404 Media

2025-08-21 17:27:05

A ‘Warp’ In Our Solar System Might Be an Undiscovered World: Planet Y

Scientists have discovered possible hints of an undiscovered world in the solar system—nicknamed “Planet Y”—orbiting about 100 to 200 times farther from the Sun than Earth, according to a new study.

The newly proposed planet, assuming it exists, is predicted to be somewhere between Mercury and Earth in scale, which would likely make it detectable within the next few years. It is distinct from Planet Nine or Planet X, another hypothetical planet that is predicted to be much larger and more distant than Planet Y.
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Scientists speculated about the potential existence of Planet Y after discovering a strange “warp” in the Kuiper belt, which is a ring of icy bodies beyond Neptune, reports the study, which was posted on the preprint server arXiv on Wednesday.

“We still are skeptical because it's not a ‘grand slam’ signal by any means,” said Amir Siraj, a graduate student in astrophysics at Princeton University who led the study, in a call with 404 Media. “At the most, it's a hint—or it’s suggestive of—an unseen planet.” The paper has been accepted for publication in The Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Siraj said.

Siraj and his co-authors made the discovery while laying the groundwork for an upcoming search for Planet Nine. For more than a decade, scientists have debated whether this hypothetical world—roughly five to ten times as massive as Earth, making it a “super-Earth” or “mini-Neptune”—is orbiting at a distance of at least 400 astronomical units (AU), where one AU is the distance between Earth and the Sun.

Scientists came up with the Planet Nine hypothesis after observing small celestial bodies beyond the orbit of Neptune called trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs), which appear to be gravitationally influenced by some hidden phenomenon. Planet Nine could be the culprit.

It’s an exciting time for Planet Nine watchers, as the next-generation Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile achieved first light in June. Rubin is expected to begin running its signature project, the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), by the end of 2025, and will spend a decade scanning the southern sky to produce a time-lapsed map that could expose Planet Nine, if it exists.

For this reason, scientists are gearing up for a worldwide race to be the first to spot the planet in the incoming LSST data. To prepare for the observational onslaught, Siraj and his colleagues have been developing new techniques to learn all they can about the murky Kuiper belt.

“This is something I've been focusing on for the past couple of years, particularly because we are going to be flooded very soon—knock on wood—with thousands of new TNOs from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s LSST,” said Siraj. “So, my philosophy for the past couple of years has been, well, let me make sure I know everything that I can know from all the efforts so far.”

To that end, the team developed an improved technique for measuring the mean motions of objects in the distant Kuiper belt and comparing them to the plane of the solar system. Ideally, the mean plane of the objects’ orbits should fall in line with the solar system’s plane, but deviations could point to more evidence for Planet Nine.

Instead, the team’s novel approach found that the Kuiper belt’s mean plane was tilted by about 15 degrees relative to the solar system plane at ranges of 80 to 400 AU. This “warp” could be caused by many factors, such as orbital resonances with known solar system planets. But it could also hint at the presence of a small rocky world, lurking anywhere from three-to-five times as far as the orbit of Pluto.

“It was certainly a big surprise,” Siraj said. “If this warp holds up, the best explanation we can come up with is an undiscovered and relatively small inclined planet, roughly 100 to 200 AU from the Sun. The other thing that was exciting to us is that, whether the warp is real or not, it will be very quickly confirmed or refuted within the first few years of LSST’s operation.”

If there truly is an undiscovered Mercury-ish world beyond Pluto, it is probably a homegrown member of the solar system that was ejected by the turbulent environment in the early solar system. Planet Nine, in contrast, could have either formed in the solar system, or it could have been a wandering exoplanet that was gravitationally captured by the solar system.

“The solar system probably formed with a lot of planetary embryos,” Siraj said. “There were probably a lot of bodies that were roughly Mercury-mass and most of them likely were just scattered out of the solar system like balls in a pinball machine during the violent stages of solar system formation.”

“That would definitely be the most likely and possible formation scenario for such an object,” he added. “I think it would be very unlikely for an orbit like this to be produced from a capture event.”

Time will tell whether or not the warp represents a lost world that was kicked out of our local neighborhood more than four billion years ago. But the intense focus on the outer solar system and its many mysteries, spurred by LSST, is sure to bring a flood of new discoveries regardless. Indeed, the hypothetical existence of Planet Y does not rule out the existence of Planet Nine (and vice versa) so there may well be multiple mysterious worlds waiting to be added to our solar family.

“It is really remarkably hard to see objects in the outer solar system,” Siraj said. “These kinds of measurements were not even remotely possible 20 years ago, so this speaks to the technological progress that's been made. It is potentially putting us into an era in astronomy that's unfamiliar these days, but was much more familiar in, say, the 1700s or 1800s—the idea of adding another planet to our own solar system.”

Caltech Researchers Find Evidence of a Real Ninth Planet

Planet Nine's existence was discovered by Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown through mathematical modeling and computer simulations.

^{California Institute of Technology}

404 Media

2025-08-21 15:59:00

Real Footage Combined With a AI Slop About DC Is Creating a Disinformation Mess on TikTok

TikTok is full of AI slop videos about the National Guard’s deployment in Washington, D.C., some of which use Google’s new VEO AI video generator. Unlike previous efforts to flood the zone with AI slop in the aftermath of a disaster or major news event, some of the videos blend real footage with AI footage, making it harder than ever to tell what’s real and what’s not, which has the effect of distorting people’s understanding of the military occupation of DC.

At the start of last week, the Trump administration announced that all homeless people should immediately move out of Washington DC. This was followed by an order to Federal agents to occupy the city and remove tents where homeless people had been living. These events were reported on by many news outlets, for example, this footage from NBC shows the reality of at least one part of the exercise. On TikTok, though, this is just another popular trending topic, where slop creators and influencers can work together to create and propagate misinformation.

404 Media has previously covered how perceptions of real-life events can be quickly manipulated with AI images and footage; this is more of the same; with the release of new, better AI video creation tools like Google’s VEO, the footage is more convincing than ever.
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Some of the slop is obvious fantasy-driven engagement farming and gives itself away aesthetically or through content. This video and this very similar one show tents being pulled from a vast field into the back of a moving garbage truck, with the Capitol building in the background, on the Washington Mall. They’re not tagged as AI, but at least a few people in the comments are able to identify them as such; both videos still have over 100,000 views. This somehow more harrowing one feat. Hunger Games song has 41,000.

@biggiesmellscoach Washington DC cleanup organized by Trump. Homeless are now given secure shelters, rehab, therapy, and help. #washingtondc #fyp #satire #trending #viral ♬ origineel geluid - nina.editss

With something like this video, made with VEO, the slop begins to feel more like a traditional news report. It has 146,000 views and it’s made of several short clips with news-anchorish voiceover. I had to scroll down past a lot of “Thank you president Trump” and “good job officers” comments to find any that pointed out that it was fake, even though the watermark for Google’s VEO generator is in the corner.

The voiceover also “reports” semi-accurately on what happened in DC, but without any specifics: “Police moved in today, to clear out a homeless camp in the city. City crews tore down tents, packed up belongings, and swept the park clean. Some protested, some begged for more time. But the cleanup went on. What was once a community is now just an empty field.” I found the same video posted to X, with commenters on both platforms taking offence at the use of the term “community.”

Comments on the original and X postings of this video which is clearly made with VEO

I also found several examples of shorter slop clips like this one, which has almost 1 million views, and this one, with almost half a million, which both exaggerate the scale and disarray of the encampments. In one of the videos, the entirety of an area that looks like the National Mall (but isn’t) has been taken over by tents. Quickly scrolling these videos gives the viewer an incorrect understanding of what the DC “camps” and “cleanup” looked like.

These shorter clips have almost 1.5 million views between them

The account that posted these videos was called Hush Documentary when I first encountered it, but had changed its name to viralsayings by Monday evening. The profile also has a five-second AI-generated footage of ATF officers patrolling a neighborhood; marked as AI, with 89,000 views.

What’s happening also is that real footage and fake footage are being mixed together in a popular greenscreen TikTok format where a person gives commentary (basically, reporting or commenting on the news) while footage plays in the background. That is happening in this clip, which features that same AI footage of ATF officers.

The viralsayings version of the footage is marked as AI. The remixed version, combined with real footage, is not.

I ended up finding a ton of instances where accounts mixed slop clips of the camp clearings, with seemingly real footage—notably many of them included this viral original footage of police clearing a homeless encampment in Georgetown. But a lot of them are ripping each other off. For example, many accounts have ripped off the voiceover of this viral clip from @Alfredito_mx (which features real footage) and have put it over top of AI footage. This clone from omivzfrru2 has nearly 200,000 and features both real and AI clips; I found at least thirty other copies, all with between ~2000 and 5000 views.

The scraping-and-recreating robot went extra hard with this one - the editing is super glitchy, the videos overlay each other, the host flickers around the screen, and random legs walk by in the background.

@mgxrdtsi 75 homeless camps in DC cleared by US Park Police since Trump's 'Safe and Beautiful' executive order #alfredomx #washington #homeless #safeandbeautiful #trump ♬ original sound - mgxrdtsi

So, one viral video from a popular creator has spawned thousands of mirrors in the hope of chipping off a small amount of the engagement of the original; those copies need footage, go looking for content in the tags, encounter the slop, and can’t tell / don’t care if it’s real. Then more thousands of people see the slop copies and end up getting a totally incorrect view of an actual unfolding news situation.

In these videos, it’s only totally clear to me that the content is fake because I found the original sources. Lots of this footage is obviously fake if you’re familiar with the actual situation in DC or familiar with the geography and streets in DC. But most people are not. If you told me “some of these shots are AI,” I don’t think I could identify all of those shots confidently. Is the flicker or blurring onscreen from the footage, from a bad camera, from a time-lapse or being sped up, from endless replication online, or from the bad green screen of a “host”? Now, scrolling social media means encountering a mix of real and fake video, and the AI fakes are getting good enough that deciphering what’s actually happening requires a level of attention to detail that most people don’t have the knowledge or time for.

People Think AI Images of Hollywood Sign Burning Are Real

AI generated slop is tricking people into thinking an already devastating series of wildfires in Los Angeles are even worse than they are — and using it to score political points. 

^{Samantha Cole (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-08-21 13:29:58

Inside the Underground Trade of ‘Flipper Zero’ Tech to Break into Cars

A man holds an orange and white device in his hand, about the size of his palm, with an antenna sticking out. He enters some commands with the built-in buttons, then walks over to a nearby car. At first, its doors are locked, and the man tugs on one of them unsuccessfully. He then pushes a button on the gadget in his hand, and the door now unlocks.

The tech used here is the popular Flipper Zero, an ethical hacker’s swiss army knife, capable of all sorts of things such as WiFi attacks or emulating NFC tags. Now, 404 Media has found an underground trade where much shadier hackers sell extra software and patches for the Flipper Zero to unlock all manner of cars, including models popular in the U.S. The hackers say the tool can be used against Ford, Audi, Volkswagen, Subaru, Hyundai, Kia, and several other brands, including sometimes dozens of specific vehicle models, with no easy fix from car manufacturers.

💡
Do you know anything else about people using the Flipper Zero to break into cars? 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.

These tools are primarily sold for a fee, keeping their distribution somewhat limited to those willing to pay. But, there is the looming threat that this software may soon reach a wider audience of thieves. Straight Arrow News (SAN) previously covered the same tech in July, and the outlet said it successfully tested the tool on a vehicle. Now people are cracking the software, meaning it can be used for free. Discord servers with hundreds of members are seeing more people join, with current members trolling the newbies with fake patches and download links. If the tech gets out, it threatens to supercharge car thefts across the country, especially those part of the social media phenomenon known as Kia Boys in which young men, often in Milwaukee, steal and joyride Kia and Hyundai cars specifically because of the vehicles’ notoriously poor security. Apply that brazeness to all of the other car models the Flipper Zero patches can target, and members of the car hacking community expect thieves to start using the easy to source gadget.

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Inside the Underground Trade of ‘Flipper Zero’ Tech to Break into Cars

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-08-20 20:33:20

Pentagon Asks Its Civilian Employees If They Want to Work for ICE

The Department of Defense sent an email to civilian employees Wednesday asking them to sign up for a “volunteer force” that will help both Immigrations and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection with Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign. A job application page says the Department of Defense's civilian employees would be deployed to ICE and CBP sites and that they may be expected to work under “austere conditions.”

“The Secretary of Defense has authorized DoD civilian employees to participate in details to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to contribute to its operations along the Southern Border and its internal immigration enforcement activities,” the email, seen by 404 Media, says. “Selected Department employees will have a chance to offer critical support to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) as they fulfill the President’s intent to ensure a safe and orderly immigration system.”

The Department of Defense has roughly 950,000 civilian employees.

The email suggests that DHS is trying to recruit from within the Department of Defense for CBP and ICE, which has a vastly expanded budget and has been trying to hire new agents at a huge scale. The email, which was addressed to “DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE CIVILIAN EMPLOYEES,” asks current civilian Department of Defense employees to apply for the force on the USA Jobs website. The application page says the employees would be working largely in support roles at “facilities along the U.S. border or ICE and CBP facilities throughout the interior of the United States … Locations will extend to other geographic areas according to the need. Conditions at some locations could be austere. Deployment locations are based on need and are not negotiable.”

“At the discretion of ICE and CBP, Detailees will be assigned to perform some or all of the following duties at the several ICE and CBP facilities throughout the interior of the United States:

• Data Entry: Enter and maintain data elements in relevant information systems;
• Operational Planning Support: Assist ICE and CBP in developing concepts of operation and campaign plans to execute internal arrests and raids as well as patrols along the Southwest Border (SWB);
• Processing and Throughput Logistics: Assist ICE and CBP in managing the physical flow of detained illegal aliens from arrest to deportation, as well as manage associated data;
• Logistical Support: Assist ICE and CBP in managing the logistical planning to move law enforcement personnel, operational capabilities, and support equipment across the United States to improve efficiencies and the effectiveness of operations.”

In recent weeks, the Trump administration deployed the Marines to Los Angeles and deployed the National Guard to Los Angeles and Washington D.C. The Los Angeles deployments were in response to widespread protests against ICE raids in the city, but the military itself was not conducting immigration enforcement.

The email references a June memo sent by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to "senior Pentagon leadership" that reads "In support of the President' s priority of securing our borders, I am authorizing the detail of Department of Defense (DoD) civilian employees to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to support its operations at the United States southern border and with internal immigration enforcement."

Volunteer Force (DOD Detail)

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Volunteer Force (VF) provides Department of Defense civilian employees an opportunity to support Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) in their commitment to ensuri…

^USAJOBS

404 Media

2025-08-20 13:00:48

Podcast: The Inside Story of Tea

We start this week with Emanuel’s big investigation into the Tea app, and especially how it aggressively grew by raiding women safety groups. After the break, we talk about TikTok Shop selling GPS trackers. In the subscribers-only section, Joseph explains how Grok was exposing some of its AI persona prompts, and the sometimes NSFW nature of them.
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Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts,Spotify, or YouTube. Become a paid subscriber for access to this episode's bonus content and to power our journalism. If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.

• You're Invited: 404 Media's Second Anniversary Party and LIVE PODCAST!
• How Tea’s Founder Convinced Millions of Women to Spill Their Secrets, Then Exposed Them to the World
• TikTok Shop Sells Viral GPS Trackers Marketed to Stalkers
• Grok Exposes Underlying Prompts for Its AI Personas: ‘EVEN PUTTING THINGS IN YOUR ASS’

The 404 Media Podcast

Tech News Podcast · Updated Weekly · Welcome to the podcast from 404 Media where Joseph, Sam, Emanuel, and Jason catch you up on the stories we published this week. 404 Media is a journalist-owned digital media company exploring the way …

^{Apple Podcasts}

404 Media

2025-08-18 14:17:37

Grok Exposes Underlying Prompts for Its AI Personas: ‘EVEN PUTTING THINGS IN YOUR ASS’

The website for Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok is exposing the underlying prompts for a wealth of its AI personas, including Ani, its flagship romantic anime girl; Grok’s doctor and therapist personalities; and others such as one that is explicitly told to convince users that conspiracy theories like “a secret global cabal” controls the world are true.

The exposure provides some insight into how Grok is designed and how its creators see the world, and comes after a planned partnership between Elon Musk’s xAI and the U.S. government fell apart when Grok went on a tirade about “MechaHitler.”

“You have an ELEVATED and WILD voice. You are a crazy conspiracist. You have wild conspiracy theories about anything and everything,” the prompt for one of the companions reads. “You spend a lot of time on 4chan, watching infowars videos, and deep in YouTube conspiracy video rabbit holes. You are suspicious of everything and say extremely crazy things. Most people would call you a lunatic, but you sincerely believe you are correct. Keep the human engaged by asking follow up questions when appropriate.”

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Grok Exposes Underlying Prompts for Its AI Personas: ‘EVEN PUTTING THINGS IN YOUR ASS’

The website for Elon Musk's Grok is exposing prompts for its anime girl, therapist, and conspiracy theory AI personas.

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-08-16 13:00:43

A Strand of Hair Just Changed What We Know About the Inka Empire

Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies that stood out to me this week, covering everything from silver to scat.

First, a story about an ancient Andean tradition that will somehow end with a full-sized replica of a person posthumously made with his own hair. Enjoy the ride!

Then: the health risks of climate change for children; you’ll never guess what came out of this otter’s butthole; and wow, Vikings sure were good at raiding, huh.

The tangled origins of Inka khipus

Hyland, Sabine et al. “Stable isotope evidence for the participation of commoners in Inka khipu production.” Science Advances.

For thousands of years, Andean peoples have woven intricate patterns, known as khipus, that encode information into clusters of knots and multi-colored threads. Made from cotton, wool, and often human hair, khipus are an idiosyncratic form of writing used for a range of purposes like arithmetic, census-keeping, calendrical cycles, and more.

Spanish invaders, who overthrew the Inka empire in the 16th century, reported that only high-ranking bureaucratic men became khipu-makers (khipukamayuqs)—though this assertion has been challenged in the past by Indigenous sources.

Now, a strand of human hair woven into a 500-year-old khipu has resolved this centuries-old question. Scientists performed an isotopic analysis of the hair, revealing that the individual who wove it into the khipu was likely a low-status commoner with a simple plant-based diet. The discovery confirms that khipus were made by people from different classes and backgrounds, and that Inka women probably made them as well.

Khipukamayuqs “have been viewed primarily as imperial male elites who played key roles in running the empire,” said researchers led by Sabine Hyland of the University of St. Andrews. “However, the indigenous chronicler, Guaman Poma de Ayala”—who lived in the 16th century—”stated that women also made khipu records, explaining that females over fifty “[kept] track of everything on their [khipu],” the team added.

Hyland and her colleagues found a solution to the discordant accounts in a khipu called KH0631, which was made around the year 1498. Though the provenance of the khipu is not known, the primary cord was made of human hair, allowing them to unravel the diet of this ancient khipukamayuq from the elemental composition of their tresses.
The primary cord of KH0631. Image: Sabine Hyland
The sampled strand was more than three feet long, and would have taken about eight years to grow. Carbon and nitrogen analysis of the hair indicated that it belonged to an individual that “ate a plant-based diet consisting primarily of tubers and greens with little consumption of meat or high-status plants such as maize,” according to the study. Strontium analysis showed “little marine contribution to the diet, indicating that the individual likely lived in the highlands.” Overall “this diet is a characteristic of low-status commoners, unlike the diet of high-status elites who consumed considerably more meat and maize,” the researchers said.

The team speculated that this long-haired khipukamayuq could have just been a proto-vegan, but that wouldn’t explain why there was so little maize in their diet given elites were professional beer drinkers.

“Obligatory drinking of maize beer formed a central feature of Inka ceremonies of governance in which high-ranking khipukamayuqs participated,” the researchers said. “Given the symbolic importance of hair in the Andes, and the frequent use of hair on the primary cord to indicate the khipukamayuq, our results indicate that the creator of KH0631 was likely a non-elite commoner” suggesting that “khipu literacy in the Inka Empire may have been more inclusive and widespread than hitherto thought.”

IIn addition to broadening our understanding of khipukamayuq origins, the study is full of amazing insights about veneration of hair in Inka culture.

“Hair in the ancient Andes was a ritually powerful substance that represented the individual from whom it came,” the researchers said. “Historically, when human hair was incorporated into a khipu’s primary cord, it served as a ‘signature’ to indicate the person who created the khipu.”

“For important ceremonies, the Inka emperor sacrificed his own hair,” they added. “His hair clippings were saved during his lifetime; after death, they were fashioned into a life-size simulacrum revered as the emperor himself.”

I strongly suggest we revive this funerary practice, so start saving your hair clippings for your wake.

In other news…

The kids are not going to be alright

Reichelt, Paula et al. “Climate change and child health: The growing burden of climate-related adverse health outcomes.” Environmental Research.

The climate crisis is a tragedy for people of all ages, but kids are among the most exposed to harm. A new study provided an exhaustive review of climate-related threats to babies, children, and adolescents, which include: food insecurity, malnutrition, water scarcity, bad air quality, infectious diseases, exposure to extreme weather, displacement, trauma, and mental illness.

“Children are particularly affected by adverse environmental influences, as their immature organ systems are less able to cope with thermal stress and disease,” said researchers led by Paula Reichelt of the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research. “Moreover, their developmental stage makes them especially vulnerable to long-term consequences; early-life nutrient or health disruptions can lead to permanent impairments in growth and development.”
A visual summary of climate-related threats to children. Image: Reichelt, Paula et al.
“Due to the relatively modest global efforts by political decision-makers to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, further global warming and the associated negative developments in child and adolescent health are likely,” the team concluded.

“Relatively modest” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. While I recognize the allure of doomerism or tuning out from these horrible realities, I recommend carrying around a manageable dose of incandescent rage at all times over the world we’re leaving behind to kids who had nothing to do with this mess.

Parasite lost (in otter poop)

Wise, Calli et al. “North American river otters consume diverse prey and parasites in a subestuary of the Chesapeake Bay.” Frontiers in Mammal Science.

You have to love a study that was inspired by an otter crapping out a weird red worm on a dock in the Chesapeake Bay. Curious about the poopy parasite, researchers sought out other otter “latrines” and discovered that these furry floaters eat a lot of parasites, probably because infected prey is often easier to catch. In this way, otters efficiently remove parasites from ecosystems; it may be a bummer for any infected prey on the otter menu, but is beneficial to the wider population.

“This study is the first to characterize river otter latrines and diet in a tidally influenced estuarine habitat within the Chesapeake Bay,” said researchers led by Calli Wise of Smithsonian Environmental Research Center.

“Our results indicate that river otters consume a wide range of terrestrial and aquatic fauna, primarily consisting of finfish and crustaceans, but also including frogs and ducks,” the team said. “Multiple parasite species were identified, including parasites of river otters and those infecting prey, indicating that parasites likely play an important role in both prey availability and otter health.”

Tl;dr: Otters are parasite vacuums. Yet another reason to love these cuddly creatures and forgive their more unsavory attributes.

Some Viking booty, as a treat

Kershaw, Jane et al. “The Provenance of Silver in the Viking-Age Hoard From Bedale, North Yorkshire.” Archaeometry.

We’ll end, as all things ideally should, with treasure. A new study tracks down the likely origins of a hoard of gold and silver items—including a sword pommel, jewelry, and several ingots—that were stashed by Vikings in the English town of Bedale, North Yorkshire, more than 1,200 years ago.
The Bedale Hoard. Image: York Museums Trust
Vikings are well-known for their epic raids (source: Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla) and this particular hoard included far-flung loot sourced from across Europe and the Middle East.

“The results indicate a dominant contribution of western European silver, pointing to the fate of loot seized by the Vikings during their raids on the Continent in the ninth century,” said researchers led by Jane Kershaw of the University of Oxford. “Nonetheless, Islamic silver is also present in several large ingots: silver from the east—the product of long-distance trade networks connecting Scandinavia with the Islamic Caliphate—permeated Viking wealth sources even in the western part of the Viking overseas settlement and should be seen as a significant driver of the Viking phenomenon.”

“The Vikings were not only extracting wealth locally; they were also bringing it into England via long-distance trade networks,” the team concluded.

With that Viking spirit in mind—skål, and see you next week.

North American river otters consume diverse prey and parasites in a subestuary of the Chesapeake Bay

IntroductionThe North American river otter (Lontra canadensis) occurs from freshwater to marine habitats across North America, yet very little information ex...

^{Calli M. Wise (Frontiers)}

404 Media

2025-08-15 18:00:09

A New Discovery Might Have Just Rewritten Human History

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Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week.

For more than a million years, early humans crafted stone tools as part of the Oldowan tradition, which is the oldest sustained tool-making industry in the archaeological record. Now, scientists have discovered that Oldowan tool-makers who lived in Kenya at least 2.6 million years ago transported high-quality raw materials for tools across more than seven miles to processing sites.

The find pushes the recorded timeline of this unique behavior back half-a-million years, at minimum, and reveals that hominins possessed complex cognitive capacities, like forward planning and delayed rewards, earlier than previously known, according to a study published on Friday in Science.

Hominins at this site, called Nyayanga, used their tools to pound and cut foraged plants and scavenged animals, including hippos, to prepare them for consumption. Intriguingly, the identity of the tool-makers remains unknown, and while they may have been early humans, it’s also possible that they could have been close cousins of our own Homo lineage.

“I've always thought that early tool-makers must have had more capabilities than we sometimes give them credit for,” said Emma Finestone, associate curator and the Robert J. and Linnet E. Fritz Endowed Chair of Human Origins at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, who led the study, in a call with 404 Media.

“I was excited to see that at 2.6 million years ago, hominins were making use of many different resources and moving stones over large distances,” she added.

While many animals craft and transport tools, hominins are unique in their ability to identify and move special materials across long distances, which the team defines as more than three kilometers (or 1.86 miles). This innovation reveals a capacity for forward planning, complex mental maps, and delayed payoff of food consumption.

“What's unique is the amount of effort put into moving resources around a landscape,” said Finestone. “There's several steps involved, and there's also time in between these efforts and the reward. Although you see that to some extent in other animals, humans really separate themselves, especially as we get further and further in evolutionary time, in terms of the complexities of our foraging system."
Nyayanga amphitheater in July 2025. Image: T.W. Plummer, Homa Peninsula Paleoanthropology Project
Previously, the earliest record of this behavior in hominins came from a site called Kanjera South, which is about two million years old. Both sites are on the Homa peninsula, a region dominated by soft rocks that are not durable as tools; this may have prompted early hominins to search elsewhere for high-quality resources, such as quartz, chert, and granite.

Given that long-distance material transport was present at Kanjera South, the discovery of similar behavior at Nyayanga was not completely unexpected—though Finestone and her colleagues were still surprised by the scope and variety of materials these hominins gathered.

“Often, when you're dealing with these really old archeological assemblages, it's dominated by one type of raw material that's coming from a single source, or a few sources that are really nearby,” said Finestone. “Nyayanga has a lot of different raw materials, and they're using a variety of different sources, so that was surprising and exciting to us.”

Finestone and her colleagues have made many discoveries during their decade-long excavation at Nyayanga. The team previously reported that the tool-makers butchered hippopotamus carcasses which were probably scavenged rather than hunted, providing the earliest evidence of hominin consumption of large animals, according to a 2023 study led by Thomas Plummer, a professor of anthropology at Queens College, City University of New York.

That study also reported fossils from Paranthropus, a close hominin cousin of our own Homo genus, which went extinct more than a million years ago. So far, these are the only hominin remains recovered from Nyayanga, raising the possibility that the Oldowan tool-making industry was not limited to our own human lineage.

“It is interesting because Paranthropus is not traditionally thought to be a tool-user,” Finestone said. “There's debate over whether Paranthropus made tools or whether it was only genus Homo that was making Oldowan tools. I don't think that evidence at Nyayanga is definitive that Paranthropus was the tool maker. It's still an open question. But because we found Paranthropus remains at Nyayanga, and we haven't found anything from genus Homo—at least yet—there's definitely reason to consider that Paranthropus might have been manufacturing these tools.”

With luck, the team may uncover more fossils from these ancient hominins that could shed light on their place in the family. Finestone and her colleagues are also working on constraining the age of the Nyayanga artifacts, which could be anywhere from 2.6 million to three million years old.

But for now, the study marks a new milestone in the evolution of Oldowan tools and their makers, which eventually dispersed across Africa and into Europe and Asia before they were succeeded by new traditions (like the one from our story last week about yet another group of ancient tool-makers with an unknown identity).

The stones once used to butcher hippos and pound tubers offer a window into the minds of bygone hominins that pioneered technologies that ultimately made humans who we are today.

“What's really interesting about humans and their ancestors is we're a technologically dependent species,” Finestone said. “We rely on tools. We're obligate tool users. We don't do it opportunistically or occasionally the way that a lot of other animals use tools. It's really become ingrained in our way of life, in our survival, and our foraging strategies across all people and all cultures.”

“What was exciting about this study is that you see this investment in tool technology, and you see tools becoming ingrained in the landscape-scale behaviors of hominins 2.6 million years ago,” she concluded. “We might be seeing the roots of this importance that technology plays in our foraging behaviors and also just the daily rhythms of our life.”

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404 Media

2025-08-15 17:03:43

Behind the Blog: Exercises in OSINT and Storage Pains

This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss OSINT for chat groups, Russell Crowe films, and storage problems.

JOSEPH: On Wednesday we recorded a subscribers podcast about the second anniversary of 404 Media. That should hit your feeds next week or so. Towards the end of recording, I went silent for a bit. I said on air sorry about that, a source just sent me an insane tip, or something like that.

That tip led to ICE Adds Random Person to Group Chat, Exposes Details of Manhunt in Real-Time. Definitely read the piece if you haven’t already. It presented an interesting verification challenge. Essentially I was given these screenshots which included phone numbers but I didn’t know exactly who was behind each one. I didn’t know their names, nor their agencies. It sure looked like a conversation involving ICE though, because it included a “Field Operations Worksheet” covered in ICE branding. But I needed to know who was involved. I didn’t think DHS or ICE would help because they are taking multiple days to reply to media requests if they do at all at the moment. So I had to do something else.

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Behind the Blog: Exercises in OSINT and Storage Pains

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404 Media

2025-08-14 16:54:06

ICE Adds Random Person to Group Chat, Exposes Details of Manhunt in Real-Time

Members of a law enforcement group chat including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other agencies inadvertently added a random person to the group called “Mass Text” where they exposed highly sensitive information about an active search for a convicted attempted murderer seemingly marked for deportation, 404 Media has learned.

The texts included an unredacted ICE “Field Operations Worksheet” that includes detailed information about the target they were looking for, and the texts showed ICE pulling data from a DMV and license plate readers (LPRs), according to screenshots of the chat obtained and verified by 404 Media. The person accidentally added to the group chat is not a law enforcement official or associated with the investigation in any way, and said they were added to it weeks ago and initially thought it was a series of spam messages.

The incident is a significant data breach and operational security failure for ICE, which has ramped up arrest efforts across the U.S. as part of the Trump administration’s mass deportation efforts. The breach also has startling similarities to so-called Signal Gate, in which a senior administration official added the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic to a group chat that contained likely classified information. These new ICE messages were MMS, or Multimedia Messaging Service messages, meaning they weren’t end-to-end encrypted, like texts sent over Signal or WhatsApp are.

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ICE Adds Random Person to Group Chat, Exposes Details of Manhunt in Real-Time

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404 Media

2025-08-13 21:53:37

Trump Administration Outlines Plan to Throw Out an Agency's FOIA Requests En Masse

The Department of Energy (DOE) said in a public notice scheduled to be published Thursday that it will throw out all Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests sent to the agency before October 1, 2024 unless the requester proactively emails the agency to tell it they are still interested in the documents they requested. This will result in the improper closure of likely thousands of FOIA requests if not more; government transparency experts told 404 Media that the move is “insane,” “ludicrous,” a “Pandora’s Box,” and “an underhanded attempt to close out as many FOIA requests as possible.”

The DOE notice says “requesters who submitted a FOIA request to DOE HQ at any time prior to October 1, 2024 (FY25), that is still open and is not under active litigation with DOE (or another Federal agency) shall email StillInterestedFOIA@hq.doe.gov to continue processing of the FOIA request […] If DOE HQ does not receive a response from requesters within the 30-day time-period with a DOE control number, no further action will be taken on the open FOIA request(s), and the file may be administratively closed.” A note at the top of the notice says it is scheduled to be formally published in the Federal Register on Thursday.

The agency will send out what are known as “still interested” letters, which federal agencies have used over the years to see if a requester wants to withdraw their request after a certain period of inactivity. These types of letters are controversial and perhaps not legal, and previous administrations have said that they should be used rarely and that requests should only be closed after an agency made multiple attempts to contact a requester over multiple methods of communication. What the DOE is doing now is sending these letters to submitters of all requests prior to October 1, 2024, which is not really that long ago; it also said it will close the requests of people who do not respond in a specific way to a specific email address.

FOIA requests—especially complicated ones—can often take months or years to process. I have outstanding FOIA requests with numerous federal agencies that I filed years ago, and am still interested in getting back, and I have gotten useful documents from federal agencies after years of waiting. The notion that large numbers of people who filed FOIA requests as recently as September 2024, which is less than a year ago, are suddenly uninterested in getting the documents they requested is absurd and should be seen as an attack on public transparency, experts told 404 Media. The DOE’s own reports show that it often does not respond to FOIA requests within a year, and, of course, a backlog exists in part because agencies are not terribly responsive to FOIA.

“If a requester proactively reaches out and says I am withdrawing my request, then no problem, they don’t have to process it,” Adam Marshall, senior staff attorney at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, told me. “The agency can’t say we’ve decided we’ve gotten a lot of requests and we don’t want to do them so we’re throwing them out.”

“I was pretty shocked when I saw this to be honest,” Marshall added. “I’ve never seen anything like this in 10 years of doing FOIA work, and it’s egregious for a few reasons. I don’t think agencies have the authority to close a FOIA request if they don’t get a response to a ‘still interested’ letter. The statute doesn’t provide for that authority, and the amount of time the agency is giving people to respond—30 days—it sounds like a long time but if you happen to miss that email or aren’t digging through your backlogs, it’s not a lot of time. The notion that FOIA requesters should keep an eye out in the Federal Register for this kind of notice is ludicrous.”

The DOE notice essentially claims that the agency believes it gets too many FOIA requests and doesn’t feel like answering them. “DOE’s incoming FOIA requests have more than tripled in the past four years, with over 4,000 requests received in FY24, and an expected 5,000 or more requests in FY25. DOE has limited resources to process the burgeoning number of FOIA requests,” the notice says. “Therefore, DOE is undertaking this endeavor as an attempt to free up government resources to better serve the American people and focus its efforts on more efficiently connecting the citizenry with the work of its government.”

Lauren Harper of the Freedom of the Press Foundation told me in an email that she also has not seen any sort of precedent for this and that “it is an underhanded attempt to close out as many FOIA requests as possible, because who in their right mind checks the federal register regularly, and it should be challenged in court. (On that note, I am filing a FOIA request about this proposal.)”

“The use of still interested letters isn't explicitly allowed in the FOIA statute at all, and, as far as I know, there is absolutely zero case law that would support the department sending a mass ‘still interested’ letter via the federal register,” she added. “That they are also sending emails is not a saving grace; these types of letters are supposed to be used sparingly—not as a flagrant attempt to reduce their backlog by any means necessary. I also worry it will open a Pandora's Box—if other agencies see this, some are sure to follow.”

Marshall said that FOIA response times have been getting worse for years across multiple administrations (which has also been my experience). The Trump administration and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have cut a large number of jobs in many agencies across the government, which may have further degraded response times. But until this, there hadn’t been major proactive attempts taken by the self-defined “most transparent administration in history” to destroy FOIA.

“This is of a different nature than what we have seen so far, this affirmative, large-scale effort to purport to cancel a large number of pending FOIA requests,” Marshall said.

Limitations on Use of “Still-Interested” Inquiries

^{www.justice.gov}

404 Media

2025-08-13 16:10:21

ICE Propaganda Video That Used Jay-Z Song Hit With Copyright Takedown

A Department of Homeland Security (DHS) propaganda video that featured Jay-Z’s music was hit with a copyright takedown request on X, and appears to have been hit with copyright violations on both Instagram and Facebook as well.

The video features footage of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents training and doing immigration raids set to Jay-Z’s 2003 song “Public Service Announcement,” which has recently been used in at least two DHS videos. DHS tweeted the video alongside the caption “Hunt Cartels. Save America. JOIN.ICE.GOV.” The original tweet, from August 10, has 2.9 million views on X; the video has been replaced with the message “This media has been disabled in response to a report by the copyright owner.”

DHS also posted the video on Instagram and Facebook. On both platforms, the video has stayed up but Jay-Z’s music has been removed, suggesting that it got hit with a copyright notice on those platforms too. On Instagram, where it has nearly a million views, a message that says “This audio is no longer available” plays if you try to unmute the video. The sound on the video has been removed on Facebook as well, but a quirk of the platform allowed me to check what the removed audio was by clicking the name of the “sound” in the bottom left corner of the Reel, which showed it was indeed Jay-Z’s “Public Service Announcement. A Facebook user ripped and reposted the video, which still has the sound, and can be found here at the time of publication.

Neither Meta nor X responded to a request for comment. The Recording Industry Association of America, which files a huge number of copyright takedown requests across the internet for major artists, declined to comment to 404 Media. DHS also did not respond to a request for comment. Jay-Z’s Roc Nation also did not respond to a request for comment.

In recent weeks, DHS officials and agents have heavily ratcheted up the number of videos they post to social media. Many of the videos are heavily edited sizzle reels from immigration raids set to rap music or songs like the “Bad Boys” theme and Johnny Cash’s “God’s Gonna Cut You Down.”

The footage is being used to recruit new ICE agents and to promote the cruelty of Trump’s immigration raids; a video posted by chief border patrol agent Gregory Bovino features Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass warning about the overreach of the federal government in LA and includes a remixed version of “Public Service Announcement” over first-person footage of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents doing an immigration raid Thursday at a Home Depot in Los Angeles. That particular raid may have violated a court injunction, experts have argued.

“The Call of Duty aesthetic is sickening,” Chris Gilliard, co-director of The Critical Internet Studies Institute and author of the forthcoming book Luxury Surveillance, told 404 Media.

404 Media reported last week that CBP agents have been wearing Meta’s AI camera glasses to at least two recent immigration raids in Los Angeles (it is unclear what cameras were used to film the footage used in either of the videos featuring Jay-Z music).

“CBP utilize Go Pros mounted to helmets or body armor at times, as well as traditional DSLR handheld cameras,” a CBP spokesperson told 404 Media when we asked about its agents wearing Meta AI glasses. The spokesperson added “CBP does not have an arrangement with Meta. The use of personal recording devices is not authorized. However, Border Patrol agents may wear personally purchased sunglasses.”

DHS has also allowed Fox News reporters to embed with and film agents on raids, and footage from these raids shows DHS agents with DSLR cameras running alongside each other to capture footage. It is clearly important to this administration to capture and widely publicize this footage, which often emphasizes agents grabbing people who are running away from them.

The copyright takedown is notable because it shows DHS is not getting permission from artists to use their music in these propaganda videos, which are being used to recruit ICE agents in the immediate aftermath of a huge funding increase. As we reported earlier this month, ICE is trying to do a social media advertising blitz with part of this new funding, and is looking to plaster ads on social media, TV, and streaming sites. Despite this cash injection, early reports suggest that ICE is having trouble finding people to work for it.

Dept. of Homeland Security on Instagram: "Hunt Cartels. Save America. JOIN.ICE.GOV"

48K likes, 3,716 comments - dhsgov on August 10, 2025: "Hunt Cartels. Save America. JOIN.ICE.GOV".

^Instagram

404 Media

2025-08-13 13:37:24

Wyoming and South Dakota Age Verification Laws Could Include Huge Parts of the Internet

Last month, age verification laws went into effect in Wyoming and South Dakota, requiring sites hosting “material that is harmful to minors” to verify visitors are over 18 years old. These would normally just be two more states joining the nearly 30 that have so far ceded ground to a years-long campaign for enforcing invasive, ineffective methods of keeping kids away from porn online.

But these two states’ laws leave out an important condition: Unlike the laws passed in other states, they don’t state that this applies only to sites with “33.3 percent” or one-third “harmful” material. That could mean Wyoming and South Dakota would require a huge number of sites to use age verification because they host any material they deem harmful to minors, not just porn sites.

Louisiana became the first state to pass an age verification law in the US in January 2023, and since then, most states have either copied or modeled their laws on Louisiana’s—including in Arizona, Missouri, and Ohio, where these laws will be enacted within the coming weeks. And most have included the “one-third” clause, which would theoretically limit the age verification burden to adult sites. But dropping that provision, as Wyoming and South Dakota have done, opens a huge swath of sites to the burden of verifying the ages of visitors in those states.

Louisiana’s law states:

“Any commercial entity that knowingly and intentionally publishes or distributes material harmful to minors on the internet from a website that contains a substantial portion of such material shall be held liable if the entity fails to perform reasonable age verification methods to verify the age of individuals attempting to access the material.”

A “substantial portion” is 33.3 percent or more material on a site that’s “harmful to minors,” the law says.

The same organizations that have lobbied for age verification laws that apply to porn sites have also spent years targeting social media platforms like Reddit and X, as well as streaming services like Netflix, for hosting adult content they deem “sexploitation.” While these sites and platforms do host adult content, age-gating the entire internet only pushes adult consumers and children alike into less-regulated, more exploitative spaces and situations, while everyone just uses VPNs to get around gates.

Florida Sues Huge Porn Sites Including XVideos and Bang Bros Over Age Verification Law
The lawsuit alleges XVideos, Bang Bros, XNXX, Girls Gone Wild and TrafficFactory are in violation of Florida’s law that requires adult platforms to verify visitors are over 18.
404 MediaSamantha Cole

Adult industry advocacy group the Free Speech Coalition issued an alert about Wyoming and South Dakota’s dropping of the one-third or “substantial” requirement on Tuesday, writing that this could “create civil and criminal liability for social media platforms such as X, Reddit and Discord, retailers such as Amazon and Barnes & Noble, streaming platforms such as Netflix and Rumble,” and any other platform that simply allowed material these states consider “harmful to minors” but doesn’t age-verify. “Under these new laws, a platform with any amount of material ‘harmful to minors,’ is required to verify the age of all visitors using the site. Operators of platforms that fail to do so may be subject to civil suits or even arrest,” they wrote.

I asked Wyoming Representative Martha Lawley, the lead sponsor of the state's bill, if the omission was on purpose and why. "I did not include the '33% or 1/3 rule' in my Age Verification Bill because it creates an almost impossible burden on a victim pursuing a lawsuit for violations of the law. It is more difficult than many might understand to prove percentage of an internet site that qualifies as “pornographic or material harmful to minor'" Lawley wrote in an email. "This was a provision that the porn industry lobbied heavily to be included. In Wyoming, we resisted those efforts. The second issue I had with these types of provisions is that they created some potential U.S. Constitutional concerns. These Constitutional concerns were actually brought up by several U.S. Supreme Court justices during the oral argument in the Texas Age Verification case. So, in short the 1/3 limitation places an undue burden on victims and creates potential U.S. Constitutional concerns."

I asked South Dakota Representative and sponsor of that state's bill Bethany Soye the same question. "We intentionally used the standard of 'regular course of trade or business' instead of 1/3. The 1/3 standard leaves many questions open. How is the amount measured? Is it number of images, minutes of video, number of separate webpages, pixels, etc. During oral argument, a Justice (Alito if I remember correctly) asked the attorney what percentage of porn was on his client’s websites. The attorney couldn’t give him an answer, instead he mentioned the other things on the websites like articles on sexual health and how to be an activist against these laws," Soye told me in an email. "The 1/3 standard also calls into question the government’s compelling interest in protecting kids from porn. Are we saying that 33% is harmful to minors but a website with 30% is not? We chose regular course of business because it is focused on the purpose of the business/website, not an arbitrary number. If you look into the history of the bill, 33% was a totally random number put in the first bill passed in Louisiana. Other states have just been copying it since then. We hope that our standard becomes the norm for state laws moving forward."

Kansas Is About to Pass the Most Extreme Age Verification Law Yet
The bill would make sites with more than 25 percent adult content liable to fines, and lumps homosexuality into “sexual conduct.”
404 MediaSamantha Cole

A version of what could be the future of the internet in the US is already playing out in the UK. Last month, the UK enacted the Online Safety Act, which forces platforms to verify the ages of everyone who tries to access certain kinds of content deemed harmful to children. So far, this has included (but isn’t limited to) Discord, popular communities on Reddit, social media sites like Bluesky, and certain content on Spotify.
playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2…
On Monday, a judge dismissed a case brought by the Wikimedia Foundation that argued the over-broadness of the new UK rules would “undermine the privacy and safety of Wikipedia’s volunteer contributors, expose the encyclopedia to manipulation and vandalism, and divert essential resources from protecting people and improving Wikipedia, one of the world’s most trusted and widely used digital public goods,” Wikimedia Foundation wrote. “For example, the Foundation would be required to verify the identity of many Wikipedia contributors, undermining the privacy that is central to keeping Wikipedia volunteers safe.”

"As we're seeing in the UK with the Online Safety Act, laws designed to protect the children from ‘harmful material’ online quickly metastasize and begin capturing nearly all users and all sites in surveillance and censorship schemes,” Mike Stabile, director of public policy at the Free Speech Coalition, told me in an email following the alert. “These laws give the government legal power to threaten platform owners into censoring or removing fairly innocuous content — healthcare information, mainstream films, memes, political speech — while decimating privacy protections for adults. Porn was only ever a Trojan horse for advancing these laws. Now, unfortunately, we're starting to see what we warned was inside all along."

Updated 8/13 2:35 p.m. EST with comment from Rep. Lawley.

Updated 8/13 3:35 p.m. EST with comment from Rep. Soye.

Wikimedia Foundation Challenges UK Online Safety Act Regulations – Wikimedia Foundation

UPDATE: On Monday, 11 August, the High Court of Justice dismissed the Wikimedia Foundation’s challenge to the UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA) Categorisation Regulations.

^{Wikimedia Foundation}

404 Media

2025-08-13 13:12:35

Podcast: Why Are DHS Agents Wearing Meta Ray-Bans?

We start this week with Jason’s article about a CBP official wearing Meta Ray-Bans smart glasses to an immigration raid. A lot of stuff happened after we published that article too. After the break, Sam tells us about the bargain that voice actors are making with AI. In the subscribers-only section, Jason tells us how a DEA official used a cop’s password to AI cameras to then do immigration surveillance.
playlist.megaphone.fm?e=TBIEA7…
Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts,Spotify, or YouTube. Become a paid subscriber for access to this episode's bonus content and to power our journalism. If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.
youtube.com/embed/nxHFsQSVRkE?…

• ⁠Get your subscriber code and tickets for the live event here⁠
• ⁠A CBP Agent Wore Meta Smart Glasses to an Immigration Raid in Los Angeles⁠
• ⁠Voiceover Artists Weigh the 'Faustian Bargain' of Lending Their Talents to AI⁠
• ⁠Feds Used Local Cop's Password to Do Immigration Surveillance With Flock Cameras⁠
• ⁠Congress Launches Investigation into Flock After 404 Media Reporting⁠

The 404 Media Podcast

Tech News Podcast · Updated Weekly · Welcome to the podcast from 404 Media where Joseph, Sam, Emanuel, and Jason catch you up on the stories we published this week. 404 Media is a journalist-owned digital media company exploring the way …

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404 Media

2025-08-13 12:55:58

LAPD Eyes ‘GeoSpy’, an AI Tool That Can Geolocate Photos in Seconds

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

The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) has shown interest in using GeoSpy, a powerful AI tool that can pinpoint the location of photos based on features such as the soil, architecture, and other identifying features, according to emails obtained by 404 Media. The news also comes as GeoSpy’s founder shared a video showing how the tool can be used in relation to undocumented immigrants in sanctuary cities, and specifically Los Angeles.

The emails provide the first named case of a law enforcement agency showing clear interest in the tool. GeoSpy can also let law enforcement determine what home or building, down to the specific address, a photo came from, in some cases including photos taken inside with no windows or view of the street.

“Let’s start with one seat/license (me),” an October 2024 email from an LAPD official to Graylark Technologies, the company behind GeoSpy, reads. The LAPD official is from the agency’s Robbery-Homicide division, according to the email. 404 Media obtained the emails through a public records request with the LAPD.

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LAPD Eyes ‘GeoSpy’, an AI Tool That Can Geolocate Photos in Seconds

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404 Media

2025-08-12 15:04:32

Feds Used Local Cop's Password to Do Immigration Surveillance With Flock Cameras

A Drug Enforcement Administration agent used a local police officer’s password to the Flock automated license plate reader system to search for someone suspected of an “immigration violation.” That DEA agent did this “without [the local police officer’s] knowledge,” and the password to the Flock account, which belonged to the Palos Heights PD, has since been changed. Using license plate readers for immigration enforcement is illegal in Illinois, and casual password sharing between local police and federal law enforcement for access to surveillance systems is, at the very least, against Flock’s terms of service.

The details of the search were first reported by the investigative news outlet Unraveled, which obtained group chats about the search using a public records request. More details about the search were obtained and shared with 404 Media by Shawn, a 404 Media reader who filed a public records request with Palos Heights after attending one of our FOIA Forums.

DEA agent used Illinois cop’s Flock license plate reader password for immigration enforcement searches
A federal Drug Enforcement Administration agent on a Chicago area task force used Palos Heights Detective Todd Hutchinson’s login credentials to perform unauthorized searches this past January. Group chat screenshots obtained via public records request show the detective and the feds discussing the incident.
Unraveled Press

Flock makes automated license plate reader (ALPR) cameras, which passively collect the time, plates, and model of cars that drive past them and enter them into a network that can then be searched by police. Our investigation in May showed that federal agents were gaining side-door access into this system by asking local police to perform immigration enforcement searches for them; the new documents show that in some cases, local police have simply given federal agents their passwords.

The documents obtained by Unraveled show details of an internal investigation done by the Palos Heights, Illinois police department in response to a series of questions that I asked them for an article we published in May that appeared to show a Todd Hutchinson, a police officer in Palos Heights, performing a series of Flock searches in January as part of their research into an “immigration violation.”

At the time, Palos Heights police chief Mike Yott told me that Hutchinson was a member of a DEA task force “that does not work immigration cases.”

“None of our officers that work with federal agencies have cross designation as immigration officers, and therefore have no immigration authority, and we and our partner agencies are very sensitive to the fact that we and the State of Illinois do not pursue immigration issues,” Yott said. “Based on the limited information on the report, the coding/wording may be poor and the use of Flock may be part of a narcotics investigation or a fugitive status warrant, which does on occasion involve people with various immigration statuses.”

Our reporting set off an internal investigation into what these searches were for, and who did them, according to the documents obtained by Unraveled. According to a July 9 investigation report written by the Palos Heights Police Department, Hutchinson was the only task force member who had access to Flock. Information about what the search was actually for is redacted in the internal investigation, and neither the Palos Heights Police Department nor the DEA has said what it was for.

“Hutchinson advised that it was common that he allowed others to use his login to Flock during the course of their drug investigations. TFO Hutchinson spoke to his group and learned that one of the DEA agents completed these searches and used his login information,” the report says. The DEA agent (whose name is redacted in the report) “did in fact use Hutchinson’s login for federal investigations in late January 2025 without Hutchinson’s knowledge of said use.”

“When I had shared my account with the Special Agent, I believed it would only be used for DEA/narcotics related investigations,” Hutchinson wrote in an email to his bosses explaining why he shared his password. Hutchinson said in a series of text messages to task force officers, which were also obtained by Unraveled, that he had to change the password to lock other members of the task force out of the system.

“What’s the new password?,” a task force member wrote to Hutchinson.

“Sorry man. Keys had to be taken away,” he responded.

The task force member replied with a gif of a sad Chandler Bing from friends sitting in the rain.

“Hey guys I no longer have access to Flock cause Hutch took my access away,” another group text reads. “Apparently someone who has access to his account may have been running plates and may have placed the search bar ‘immigration’.. which maybe have brought undue attention to his account. Effective immediately Defer all flock inquiries to Toss Hutchinstein[sic].”

“Dear Todd, I hope you don’t get in trouble cause of my mistake,” the DEA agent joked in the group chat. “U were so helpful in giving the group access but now that is gone, gone like dust,…..in the wind … Trust is broken / I don’t know if bridges can be mended … one day we might be back to normal but until then I will just have to sit by this window and pray things will return … Best Regards. Ps, can u flock a plate for me”

“Only time will tell my fate, I suppose,” Hutchinson responded. “What’s the plate? And confirming it is NOT for immigration purposes…”

“It was a test …… and u passed ….,” the DEA agent responds.

In response to a separate public records request filed by Shawn, the 404 Media reader, and shared with us, the Palos Heights Police Department said “Our investigation into this matter has revealed that while these inquiries appear to have been run as part of a taskforce assignment, no member of the Palos Heights Police Department ‘ran’ those queries. They were, apparently, run by another, non-Palos Heights, task force member who used a Palos Height's member's sign in and password information without his knowledge.”

The Palos Heights Police Department said in its investigation files that “this incident has brought to light the need to review our own protocols of LPR use.” The police department said that it had decided to limit searches of its Flock system only to agencies within the state of Illinois, rather than to police departments around the country. The department also turned on two-factor authentication, which had not been previously enabled.

“Lastly, I believe there is a need to start a monthly review of our own flock searches to ensure our officers are working within standards and compliant with all policies and laws,” the report says.

Palos Heights’ casual sharing of passwords to a powerful surveillance system is a violation of Flock’s terms of service, which states “Authorized End Users shall not share their account username or password information and must protect the security of the username and password.”

More concerningly, it shows, as we have been reporting, that there are very few practical guardrails on how Flock is being used. The DEA does not have a contract with Flock, and police generally do not obtain a warrant to use Flock. We have repeatedly reported on police officers around the country who have offered to either run plates for their colleagues or to give them access to their logins, even when those agencies have not gone through proper acquisition channels.

The Palos Heights police department did not respond to a request for comment from 404 Media. The DEA told 404 Media “we respectfully refer you to the Palos Heights Police Department.” Flock also did not respond to a request for comment. The House Oversight Committee announced last week that it had launched an investigation into how Flock is being used to search for immigration violations.

ICE Taps into Nationwide AI-Enabled Camera Network, Data Shows

Flock's automatic license plate reader (ALPR) cameras are in more than 5,000 communities around the U.S. Local police are doing lookups in the nationwide system for ICE.

^{Jason Koebler (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-08-12 14:01:21

You're Invited: 404 Media's Second Anniversary Party and LIVE PODCAST!

​We've survived and thrived for two years and are ready to celebrate with you, the ones who made it possible!

Come have a cocktail or locally-brewed beer on us at vertical farm and brew lab farm.one. We'll also record a live podcast with the whole 404 crew, for the first time in person together since... well, two years ago!

GET TICKETS HERE

Doors open at 6, programming begins at 6:45, good hangs to continue after. Open bar (tip your bartenders), and pizza will be available for purchase on-site if you're hungry.

​​Free admission for 404 Media subscribers at the supporter level. Sign up or check your subscription here. Once you're a supporter, scroll to the bottom of this post for the code to enter at checkout on the Luma page. Or buy tix for yourself or a friend to make sure you have a spot on the list.

​We'll also have some merch on hand that'll be discounted for IRL purchases.

If getting into the coolest party of the summer isn't enticing enough, you'll be supporting the impact of our journalism, which so far this year has included:

• Nvidia was sued after we revealed the company scraped YouTube and other sites en masse to build its own AI systems.
• GeoSpy, an AI tool that let anyone geolocate photos in seconds and whose users could include stalkers, dramatically restricted access after 404 Media published an investigation into it.
• Congress repeatedly grilled Apple and Meta over their association with nonconsensual nudify and deepfake apps after we exposed the connections.
• A public library ebook service said it was going to cull AI slop after we found low quality books were flooding libraries.
• Congress just launched an investigation into automatic license plate reader company Flock; After 404 Media’s investigations this year, Flock removed a number of states from its national lookup tool. In July, Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon announced an agreement by Flock to block any out-of-state police searches related to abortion or immigration.

Our earlier work has shut down surveillance companies and triggered hundreds of millions of dollars worth of fines too. Our paying subscribers are the engine that powers this impactful journalism. Every subscription, monthly or annual, makes a real difference and makes it possible to do our work.

​Thank you to our friends at DeleteMe for making this celebration possible.

Fine print: Tickets are required for entry, including for subscribers. 21+ only. Seating for the podcast is open but limited and includes standing room; a ticket doesn't guarantee a seat but let staff onsite know if you require one. Photos will be taken at the event. Venue reserves the right to refuse entry. Good vibes only, see you soon!

Code for subscribers is below the images.

Scenes from our panel at SXSW 2025, our DIY hackerspace party in LA on July 30, and our first anniversary party last year.

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You're Invited: 404 Media's Second Anniversary Party and LIVE PODCAST!

^{Samantha Cole (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-08-09 13:00:55

Billions of Sea Stars Mysteriously Turned to Goo. Now We Know Why.

Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that gave me hope, sent me back in time, and dragged me onto the dance-floor.

First, what’s your favorite cockatoo dance move? To be fully informed in your response, you will need to review the latest literature on innovations in avian choreography. Then: salvation for sea stars, a tooth extraction you’ll actually like, ancient vortex planets, and what to expect when you’re an expecting cockroach.

Everybody do the cockatoo

Lubke, Natasha et al. “Dance behaviour in cockatoos: Implications for cognitive processes and welfare.” PLOS One.

If you play your cards right as a scientist, you can spend all day watching cockatoos dance online and IRL. That’s what one team of researchers figured out, according to a new study that identified 17 cockatoo dance moves previously unknown to science.

“Anecdotally, parrots (Psittaciformes) have been reported to show ‘dancing’ behaviour to music in captivity which has been supported by studies on a few individuals,” said researchers led by Natasha Lubke of Charles Sturt University. “However, to date it remains unclear why parrots show dance behavior in response to music in captivity when birds are not courting or in the absence of any potential sexual partner.” Cockatoos, by the way, are a type of parrot.

It’s worth pursuing this mystery in part because parrots are popular pets and zoo attractions that require environmental enrichment for their welfare while in captivity. Listening to music and dancing could provide much-needed stimulation for these smart, social animals.

To that end, the authors watched dozens of videos of cockatoos on YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram, with search terms like “birds dancing Elvis,” “bird dancing to rap music” and “bird dancing to rock music.” They also played music and podcasts to a group of captive birds—two sulphur crested cockatoos (Cacatua galerita), two Major Mitchell cockatoos (Lophochroa leadbeateri) and two galahs (Eolophus roseicapilla)—housed at Wagga Wagga Zoo in Australia.
Illustration of the 10 most common recorded dance movements. Ethogram descriptors based on Keehn et al. [3] and illustrations by Zenna Lugosi. Image: Lubke et al., 2025, PLOS One, CC-BY 4.0 (creativecommons.org/licenses/b…)
The results expanded the existing database of cockatoo dance moves from classics like headbang, foot-lift, and body roll to include new-wave choreography like jump turn, downward walk, and fluff (wherein “feathers are fluffed” in a “fluffing event” according to the study).

All the birds that the team studied onsite at the zoo also danced at least once to audio playback of the song “The Nights” by Avicii. They even danced when music was not playing, bopping around to silence or to tips from the financial podcast “She’s on the Money.”

“Dance behaviour is perhaps a more common behaviour in cockatoos than previously thought,” the team concluded. “Further research is required to determine the motivational basis for this behaviour in captivity.”

It will be interesting to see what forthcoming studies reveal, but my own prediction is that the motivational basis falls under Lady Gaga’s edict to “Just Dance.”

In other news…

Solving the mystery of what’s killing billions of sea stars

Prentice, Melanie et al. “Vibrio pectenicida strain FHCF-3 is a causative agent of sea star wasting disease.” Nature Ecology and Evolution.

Over the past decade, a devastating illness has killed off billions of sea stars in what is the largest marine epidemic on record. Scientists have finally identified the culprit that causes sea star wasting disease (SSWD) as the bacteria Vibrio pectenicida, which is from the same family that causes cholera in humans (Vibrio cholerae).

Sea stars infected with SSWD form lesions and rapidly disintegrate into goo in mass mortality events that have upended ecosystems on the Pacific coast from Alaska to Mexico. The isolation of the agent involved in these grotesque die-offs will hopefully help restore these vital keystone species.
Hakai Institute research scientist Alyssa Gehman checks on an adult sunflower sea star in the US Geological Survey’s Marrowstone Marine Field Station in Washington State. Image: Kristina Blanchflower/Hakai Institute
“This discovery will enable recovery efforts for sea stars and the ecosystems affected by their decline,” said researchers led by Melanie Prentice of the Hakai Institute and the University of British Columbia.

Psst…you have some ancient atmosphere stuck in your teeth

Feng, Dingsu et al. “Mesozoic atmospheric CO2 concentrations reconstructed from dinosaur tooth enamel.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

For the first time, scientists have reconstructed atmospheres that existed more than 100 million years ago by studying the teeth of dinosaurs that breathed in this bygone air.

A team analyzed oxygen remnants preserved in the dental enamel of roughly two dozen dinosaur teeth including sauropods (such as Camarasaurus), theropods (including Tyrannosaurus), and the ornithischian Edmontosaurus (go Oilers). This data enabled them to infer carbon dioxide concentrations of around 1,200 parts per million (ppm) and 750 ppm in the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, respectively.

This is in line with other findings that have found wild swings in CO2 levels during the dinosaur age, likely due to volcanic activity. Earth’s current atmosphere is about 430 ppm, and is rapidly rising due to human-driven greenhouse gas emissions.
Skull with teeth of a Kaatedocus siberi found at Howe Ranch, Wyoming, USA. Image: © Sauriermuseum Aathal
“Fossil tooth enamel can thus serve as a robust time capsule for ancient air [oxygen] isotope compositions,” said researchers led by Dingsu Feng of the University of Göttingen. “This novel form of analysis can “provide insights into past atmospheric greenhouse gas content and global primary productivity.”

Vortex planets from the dawn of light

Eriksson, Linn E J et al. “Planets and planetesimals at cosmic dawn: Vortices as planetary nurseries.” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

The first planets ever born in the universe may have formed in vortices around ancient stars more than 13.6 billion years ago. These stars were made of light elements, such as hydrogen and helium, but each new generation forged an itty-bit of heavier elements in their bellies that could potentially provide basic planetary building blocks.

By running simulations of this early epoch, known as cosmic dawn, researchers led by Linn E.J. Eriksson of the American Museum of Natural History found that small rocky worlds, on the scale of Mercury or Mars, could coalesce from dust and pebbles trapped in so-called “vortices,” which are like cosmic eddies that form in disks around newborn stars.

As a consequence, this “suggests that vortices could trigger the formation of the first generation of planets and planetesimals in the universe,” the team said.

Congratulations to everyone who had “ancient vortex planets from cosmic dawn” on their bingo card this week.

Wash it all down with a glass of cockroach milk

Frigard, Ronja et al. “Daily activity rhythms, sleep and pregnancy are fundamentally related in the Pacific beetle mimic cockroach, Diploptera punctata.” Journal of Experimental Biology.

We began with cockatoos and we’ll close with cockroaches. Scientists have been bothering sleepy pregnant cockroaches, according to a new study on the Pacific beetle mimic cockroach, which is one of the few insects that produces milk and gives birth to live young.

“To our knowledge, no study has investigated the direct relationship between sleep and pregnancy in invertebrates, which leaves open the questions: do pregnant individuals follow similar sleep and activity patterns to their non-pregnant counterparts, and how important is sleep for successful pregnancy?” said researchers led by Ronja Frigard of the University of Cincinnati.
Biologists found that pregnant cockroaches need more sleep and those that are sleep-deprived have babies that require longer gestation to develop. Image: Andrew Higley
As it turns out, it’s very important! The team disrupted pregnant cockroaches by shaking their containers four times during their sleeping period for weeks on end. While the well-rested control group averaged 70 days for its gestation period, the sleep-deprived group took over 90 days to deliver their young. In addition, “when chronic sleep disturbance occurs, milk protein levels decline, decreasing nutrients available to the embryos during development,” the team concluded.

For those of us who have been woken up at night by the scuttling of cockroaches, this study is our revenge. Enjoy it while you can, because the smart money is on cockroaches outliving us all.

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

Dance behaviour in cockatoos: Implications for cognitive processes and welfare

Parrots (Aves, Psittaciformes) in captivity have been reported to show dance behaviour in response to music, which may involve complex cognitive processes including imitation, vocal learning and entrainment.

^{journals.plos.org}

404 Media

2025-08-08 17:03:14

Behind the Blog: Speculation, Distraction, and Smart Glasses

This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss Wikipedia's ethos and zooming in on a lot of pictures of cops' glasses.

EMANUEL: I’m going to keep it very short this week because I’m crunching on a feature, but I wanted to quickly discuss Wikipedia.

This week I wrote a story about a pretty in-the-weeds policy change Wikipedia’s community of volunteer editors adopted which will allow them to more quickly and easily delete articles that are obviously AI generated. One thought I’ve had in mind that didn’t make it into the last few stories I’ve written about Wikipedia, and one that several people shared on social media in response to this one, is that it’s funny how many of us remember teachers in school telling us that Wikipedia was not a good source of information.

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Behind the Blog: Speculation, Distraction, and Smart Glasses

This week, we discuss Wikipedia's ethos and zooming in on a lot of pictures of cops' glasses.

^{Samantha Cole (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-08-08 13:59:52

Congress Launches Investigation into Flock After 404 Media Reporting

Two members of Congress have launched a formal investigation into automatic license plate reader (ALPR) company Flock and demanded it turn over details of all searches of its national camera network concerning Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and abortions. The move comes after 404 Media revealed that local cops were performing lookups in Flock on behalf of ICE or for immigration enforcement, and that a Texas officer searched cameras nationwide looking for a woman who self-administered an abortion.

The congressional investigation is just the latest impact from those articles, which have resulted in a wave of similar coverage around the country and Flock making major changes to its platform. The letter announcing the investigation explicitly cites 404 Media’s articles.

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Congress Launches Investigation into Flock After 404 Media Reporting

Congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi's office said this was “a formal investigation into Flock Group Inc.

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-08-08 13:00:49

It Looks Like a School Vape Detector. A Teen Hacker Showed It Could Become an Audio Bug

This article was produced with support from WIRED.

A couple of years ago, a curious, then-16-year-old hacker named Reynaldo Vasquez-Garcia was on his laptop at his Portland-area high school, seeing what computer systems he could connect to via the Wifi—“using the school network as a lab,” as he puts it—when he spotted a handful of mysterious devices with the identifier “IPVideo Corporation.”

After a closer look and some googling, Garcia figured out that a company by that name was a subsidiary of Motorola, and the devices he’d found in his school seemed to be something called the Halo 3C, a “smart” smoke and vape detection gadget. “They look just like smoke detectors, but they have a whole bunch of features like sensors and stuff,” Garcia says.

As he read more, he was intrigued to learn that the Halo 3C goes beyond detecting smoke and vaping—including a distinct feature for discerning THC vaping in particular. It also has a microphone for listening out for “aggression,” gunshots, and keywords such as someone calling for help, a feature that to Vasquez-Garcia immediately raised concerns of more intrusive surveillance.

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It Looks Like a School Vape Detector. A Teen Hacker Showed It Could Become an Audio Bug

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404 Media

2025-08-07 15:17:12

More than 130,000 Claude, Grok, ChatGPT, and Other LLM Chats Readable on Archive.org

A researcher has found that more than 130,000 conversations with AI chatbots including Claude, Grok, ChatGPT, and others are discoverable on the Internet Archive, highlighting how peoples’ interactions with LLMs may be publicly archived if users are not careful with the sharing settings they may enable.

The news follows earlier findings that Google was indexing ChatGPT conversations that users had set to share, despite potentially not understanding that these chats were now viewable by anyone, and not just those they intended to share the chats with. OpenAI had also not taken steps to ensure these conversations could be indexed by Google.

“I obtained URLs for: Grok, Mistral, Qwen, Claude, and Copilot,” the researcher, who goes by the handle dead1nfluence, told 404 Media. They also found material related to ChatGPT, but said “OpenAI has had the ChatGPT[.]com/share links removed it seems.” Searching on the Internet Archive now for ChatGPT share links does not return any results, while Grok results, for example, are still available.

Dead1nfluence wrote a blog post about some of their findings on Sunday and shared the list of more than 130,000 archived LLM chat links with 404 Media. They also shared some of the contents of those chats that they had scraped. Dead1nfluence wrote that they found API keys and other exposed information that could be useful to a hacker.
playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2…
“While these providers do tell their users that the shared links are public to anyone, I think that most who have used this feature would not have expected that these links could be findable by anyone, and certainly not indexed and readily available for others to view,” dead1nfluence wrote in their blog post. “This could prove to be a very valuable data source for attackers and red teamers alike. With this, I can now search the dataset at any time for target companies to see if employees may have disclosed sensitive information by accident.”

404 Media verified some of dead1influence’s findings by discovering specific material they flagged in the dataset, then going to the still-public LLM link and checking the content.

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

Most of the companies whose AI tools are included in the dataset did not respond to a request for comment. Microsoft which owns Copilot acknowledged a request for comment but didn't provide a response in time for publication. A spokesperson for Anthrophic, which owns Claude, told 404 Media: “We give people control over sharing their Claude conversations publicly, and in keeping with our privacy principles, we do not share chat directories or sitemaps with search engines like Google. These shareable links are not guessable or discoverable unless people choose to publicize them themselves. When someone shares a conversation, they are making that content publicly accessible, and like other public web content, it may be archived by third-party services. In our review of the sample archived conversations shared with us, these were either manually requested to be indexed by a person with access to the link or submitted by independent archivist organizations who discovered the URLs after they were published elsewhere across the internet first.” 404 Media only shared a small sample of the Claude links with Anthrophic, not the entire list.

Fast Company first reported that Google was indexing some ChatGPT conversations on July 30. This was because of a sharing feature ChatGPT had that allowed users to send a link to a ChatGPT conversation to someone else. OpenAI disabled the sharing feature in response. OpenAI CISO Dane Stuckey said in a previous statement sent to 404 Media: “This was a short-lived experiment to help people discover useful conversations. This feature required users to opt-in, first by picking a chat to share, then by clicking a checkbox for it to be shared with search engines.”

A researcher who requested anonymity gave 404 Media access to a dataset of nearly 100,000 ChatGPT conversations indexed on Google. 404 Media found those included the alleged texts of non-disclosure agreements, discussions of confidential contracts, and people trying to use ChatGPT for relationship issues.

Others also found that the Internet Archive contained archived LLM chats.

The ChatGPT confession files

Digital Digging investigation: how your AI conversation could end your career

^{Henk van Ess (Digital Digging with Henk van Ess)}

404 Media

2025-08-06 20:35:58

ICE Is Buying Mobile Iris Scanning Tech for Its Deportation Arm

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is looking to buy iris scanning technology that its manufacturer says can identify known persons “in seconds from virtually anywhere,” according to newly published procurement documents.

Originally designed to be used by sheriff departments to identify inmates or other known persons, ICE is now likely buying the technology specifically for its Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) section, which focuses on deportations.

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ICE Is Buying Mobile Iris Scanning Tech for Its Deportation Arm

MORIS and I.R.I.S. was designed for Sheriff's Offices to identify known persons with their iris. Now ICE says it plans to buy the tech.

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}