” they added.

Now months after this all started, Loudon said “The best beers on the market are art forms. They are expressionist. They're something that can't be quantified. And the human element to it, if you strip that all away, it just becomes very basic, and very sanitized, and sterilized.”

“Brewing is an art.”

XhAle Brew Co.

XhAle is not just a craft beer company. We are a company comprised of majority equity-deserving folks, and have been and still are marginalized in this industry. We understand and have personally...

^{www.facebook.com}

404 Media

2025-10-09 15:26:05

The Discord Hack is Every User’s Worst Nightmare

A catastrophic breach has impacted Discord user data including selfies and identity documents uploaded as part of the app’s verification process, email addresses, phone numbers, approximately where the user lives, and much more.

The hack, carried out by a group that is attempting to extort Discord, shows in stark terms the risk of tech companies collecting users’ identity documents, and specifically in the context of verifying their age. Discord started asking users in the UK, for example, to upload a selfie with their ID as part of the country’s age verification law recently.

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“This is about to get really ugly,” the hackers wrote in a Telegram channel, which 404 Media joined, while posting user data on Wednesday. A source with knowledge of the breach confirmed to 404 Media that the data is legitimate. 404 Media granted the source anonymity to speak candidly about a sensitive incident.

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The Discord Hack is Every User’s Worst Nightmare

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404 Media

2025-10-08 19:10:39

Apple Banned an App That Simply Archived Videos of ICE Abuses

Apple removed an app for preserving TikToks, Instagram reels, news reports, and videos documenting abuses by ICE, 404 Media has learned. The app, called Eyes Up, differs from other banned apps such as ICEBlock which were designed to report sightings of ICE officials in real-time to warn local communities. Eyes Up, meanwhile, was more of an aggregation service pooling together information to preserve evidence in case the material is needed in the future in court.

The news shows that Apple and Google’s crackdown on ICE-spotting apps, which started after pressure from the Department of Justice against Apple, is broader in scope than apps that report sightings of ICE officials. It has also impacted at least one app that was more about creating a historical record of ICE’s activity during its mass deportation effort.

“Our goal is government accountability, we aren’t even doing real-time tracking,” the administrator of Eyes Up, who said their name was Mark, told 404 Media. Mark asked 404 Media to only use his first name to protect him from retaliation. “I think the [Trump] admin is just embarrassed by how many incriminating videos we have.”

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Do you work at Apple or Google and know anything else about these app removals? 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.

Mark said the app was removed on October 3. At the time of writing, the Apple App Store says “This app is currently not available in your country or region” when trying to download Eyes Up.

The website for Eyes Up which functions essentially the same way is still available. The site includes a map with dots that visitors can click on, which then plays a video from that location. Users are able to submit their own videos for inclusion. Mark said he manually reviews every video before it is uploaded to the service, to check its content and its location.

“I personally look at each submission to ensure that it's relevant, accurately described to the best I can tell, and appropriate to post. I actually look at the user submitted location and usually cross-reference with [Google] Street View to verify. We have an entire private app just for moderation of the submissions,” Mark said.

Screenshots of Eyes Up.

The videos available on Eyes Up are essentially the same you might see when scrolling through TikTok, Instagram, or X. They are a mix of professional media reports and user-generated clips of ICE arrests. Many of the videos are clearly just re-uploads of material taken from those social media apps, and still include TikTok or Instagram watermarks. Mark said the videos are also often taken from Reddit or the community- and crime-awareness app Citizen too.

Many of the videos from New York are footage of ICE officials aggressively detaining people inside the city’s courts, something ICE has been doing for months. Another is a video from the New York Immigration Coalition (NYIC), which represents more than 200 immigrant and refugee rights groups. Another is an Instagram video showing ICE taking “a mother as her child begs the officers not to take her,” according to a caption on the video. The map includes similar videos from San Diego, Los Angeles, and Portland, Oregon, which are clearly taken from TikTok or media reports, including NBC News.

“Our goal is to preserve evidence until it can be used in court, and we believe the mapping function will make it easier for litigants to find bystander footage in the future,” Mark said.

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, told 404 Media “Like any other government agency, DHS is required to follow the law. The collection of video evidence is a powerful tool of oversight to ensure that the government respects the rights of citizens and immigrants alike. People have a right to film interactions with law enforcement in public spaces and to share those videos with others.”

“If DHS is concerned that the actions of their own officers might inflame public opinion against the agency, they should work to increase oversight and accountability at the agency — rather than seek to have the evidence banned,” he added.

Apple removed ICEBlock, another much more prominent app, on Thursday from its App Store. The move came after direct pressure from Department of Justice officials acting at the direction of Attorney General Pam Bondi, according to Fox. A statement the Department of Justice provided to 404 Media said the agency reached out to Apple “demanding they remove the ICEBlock app from their App Store—and Apple did so.” Fox says authorities have claimed that Joshua Jahn, the suspected shooter of an ICE facility in September in which a detainee was killed, searched his phone for various tracking apps before attacking the facility.

Joshua Aaron, the developer of ICEBlock, told 404 Media “we are determined to fight this.”

ICEBlock allowed people to create an alert, based on their location, about ICE officials in their area. This then sent an alert to other users nearby.

Apple also removed another similar app called Red Dot, 404 Media reported. Google did the same thing, and described ICE officials as a vulnerable group. Apple also removed an app called DeICER.
playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2…
Yet, Eyes Up differs from those apps in that it does not function as a real-time location reporting app.

Apple did not respond to a request for comment on Wednesday about Eyes Up’s removal.

Mark provided 404 Media with screenshots of the emails he received from Apple. In the emails, Apple says Eyes Up violates the company’s guidelines around objectionable content. That can include “Defamatory, discriminatory, or mean-spirited content, including references or commentary about religion, race, sexual orientation, gender, national/ethnic origin, or other targeted groups, particularly if the app is likely to humiliate, intimidate, or harm a targeted individual or group. Professional political satirists and humorists are generally exempt from this requirement.”

The emails also say that law enforcement have provided Apple with information that shows the purpose of the app is “to provide location information about law enforcement officers that can be used to harm such officers individually or as a group.”

The emails are essentially identical to those sent to the developer of ICEBlock which 404 Media previously reported on.

In an appeal to the app removal, Mark told Apple “the posts on this app are significantly delayed and subject to manual review, meaning the officers will be long gone from the location by the time the content is posted to be viewed by the public. This would make it impossible for our app to be used to harm such officers individually or as a group.”

“The sole purpose of Eyes Up is to document and preserve evidence of abuses of power by law enforcement, which is an important function of a free society and constitutionally protected,” Mark’s response adds.

Apple then replied and said the ban remains in place, according to another email Mark shared.

The app is available on Google's Play Store.

Update: this piece has been updated to include comment from Aaron Reichlin-Melnick.

SCOOP: Apple Quietly Made ICE Agents a Protected Class

Internal emails show tech giant used anti-hate-speech rules meant for minorities to block an app documenting immigration enforcement.

^{Pablo Manríquez (Migrant Insider)}

404 Media

2025-10-08 13:06:18

Cocaine in Private Jets and Sex Toys: What the FBI Found on its Secretly Backdoored Chat App

Private jets loaded with cocaine landing at an airport in Germany. A trafficker stuffing a racing sail boat with drugs and entering a tournament to blend in with other racers before speeding off. Vacuum-sealed layers of methamphetamine inside solar panels. And nearly 60 kilograms of drugs hidden inside a shipment of sex toys.

These are just some of the examples included in a cache of leaked U.S. Department of Justice documents the FBI used to convince a judge to let them continue harvesting messages from Anom. Anom was an encrypted phone and app the FBI secretly took over, backdoored, and ran for years as a tech company popular with organized crime around the world. The Anom operation, dubbed Trojan Shield, was the largest sting operation ever.

The documents provide more insight into the sorts of criminals swept up in the FBI’s investigation, and give behind-the-scenes detail on how exactly the FBI obtained legal approval for such a gigantic, and to some controversial, operation. The leaked documents include the original court orders from Lithuania, which assisted the FBI in collecting the data from Anom devices worldwide, and the FBI’s supporting documentation for those court orders. The documents were not supposed to be released publicly, but someone posted them anonymously online.

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“Like I said this Turbo crew are the Pablo Escobar of this time in that area and got full control there,” one message written by an alleged drug trafficker included in the documents reads.

404 Media showed sections of the documents to people with direct knowledge of the operation who said they appeared authentic. Finnish outlet Yle reported on some of their contents at the end of September, but 404 Media is publishing copies of the documents themselves.

In 2018 the FBI shut down an encrypted phone company called Phantom Secure. In the wake of that, a seller from Phantom Secure and another popular company called Sky offered U.S. authorities their own, in-development encrypted device: Anom. The FBI then took Anom under its wing and oversaw a backdoor placed into the app. This involved adding a “ghost” contact to every group chat and direct message across the platform. The operation started in Australia as a beta test, before expanding to Europe, South America, and other parts of the world, sweeping up messages from cartels to biker gangs to hitmen to money launderers.
A screenshot from the documents.
Some of the documents are formal requests for continued assistance from the U.S. to Lithuania and spell out the sort of criminal activity the FBI has seen on the Anom platform. Several sections name specific and well-known drug traffickers. One is Maximillian Rivkin, also known as “Microsoft.” As I chronicled in my book about Anom, Rivkin was a devilishly creative drug trafficker, constantly making new schemes to smuggle cocaine or other narcotics. The new documents say Rivkin’s Serbia-based organized crime group was involved in the trafficking of hundreds of kilograms of cocaine between South America and Spain. To move the drugs, the group sailed a boat during a November 2020 regatta, a sailing race, “where their travel will be obscured by other boats and sail to the Caribbean,” the documents say. Around two or three weeks later, the boat would then return to Europe with the cocaine, before being dropped off the coast of Spain where another member of the group would pick it up, the documents add.

In another instance Rivkin’s group smuggled cocaine base within juice bottles from Colombia to Europe, according to the documents. In my book, I found Rivkin planned to do something similar with energy drinks.

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These sorts of audacious, over-the-top drug smuggling operations were a common sight on Anom, according to my own review of hundreds of thousands of Anom text messages between drug traffickers I previously obtained. The new documents also specifically name Hakan Ayik, who was the head of the so-called Aussie Cartel, which controlled as much as a third of all drug importation into Australia, and who at one point was Australia’s most wanted criminal. Ayik discussed sending a massive 900 kilograms of cocaine through Malaysia to Australia concealed within shipments of scrap metal, according to the documents.

“Can you give me roughly the coordinates where’s the better place to meet outside Indonesian waters,” Ayik, using the moniker Oscar, said in one of the messages included in the documents.
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Both Rivkin and Ayik were later arrested by Turkish authorities. Ayik was also known as the “encryption king,” likely due to his prolific selling of encrypted communication devices to organized criminals.

Other examples in the documents include a Dutch drug trafficking group involving a man called Guiliano Domenico Azzarito. That group smuggled cocaine between South America and Europe with private jet flights into small and medium sized airports the group controls, according to the documents. “Look we can move 20 tons easily every month from here in the future,” one message said.

Another describes Baris Tukel, a high-ranking Comanchero motorcycle gang member who was later charged by the U.S. for helping to spread Anom devices, discussing plans to hide methamphetamine and MDMA in marble tiles. In another case, a drug trafficker with the username RealG discussed smuggling drugs on a sailboat, inside shipments of bananas and hides, and cocaine base hidden inside fertilizer.

In September 2020, a drug trafficking group smuggled a shipment of cocaine and methamphetamine from the UK, through Singapore, to Australia, according to the documents. Authorities later searched the shipment, and found nearly 60 kilograms of drugs “concealed within 21 boxes of sex toys,” the documents say.
A screenshot from the documents.
The messages included in the document also detail some of the extreme violence Anom users engaged in. Simon Bekiri, a Comanchero member, discussed an assault against a rival gang, according to the documents. “I even pistol whipped him 3 times and blood was squirting out of his head almost a meter high in time with his heartbeat (That part was really funny),” one of the messages reads. “But when you say I pistol whipped him, shot him, bashed him and then took off in his car I’ll admit it does sound violent.”

These examples were used to help convince a Lithuanian judge to allow local authorities to continue providing the FBI with Anom messages. In an unusual legal workaround, instead of running the Anom collection server in the U.S., which may have created more legal headaches, the Department of Justice arranged for it to be run in Lithuania. Lithuanian authorities then provided a regular stream of collected Anom messages to the FBI. In all, Anom grew to 12,000 devices and the FBI collected tens of millions of messages before shutting the network down in June 2021.

404 Media first revealed in September 2023 Lithuania was the so-called “third country” that harvested the messages for the FBI. The Department of Justice has never formally acknowledged Lithuania’s role despite the leaked documents further corroborating 404 Media’s reporting.

Revealed: The Country that Secretly Wiretapped the World for the FBI

For years the FBI ran its own encrypted phone company to intercept messages from thousands of people around the globe. One country was critical to that operation, whose identity was unknown to the public. Until now.

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-10-06 14:05:04

Libraries Can’t Get Their Loaned Books Back Because of Trump’s Tariffs

The Trump administration’s tariff regime and the elimination of fee exemptions for items under $800 is limiting resource sharing between university libraries, trapping some books in foreign countries, and reversing long-held standards in academic cooperation.

“There are libraries that have our books that we've lent to them before all of this happened, and now they can't ship them back to us because their carrier either is flat out refusing to ship anything to the U.S., or they're citing not being able to handle the tariff situation,” Jessica Bower Relevo, associate director of resource sharing and reserves at Yale University Library, told me.

After Trump’s executive order ended the de minimis exemption, which allowed people to buy things internationally without paying tariffs if the items cost less than $800, we’ve written several stories about how the decision caused chaos over a wide variety of hobbies that rely on people buying things overseas, especially on Ebay, where many of those transactions take place.

Libraries that share their materials internationally are in a similar mess, partly because some countries’ mail services stopped shipments to and from the U.S. entirely, but the situation for them is arguably even more complicated because they’re not selling anything—they’re just lending books.

“It's not necessarily too expensive. It's that they don't have a mechanism in place to deal with the tariffs and how they're going to be applied,” Relevo said. “And I think that's true of U.S. shipping carriers as well. There’s a lot of confusion about how to handle this situation.”

“The tariffs have impacted interlibrary loans in various ways for different libraries,” Heather Evans, a librarian at RMIT University in Australia, told me in an email. “It has largely depended on their different procedures as to how much they have been affected. Some who use AusPost [Australia’s postal service] to post internationally have been more impacted and I've seen many libraries put a halt on borrowing to or from the US at all.” (AusPost suspended all shipments to the United States but plans to renew them on October 7).

Relevo told me that in some cases books are held up in customs indefinitely, or are “lost in warehouses” where they are held for no clear reason.

As Relevo explains it, libraries often provide people in foreign institutions books in their collections by giving them access to digitized materials, but some books are still only available in physical copies. These are not necessarily super rare or valuable books, but books that are only in print in certain countries. For example, a university library might have a specialized collection on a niche subject because it’s the focus area of a faculty member, a French university will obviously have a deeper collection of French literature, and some textbooks might only be published in some languages.

A librarian’s job is to give their community access to information, and international interlibrary loans extend that mission to other countries by having libraries work together. In the past, if an academic in the U.S. wanted access to a French university’s deep collection of French literature, they’d have to travel there. Today, academics can often ask that library to ship them the books they want. Relevo said this type of lending has always been useful, but became especially popular and important during COVID lockdowns, when many libraries were closed and international travel was limited.

“Interlibrary loans has been something that libraries have been able to do for a really long time, even back in the early 1900s,” Relevo said. “If we can't do that anymore and we're limiting what our users can access, because maybe they're only limited to what we have in our collection, then ultimately could hinder academic progress. Scholars have enjoyed for decades now the ability to basically get whatever they need for their research, to be very comprehensive in their literature reviews or the references that they need, or past research that's been done on that topic, because most libraries, especially academic libraries, do offer this service [...] If we can't do that anymore, or at least there's a barrier to doing that internationally, then researchers have to go back to old ways of doing things.”

The Trump administration upended this system of knowledge sharing and cooperation, making life even harder for academics in the U.S., who are already fleeing to foreign universities because they fear the government will censor their research.

The American Library Association (ALA) has a group dedicated to international interlibrary lending, called the International Interlibrary Loan (ILL) Committee, which is nested in the Sharing and Transforming Access to Resources Section (STARS) of the Reference and User Services Association (RUSA). Since Trump’s executive order and tariffs regime, the RUSA STARS International ILL Committee has produced a site dedicated to helping librarians navigate the new, unpredictable landscape.

In addition to explaining the basic facts of the tariffs and de minimis, the site also shares resources and “Tips & Tricks in Uncertain Times,” which encourages librarians to talk to partner libraries before lending or borrowing books, and to “be transparent and set realistic expectations with patrons.” The page also links to an online form that asks librarians to share any information they have about how different libraries are handling the elimination of de minimis in an attempt to crowd source a better understanding of the new international landscape.

“Let's say this library in Germany wanted to ship something to us,” Relevo said. “It sounds like the postal carriers just don't know how to even do that. They don’t know how to pass that tariff on to the library that's getting the material, there's just so much confusion on what you would even do if you even wanted to. So they're just saying, ‘No, we're not shipping to the U.S.’”

Relevo told me that one thing the resource sharing community has talked about a lot is how to label packages so customs agents know they are not [selling] goods to another country. Relevo said that some libraries have marked the value of books they’re lending as $0. Others have used specific codes to indicate the package isn’t a good that’s being bought or sold. But there’s not one method that has worked consistently across the board.

“It does technically have value, because it's a tangible item, and pretty much any tangible item is going to have some sort of value, but we're not selling it,” she said. “We're just letting that library borrow it and then we're going to get it back. But the way customs and tariffs work, it's more to do with buying and selling goods and library stuff isn't really factored into those laws [...] it's kind of a weird concept, especially when you live in a highly capitalized country.”

Relevo said that the last 10-15 years have been a very tumultuous time for libraries, not just because of tariffs, but because AI-generated content, the pandemic, and conservative organizations pressuring libraries to remove certain books from their collections.

“At the end of the day, us librarians just want to help people, so we're just trying to find the best ways to do that right now with the resources we have,” she said.

“What I would like the public to know about the situation is that their librarians as a group are very committed to doing the best we can for them and to finding the best options and ways to fulfill their requests and access needs. Please continue to ask us for what you need,” Evans said. “At the moment we would ask for a little extra patience, and perhaps understanding that we might not be able to get things as urgently for them if it involves the U.S., but we will do as we have always done and search for the fastest and most helpful way to obtain access to what they require.”

Police Bodycam Shows Sheriff Hunting for 'Obscene' Books at Library

Body camera footage from Idaho reveals a sheriff hunting for a YA book he could use for a political stunt.

^{Jason Koebler (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-10-03 16:02:19

Google Calls ICE Agents a Vulnerable Group, Removes ICE-Spotting App ‘Red Dot’

Both Google and Apple recently removed Red Dot, an app people can use to report sightings of ICE officials, from their respective app stores, 404 Media has found. The move comes after Apple removed ICEBlock, a much more prominent app, from its App Store on Thursday following direct pressure from U.S. Department of Justice officials. Google told 404 Media it removed apps because they shared the location of what it describes as a vulnerable group that recently faced a violent act connected to these sorts of ICE-spotting apps—a veiled reference to ICE officials.

The move signals a broader crackdown on apps that are designed to keep communities safe by crowdsourcing the location of ICE officials. Authorities have claimed that Joshua Jahn, the suspected shooter of an ICE facility in September and who killed a detainee, searched his phone for various tracking apps. A long-running immigration support group on the ground in Chicago, where ICE is currently focused, told 404 Media some of its members use Red Dot.

💡
Do you know anything else about these apps and their removal? Do you work at Google, Apple, or ICE? 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.

“Ready to Protect Your Community?” the website for Red Dot reads. “Download Red Dot and help build a stronger protection network.”

The site provides links to the app’s page on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store. As of at least Friday, both of those links return errors. “This app is currently not available in your country or region,” says the Apple one, and “We're sorry, the requested URL was not found on this server,” says the Google one.

The app allows people to report ICE presence or activity, along with details such as the location and time, according to Red Dot’s website. The app then notifies nearby community members, and users can receive alerts about ICE activity in their area, the website says.

Google confirmed to 404 Media that it removed Red Dot. Google said it did not receive any outreach from the Department of Justice about this issue and that it bans apps with a high risk of abuse. Without talking about the shooting at the ICE facility specifically, the company said it removed apps that share the location of what it describes as a vulnerable group after a recent violent act against them connected to this sort of app. Google said apps that have user generated content must also conduct content moderation.
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Google added in a statement that “ICEBlock was never available on Google Play, but we removed similar apps for violations of our policies.”

Google’s Play Store policies say the platform does not allow apps that “promote violence” against “groups based on race or ethnic origin, religion, disability age, nationality, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, caste, immigration status, or any other characteristic that is associated with systemic discrimination or marginalization,” but its published policies do not include information about how it defines what types of groups are protected.

Red Dot did not respond to a request for comment.

On Thursday Apple told 404 Media it removed multiple ICE-spotting apps, but did not name Red Dot. Apple did not respond to another request for comment on Friday.

On Thursday Joshua Aaron, the developer of ICEBlock, told 404 Media “I am incredibly disappointed by Apple's actions today. Capitulating to an authoritarian regime is never the right move,” referring to Apple removing his own app. ICEBlock rose to prominence in June when CNN covered the app. That app was only available on iOS, while Red Dot was available on both iOS and Android.

“ICEBlock is no different from crowd sourcing speed traps, which every notable mapping application, including Apple's own Maps app, implements as part of its core services. This is protected speech under the first amendment of the United States Constitution,” Aaron continued. “We are determined to fight this with everything we have. Our mission has always been to protect our neighbors from the terror this administration continues to reign down on the people of this nation. We will not be deterred. We will not stop. #resist.”

That move from Apple came after pressure from Department of Justice officials on behalf of Attorney General Pam Bondi, according to Fox. “ICEBlock is designed to put ICE agents at risk just for doing their jobs, and violence against law enforcement is an intolerable red line that cannot be crossed. This Department of Justice will continue making every effort to protect our brave federal law enforcement officers, who risk their lives every day to keep Americans safe,” Bondi told Fox. The Department of Justice declined to comment beyond Bondi's earlier comments.

The current flashpoint for ICE’s mass deportation effort is Chicago. This week ICE raided an apartment building and removed everyone from the building only to ask questions later, according to local media reports. “They was terrified. The kids was crying. People was screaming. They looked very distraught. I was out there crying when I seen the little girl come around the corner, because they was bringing the kids down, too, had them zip tied to each other," one neighbor, Eboni Watson, told ABC7. “That's all I kept asking. What is the morality? Where's the human? One of them literally laughed. He was standing right here. He said, 'f*** them kids.’”

Brandon Lee, communications lead at Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, told 404 Media some of the organization’s teams have used Red Dot and similar apps as a way of taking tips. But the organization recommends people call its hotline to report ICE activity. That hotline has been around since 2011, Lee said. “The thing that takes time is the infrastructure of trust and training that goes into follow-up, confirmation, and legal and community support for impacted families, which we in Illinois have been building up over time,” he added.

“But I will say that at the end of the day it's important for all people of conscience to use their skills to shine some light on ICE's operations, given the agency's lack of transparency and overall lack of accountability,” he said, referring to ICE-spotting apps.

In ICEBlock’s case, people who already downloaded the app will be able to continue using but will be unable to re-download it from the Apple App Store, according to an email from Apple Aaron shared with 404 Media. Because Red Dot is available on Android, users can likely sideload the app—that is, install it themselves by downloading the APK file rather than from the Play Store.

The last message to Red Dot’s Facebook page was on September 24 announcing a new update that fixed various bugs.

Update: this piece has been updated to include a response from the Department of Justice.

ICE agents raid South Shore apartments; Trump says Chicago could become military training ground

Anti-ICE protesters marched up Michigan Avenue on Tuesday evening.

^{Cate Cauguiran (ABC7 Chicago)}

404 Media

2025-10-03 02:19:17

ICEBlock Owner After Apple Removes App: ‘We Are Determined to Fight This’

The developer of ICEBlock, an app that lets people crowdsource sightings of ICE officials, has said he is determined to fight back after Apple removed the app from its App Store on Thursday. The removal came after pressure from Department of Justice officials acting at the direction of Attorney General Pam Bondi, according to Fox which first reported the removal. Apple told 404 Media it has removed other similar apps too.

“I am incredibly disappointed by Apple's actions today. Capitulating to an authoritarian regime is never the right move,” Joshua Aaron told 404 Media. “ICEBlock is no different from crowd sourcing speed traps, which every notable mapping application, including Apple's own Maps app, implements as part of its core services. This is protected speech under the first amendment of the United States Constitution.”

💡
Do you know anything else about this removal? Do you work at Apple or ICE? 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.

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ICEBlock Owner After Apple Removes App: ‘We Are Determined to Fight This’

Apple removed ICEBlock reportedly after direct pressure from Department of Justice officials. “I am incredibly disappointed by Apple's actions today. Capitulating to an authoritarian regime is never the right move,” the developer said.

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}