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 the death of Mr. Deepfakes, introducing kids to the Manosphere, and working on big, difficult, high-brain-power scoops.
SAM: I’m gonna use my time to give a huge shoutout to Bellingcat, the CBC, and Danish publications Politiken and Tjekdet for this story, where they spent a ton of time and effort tracking down the guy behind Mr. Deepfakes. I don’t really know a better word to use to describe this investigation than ballsy—it takes serious nerves of steel to confront a guy at work and in his car about some vile shit he’s done online. I would be pretty nervous about his reaction, considering he’s spent years thinking he’s completely anonymous and untraceable, and now a reporter is dogging him in person. The way they conducted the investigation is also really impressive, using crypto payments, usernames across forums, and IP data along with a bunch of other data to track him down. He eventually slipped up, and so much of this kind of investigation is about patience. I have a lot of respect for that process. Go read it.
Ricardo Prada Vásquez, a Venezuelan man whose family says he was “disappeared” and who wasn’t included on a previously leaked government list of people sent to a notorious mega prison in El Salvador, was included on a private airline’s flight manifest to the country, according to hacked airline data obtained and analyzed by 404 Media.
That means a private charter flight company might have more accurate information on where people are being deported than the government, experts say, and raises questions about the process being used to deport people.
While the government initially declined to say where Prada had been sent before eventually admitting he was sent to El Salvador, the man was on a manifest for a March 15 flight held by GlobalX, one of ICE’s primary charter companies. The news also raises questions about whether other people whose families are unaware of their whereabouts may be in El Salvador too.
💡
Do you know the name of anyone else who has been deported but their whereabouts are unknown? 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 [email protected].
“There are so many levels at which this concerns me. One is they clearly did not take enough care in this to even make sure they had the right lists of who they were removing, and who they were not sending to a prison that is a black hole in El Salvador,” Michelle Brané, executive director of Together and Free, a group that has been working with families of deported people, including Prada’s, told 404 Media. “They weren't even keeping accurate records of who they were sending there. What that says about how much due process or how much accuracy there is in the rest of the assessments of whether these people should be on those planes at all follows very closely behind that.”
On Wednesday, The Information reported that Meta is working on facial recognition for the company’s Ray-Ban glasses. This sort of technology—combining facial recognition with a camera feed—is something that big tech including Meta has been able to technically pull off, but has previously decided to not release. There are serious, inherent risks with the idea of anyone being able to instantly know the real identity of anyone who just happens to walk past their camera feed, be that in a pair of glasses or other sort of camera.
The move is an obvious about-face from Meta. It’s also interesting to me because Meta’s PR chewed my ass off when I dared to report in October that a pair of students took Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses and combined them with off-the-shelf facial recognition technology. That tool, which the students called I-XRAY, captured a person’s face, ran it through an easy to access facial recognition service called Pimeyes, then went a step further and pulled up information about the subject from across the web, including their home address and phone number.
When I contacted Meta for comment for that story, Dave Arnold, a spokesperson for the company, said in an email he had one question for me. “That Pimeyes facial recognition technology could be used with ANY camera, correct? In other words, this isn't something that only is possible because of Meta Ray-Bans? If so, I think that's an important point to note in the piece,” he wrote.
Job hunting can be a dehumanizing, demoralizing experience even if you’re interacting with an empathetic recruiter on the other end. For the 1.7 million people slogging through long-term unemployment in the U.S., the process is grueling at best. Add to this the advent of AI-generated recruiter avatars that glitch out on you before you even speak to a real person at the company you’re trying to work for, and now you’re truly in hell.
This week, TikTok user @its_ken04, who goes by Ken, posted a recording she took of 25 seconds of the “interview” that’s now viral on TikTok. In the video, the avatar says “vertical bar pilates” 14 times in a row, occasionally tripping over the words or stuttering, while Ken stares at the screen unamused.
An AI avatar made to look and sound like the likeness of a man who was killed in a road rage incident addressed the court and the man who killed him: “To Gabriel Horcasitas, the man who shot me, it is a shame we encountered each other that day in those circumstances,” the AI avatar of Christopher Pelkey said. “In another life we probably could have been friends. I believe in forgiveness and a God who forgives. I still do.”
It was the first time the AI avatar of a victim—in this case, a dead man—has ever addressed a court, and it raises many questions about the use of this type of technology in future court proceedings.
The avatar was made by Pelkey’s sister, Stacey Wales. Wales tells 404 Media that her husband, Pelkey’s brother-in-law, recoiled when she told him about the idea. “He told me, ‘Stacey, you’re asking a lot.’”
Earlier this week TeleMessage, the company that creates modified versions of messaging apps like Signal and adds an archiving ability to them, made a video private on its YouTube channel that explained how its Signal message archiving tool worked, and how the company says it is able to copy messages securely. The hiding of the video came after 404 Media revealed that a hacker had targeted TeleMessage, which is used by the Trump administration, and managed to obtain the contents of some users’ messages and group chats.
404 Media made a transcript of what this video said and is now publishing it in order to preserve TeleMessage’s claims around the security and functioning of its Signal archiving product. The news comes after Senator Ron Wyden has demanded a Department of Justice investigation into the TeleMessage episode, including the national security risk the app poses. The letter demanding the investigation also points to TeleMessage’s marketing material which claims messages are protected with end-to-end encryption, a claim that both the hack and a subsequent technical analysis refute.
The video said TeleMessage’s app keeps “intact the Signal security and end-to-end encryption when communicating with other Signal users.” This is not true, judging by the fact the hacker was able to obtain plaintext Signal messages. The video also says “The only difference is the TeleMessage version captures all incoming and outgoing Signal messages for archiving purposes.”
Dora the Explorer, the cute Nickelodeon cartoon character, is teaching kids what it means to be “Sigma,” a slang term describing an extremely toxic male archetype which originates in the darkest corners of the so-called “manosphere.”
“Hola, grown-ups! Today I have a super cool word for you! Sigma,” a 3D rendered version of Dora says in a video uploaded to the official Dora the Explorer Instagram account yesterday. “‘Sigma’ is a word for someone who’s confident, independent, and does things their own way! Think of it as someone who’s a leader and a trendsetter. Let’s say your friend is doing their own thing, focusing on their goals, and not worrying about what others think. You can say, ‘you’re such a SIGMA!’”
This has become the Slop Presidency, and AI-generated images are the perfect artistic medium for the Trump presidency. They're impulsively created, grotesque, and low-effort. Trumpworld’s fascination with slop is the logical next step for a President that, in his first term, regularly retweeted random memes created by his army of supporters on Discord or The Donald, a subreddit that ultimately became a Reddit-clone website after it was banned. AI allows his team to create media that would never exist otherwise, a particularly useful tool for a President and administration that has a hostile relationship with reality.
Trump’s original fascination with AI slop began last summer, after he said legal Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were “eating the cats…they’re eating the pets” in his debate with Kamala Harris. The internet’s AI slop factories began spinning up images of Trump as cat-and-dog savior. Since then, Trump and the administration have occasionally shared or reposted AI slop. In his first week in office, Trump shared an AI-generated “GM” car image that was promoting $TRUMP coin. “What a beautiful car. Congrats to GM!,” he posted.
We start this week's episode with our massive story on TeleMessage, the Signal clone the Trump administration uses to archive messages which was hacked. We have more detail than anyone else on that story. After the break, Jason tells us about another hack, this time GlobalX Air, one of the airlines used by ICE for deportation flights. In the subscribers-only section, Sam and Emanuel tell us about the shut down of Mr. Deepfakes, and what the lasting legacy of the site will be.
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.
On Tuesday a Senator demanded the Department of Justice investigate “the serious threat to U.S. national security” posed by TeleMessage, a company that makes a Signal clone used by the Trump administration which 404 Media revealed was hacked on Sunday, with the hacker obtaining the content of some users’ messages and group chats.
The news is the latest piece of fallout from the TeleMessage hack and the Trump administration’s use of Signal, or insecure modified versions, more broadly. On Monday NBC News reported that another hacker had targeted the same company, and TeleMessage suspended service in response to the breaches.
“Communications from several federal agencies, including the most senior national security officials, have been recklessly entrusted to TeleMessage, a foreign company that purports to offer agencies a secure tool to archive messages sent using Signal, the popular secure messaging app,” Senator Ron Wyden’s letter reads. The Washington Post first reported the existence of the letter.
“It would be hard to imagine a less secure way for U.S. government agencies to retain employee messages than decrypting, copying to, and processing those messages on a poorly secured server operated by a foreign company,” the letter adds. TeleMessage is an Israeli company that was acquired by Portland, Oregon company Smarsh in 2024.
Elon Musk’s Grok, an AI chatbot that people can interact with via X, is being used to undress photos women are posting to the social media platform, as first flagged t0 404 Media by Kolina Koltai, a researcher and trainer at Bellingcat. All a user has to do is reply to an image someone has posted to X with a request to Grok to “remove her clothes.” Grok will then reply in-thread with an image of the woman wearing a bikini or lingerie. Sometimes Grok will reply with a link that will send users to a Grok chat where the image will be generated.
A 25-year old hacker has agreed to plead guilty to hacking the Disney Corporation by compromising a tool for AI-generating art. According to a Department of Justice press release, the hacker, Ryan Mitchell Kramer—aka “NullBulge”— will admit to two felony charges related to the offense.
As we reported last year, NullBulge specifically targeted AI users by compromising ComfyUI, a very popular graphical user interface for the open-weights AI image generator Stable Diffusion that’s distributed on Github. The extension contained a trojan horse that allowed Kramer to access the computer of whoever used it, including one Disney employee.
By leveraging access to that employee’s computer, Kramer was able to access the company’s Slack and download 1.1 terabytes of data. Kramer pinged the employee in July of 2024 and, using the alias NullBulge, threatened to leak all the personal information in the data he obtained from Disney. The employee didn’t respond and Kramer followed through with the threat and published the information.
Hackers have targeted GlobalX Air, one of the main airlines the Trump administration is using as part of its deportation efforts, and stolen what they say are flight records and passenger manifests of all of its flights, including those for deportation, 404 Media has learned.
The data, which the hackers contacted 404 Media and other journalists about unprompted, could provide granular insight into who exactly has been deported on GlobalX flights, when, and to where, with GlobalX being the charter company that facilitated the deportation of hundreds of Venezuelans to El Salvador.
“Anonymous has decided to enforce the Judge's order since you and your sycophant staff ignore lawful orders that go against your fascist plans,” a defacement message posted to GlobalX’s website reads. Anonymous, well-known for its use of the Guy Fawkes mask, is an umbrella some hackers operate under when performing what they see as hacktivism.
💡
Do you know anything else about this incident? We would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message Joseph securely on Signal at joseph.404 or send an email to [email protected].You can Signal Jason at jason.404 or email [email protected].
The hacker says the data includes flight records and passenger lists. The hacker sent 404 Media a copy of the data, which is sorted into folders dated everyday from January 19 through May 1.
404 Media cross-checked known information about ICE deportation flights that come from official and confirmable sources with information contained on the flight manifests and flight details obtained by the hacker. Information about Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s flight is in the hacked data.
A Telegram bot that does nothing but AI generate nonconsensual short videos of men ejaculating on women’s faces has more than 150,000 monthly active users.
Only after this article was first published did Telegram reply to my request for comment, ask for the bot's name, and remove it.
Telegram bots that produce nonconsensual pornography are common, but this particular bot is notable for amassing 115,016 users in just a few weeks and for making the bleeding edge of AI video generation cheap and easy to access for nefarious means. The bot’s popularity also shows how quickly “open” AI tools released by tech giants are being adopted to cause harm.
Mr. Deepfakes, the go-to site for nonconsensual deepfake porn, says it’s shutting down and not coming back because it lost a service provider and data.
“A critical service provider has terminated service permanently. Data loss has made it impossible to continue operation,” a notice that appears when visitors go to the site now says. The site's forums and videos are no longer available at the time of writing. “We will not be relaunching. Any website claiming this is fake. This domain will eventually expire and we are not responsible for future use. This message will be removed around one week.”
We don’t know why Mr. Deepfakes was shut down, which service it was cut from, and why. The person behind the site is also still anonymous, though in January the German newspaper Der Spiegel said it was able to identify them as a 36-year-old in Toronto who has been working at a hospital for several years.
A hacker has breached and stolen customer data from TeleMessage, an obscure Israeli company that sells modified versions of Signal and other messaging apps to the U.S. government to archive messages, 404 Media has learned. The data stolen by the hacker contains the contents of some direct messages and group chats sent using its Signal clone, as well as modified versions of WhatsApp, Telegram, and WeChat. TeleMessage was recently the center of a wave of media coverage after Mike Waltz accidentally revealed he used the tool in a cabinet meeting with President Trump.
The hack shows that an app gathering messages of the highest ranking officials in the government—Waltz’s chats on the app include recipients that appear to be Marco Rubio, Tulsi Gabbard, and JD Vance—contained serious vulnerabilities that allowed a hacker to trivially access the archived chats of some people who used the same tool. The hacker has not obtained the messages of cabinet members, Waltz, and people he spoke to, but the hack shows that the archived chat logs are not end-to-end encrypted between the modified version of the messaging app and the ultimate archive destination controlled by the TeleMessage customer.
Data related to Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the cryptocurrency giant Coinbase, and other financial institutions are included in the hacked material, according to screenshots of messages and backend systems obtained by 404 Media.
The news is so often dominated by big egos and noxious personalities, so I’m genuinely excited to lead the column with this chill lass who just seems like a good hang! What’s her secret? She’s not a human being. That goes a long way these days.
Next, researchers have once again used the power of the scientific method and institutional funding to…make dinner. And speaking of dinner, bust out the fava beans because I’m back on the cannibalism beat. This time, it’s larval cannibalism, a delightfully grotesque subcategory of fellow flesh consumption. Last, some body art for some very tiny bodies.
Can’t stop the beat, the beat goes on, back up to that beat. Humans simply cannot resist rolling with the rhythm. But as it turns out, there’s another groover in our midst. Put your hands (or flippers) together for Ronan the sea lion, a teen marine queen that bobs her head to tempos with incredible accuracy, according to a new study.
Ronan, a California sea lion (Zalophus californianus), was born in the wild in 2008. But she repeatedly stranded herself on land by the time she was one, as if she wasn’t cut out for the ocean. After she ended up on a highway in San Luis Obispo County, she was adopted by researchers who study pinnipeds (the family that contains sea lions, seals, and walruses) at the Long Marine Laboratory in Santa Cruz.
Peter Cook, a researcher at the University of California, Santa Cruz, has worked with Ronan since her arrival and recognized her keen sense of rhythm. Ronan’s penchant for “biomusicality” first made waves in 2013 when Cook’s team declared her the first non-human animal to demonstrate “rhythmic entrainment,” or the ability to move with a beat. Back then, she was apparently really into “Boogie Wonderland” by Earth Wind & Fire, an enduring testament to the transcendent power of disco-funk.
This week, Cook and his colleagues presented new insights into her intriguing talent for tempo, which surpasses humans in many cases.
“Most laboratory evidence of beat keeping in non-human vertebrates comes from psittacines [parrots] which tend not to show the same degree of consistency and precision as do humans, and from other primates, which seem to have great difficulty with lagless beat keeping,” said Cook’s team. “The notable exception is Ronan the sea lion, who was operantly conditioned to entrain a continuous head bob movement with metronomic sounds, and then demonstrated transfer of this behavior to novel acoustic tempos and wholly novel stimuli, including music.”
“Ronan’s unprecedented beat keeping behavior was both consistent and relatively precise; there are no empirical data from a non-human mammal or bird that come close in terms of precision and consistency,” the researchers continued, before raising the question: “Would Ronan’s capability for beat keeping rival that of typical humans?”
To find out, Cook and his colleagues enlisted ten human participants aged 18 to 23 years of age “who self-reported as non-musicians with minimal formal exposure and training in music and dance.” All participants (hominid and pinniped) listened to snare drums at a tempo of 112, 120, and 128 beats per minute; Ronan performed her bob-head groove, while the humans were instructed to move a hand to the rhythm.
The upshot: Ronan’s still got it, baby. “This sea lion’s sensorimotor synchronization was precise, consistent, and indistinguishable from or superior to that of typical adults,” the team concluded. “These findings challenge claims of unique neurobiological adaptations for beat keeping in humans.”
First off, I demand a remake of Whiplash starring Ronan instead of Miles Teller. But more importantly, I must highlight the team’s lovely coda on the experiment: “When the test session was complete, human participants were thanked and given further details on the nature of the study” while “Ronan received a toy filled with fish and ice.”
These are both great outcomes: The humans discovering that they were competing against a sea lion and Ronan receiving a cool treat. A lot of studies don’t have happy endings, so let’s cherish this vision of Beatmaster Ronan winding down from a well-compensated gig.
Scientists are people too, with bellies that rumble and taste-buds that yearn for excitement. That might explain the origins of a new study that invests prodigious brainpower and institutional resources into the best recipe for pasta alla Cacio e pepe, a traditional Italian dish made from simple ingredients: Pasta, pepper, and pecorino.
“On several occasions, pasta has been a source of inspiration for physicists,” said researchers led by Giacomo Bartolucci of the University of Barcelona. “The observation that spaghetti always breaks up into three or more fragments, but never in two halves, puzzled even Richard Feynman himself” and “analogies with pasta shapes have proved useful in different physics fields, from polymer rings to neutron stars.”
This is a fantastic professional justification to make some pasta, plus it adds more grist to the theory that the universe is made of noodles (aka pastafarianism). The study is also a fun read, filled with flourishes about a perilous “Mozzarella Phase” in the cooking process as well as sentences like: “A potential future direction could be to better understand the starch-dependent morphology of the cheese clumps.”
That’s basically a ready-made PhD thesis for anyone who aspires to join the vibrant subfield of cheese clumps. And while the researchers present laboratorial techniques to “achieve the perfect Cacio e pepe” they wisely acknowledge that “a true Italian grandmother or a skilled home chef from Rome would never need a scientific recipe for Cacio e pepe, relying instead on instinct and years of experience.” As always, Nonna knows best.
Parasitic wasps are so creepy that they gave Charles Darwin a crisis of faith. “I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae,” a family of parasitoid wasps, “with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars,” he wrote in a 1860 letter to Asa Gray.
Well, Charlie D, it’s even worse than you even imagined. Scientists have now discovered that the parasitic wasp Cotesia vestalis not only infests the larval caterpillar form of the diamondback moth (Plutella xylostella), it also encourages their hosts to fight to the death and feast on their kin when starved.
“To test whether aggressive behavior differed between unparasitized hosts and hosts parasitized by C. vestalis , we used a one-on-one aggression assay under starvation conditions that resulted in one larva cannibalizing the other,” said researchers led by Zhiwei Wu of Zhejiang University. “Strikingly, parasitized larvae exhibited higher attack (biting) frequencies than unparasitized larvae.”
“We also show that a CvBV gene that is transferred to parasitized hosts elevates host aggression by increasing octopamine (OA) levels,” the team said. “Our results show how a parasite promotes its own survival under starvation conditions by manipulating the behavior of its host.”
In other words, the wasps manipulate the caterpillars to be their mech suits and mess halls. When the caterpillars starve, the wasps give them a genetic cue to cut loose and eat their brethren, upping the odds of survival. From the POV of the very hungry caterpillars, this is a benefit in the short term, as they might snag some grub (even if it is a sibling). On the other hand, they are still hosting a wasp parasite. You win some, you lose some.
Amazingly, this isn’t the only story about larval cannibalism this week—the same issue of this journal also published a study about toad tadpoles that were observed over several days in laboratory containers. The experiment inspired this fantastic sentence: “Instances in which tadpoles disappeared from containers overnight were considered cannibalism events.” It makes me picture a tadpole shrugging at the absence of its room-mates in the morning, then letting out a little tadpole belch.
In short, Darwin was right. Baby toads and baby moths are cannibalizing each other, sometimes at the behest of baby wasps. There is no benevolent God. Tell the conclave that it’s time, at last, to embrace Pope Baby Cannibal.
I normally only feature studies published within the past calendar week in this column. But the internet is currently haunted by a study from March 2025—a distant hazy era—which refuses to fade away. I’m talking about tattooed tardigrades. Water bears with watermarks. Microbes are getting inked. Has science gone too far? Yes, it has. Behold:
“Here, we present ice lithography for direct fabrication of micro/nanoscale patterns on the surfaces of tardigrades in their cryptobiotic state,” said researchers led by Zhirong Yang of Westlake University. “Remarkably, upon rehydration the tardigrades revive, retaining the patterns on their surfaces…These patterns remain stable even after stretching, solvent immersion, rinsing, and drying.”
The tattoos display patterns of dots and lines as narrow as 72 nanometers, which is smaller than most viruses. These particular tats don’t convey a specific meaning, but perhaps future iterations of the method will get more creative. After all, given their virtually indestructible nature, tardigrades are already a contender for most badass species on Earth. A classic skull-and-bones tat would suit them.
U.S. Central Command, the part of the Pentagon that oversees its wars in the Middle East, denies that the United States military bombed a target in Yemen based on posts on X from an anonymous open source intelligence account which identified it as a Houthi base before the bombing and apologized for their posts after local news reports said civilians died in the bombing.
A defense official declined to say whether it was the U.S. that bombed the target, but said that the military does not use information posted by open-source intelligence accounts on social media to select targets. The defense official said CENTCOM uses detailed and comprehensive intelligence to conduct strikes against the Houthis. It’s common for the U.S. to kill civilians in airstrikes, and it has done so several times in Yemen. On Monday, for example, Reuters reported it killed dozens of people when it combed a detention center for African migrants.
The gathering and posting of open source intelligence about war zones on X and other social media platforms has become a popular, and lucrative, pastime. In the oceans of OSINT accounts on X there are people who know what they are doing, and then there are countless frauds and hundreds of amateurs.
Last week, a small OSINT account on X apologized for incorrectly identifying a quarry in Yemen as an underground base after a U.S. airstrike blew it up and killed eight people.
The account VleckieHond retweeted another OSINT account in early April with pictures of what both suggested was an underground Houthi base. Vleckie noted the area's exact coordinates. “Last one Northwest of Sana’a,” it said.On April 28, a U.S. strike hit the region VleckieHond posted. According to local news reports, the U.S. attack hit houses near a quarry. Vleckie and reporters on the ground in Yemen said there had never been an underground base there, and Vleckie apologized on X after the strike.
Allright, time for me to go through the mud. Based on satellite imagery I'd marked this quarry as an underground base, and tweeted is out as such. I'm fairly certain Centcom doesn't take their targeting data from Twitter, but this still is a very severe mistake. https://t.co/Ze9hFNj4kopic.twitter.com/cRgnXDx2KK
“Allright, time for me to go through the mud,” the person running the Vleckie account wrote. “I should have never posted it. The fact that I took in from someone else who had posted it is not an excuse.”Vleckie then shared receipts of two donations they made—one to Doctors Without Borders and the other to the Yemen Data Project—for 500 euros. “No more posting about 'possible' bases. Look for more concrete signs of these bases, most notably spoil heaps, present at even smaller bases, but not really here.”
Vleckie posting this started a news cycle, or at least a lot of discussion on X, about whether the Pentagon was using information from random OSINT accounts on social media to help identify targets. There was no evidence that this was the case, besides the coincidence of the area Vleckie tweeted about having been bombed, and their apology, which of course does not mean that they had anything to do with the strike. It’s also worth noting that Vleckie’s apology had the effect of raising their profile in the OSINT world even though there is absolutely no evidence that the military bombed this target because of their tweet and it’s somewhat ludicrous to imagine that the Pentagon is picking targets based on the tweets of small anonymous Twitter accounts.
VleckieHond’s analysis has appeared in CTC Sentinel, a West Point published magazine. Journalist Michael Knights cited VleckieHond’s work in an April 2024 issue of CTC Sentinel that used OSINT to detail the Houthi war effort.
The work of one Pentagon affiliated analyst isn’t confirmation that America’s military machine is scanning social media for targets. “I'm fairly certain Centcom doesn't take their targeting data from Twitter, but this still is a very severe mistake,” VleckieHond said in its apology post on X. The account didn’t respond to 404 Media’s request for a comment.
Critics online and in the the mediapointed to Knights’ citation of Vleckie’s work in a CTC Sentinel as possible proof that the Pentagon used the account’s work to pick targets, which is largely just idle speculation.
The VleckieHond situation points to the problems in the OSINT community broadly and on X specifically. “It’s been something of a steady decline, really,” Eliot Higgins, the founder of the investigative journalism firm Bellingcat, which helped popularize the use of OSINT on Twitter and more broadly for journalism, told 404 Media. Bellingcat’s success in using open source intelligence, video footage, social media posts, satellite imagery, and maps to do groundbreaking journalistic work has spawned an endless number of copycats and OSINT accounts, many of which do good work but many of which do not.
“The early days in the era of the Arab Spring and on through Syria and MH17 were very community minded and cautious,” Higgins said. “It felt like something new and yet also important being constructed. Then the Trump years ushered in this flood of chaos and conspiracism filling the room—now suddenly everyone with a Telegram screenshot was in the analyst’s seat.”
There is a lot of AI-generated slop and outright lies on X right now, especially in the OSINT space. “Musk coming in and taking over X exacerbated it,” Higgins said. “We've focused on moving our community onto other spaces, so there's at least some healthy spaces for collaborative work.”
Calibre Obscura, a well-known open source account that focuses on weapons, told 404 Media that the legitimate OSINT field itself is still healthy, even if X has become a cesspool. “It has gotten worse, but not uniquely,” it said. “It’s just more slop and propaganda like everything else.”
But the problem with Vleckie isn’t that the account is posting slop or lying. They’re an amateur sleuth in a field where the opinions of informed amateurs are taken seriously. At least seriously enough to end up in a Pentagon funded magazine. Vleckie’s X profile bio says “Yemen things, learning as I post, Ceasefire now.”
And, indeed, Vleckie has spun the underground base mistake as a learning opportunity.
“So now to improve and learn from this: No more posting about 'possible' bases. Look for more concrete signs of these bases, most notably spoil heaps, present at even smaller bases, but not really here,” it said in a long thread about how it will improve its processes.
“There should be rules, but they’re not really universal,” Higgins said. “The good practitioners also tend to adhere to a pretty straightforward set of principles, verify before you share; be transparent about your methods; properly credit others; do no harm (particularly when it comes to people in conflict zones). You also deign not to speculate beyond the evidence. If it’s not confirmed, don’t say it. In short, approach open source investigation as you would investigative journalism. If you wouldn’t send it from an office where you have to sign your name to the work, maybe don’t launch it into the world from an anonymous secret account.”
Higgins began his career as an anonymous account posting under the name Brown Moses about the Syrian Civil War. As his profile rose, he dropped the pseudonym. “It’s a double-edged sword,” he said. “Anonymity can matter a lot, particularly for those in hazardous locales or under repressive regimes. But it also provides cover for bad actors: people who game data, push propaganda, or chase clout with absolutely no accountability. If you’re anonymous and responsible, well and good—but if you’re building a big security following, shaping narratives and making claims that affect the lay public’s technical literacy, then you owe it. You can’t say ‘I’m just some guy’ and amass views and attention. Where there’s reach, there’s responsibility, and a lot of that responsibility is being shirked right now.”
In Vleckie’s apology thread, they promised to raise its standard of proof. “I want information on this page to be reliable,” they said. “I sincerely apologize for this error in my judgement, and it will never be my intention to spread false information here or elsewhere.”
All that said, the military has its own intelligence, and is not looking at Twitter to decide what to bomb.
The competition is fierce, but no one can paint quite as vivid a picture of the future technofeudalist dystopia the Trump administration is trying to build as Howard Lutnick, the Secretary of Commerce, of “the army of millions and millions of people screwing in little, little screws to make iPhones, that kind of thing is going to come to America” fame.
Lutnick filled in some blanks of the expanded MAGA dystopic universe on CNBC this week, when he said “these are really good paying jobs, they start at $70s, $80s, $90,000 [a year]. These are tradecraft. It’s time to train people not to do the jobs of the past, but to do the great jobs of the future. This is the new model, where you work in these kinds of plants for the rest of your life, and your kids work here, and your grandkids work here.”
Lutnick: "It's time to train people not to do the jobs of the past, but to do the great jobs of the future. This is the new model where you work in these kinds of plants for the rest of your life and your kids work here and your grandkids work here. We let the auto plants go overseas."
The administration’s new fantasy—the apparent boon Trump’s tariffs will bring—is a future in which you will work at the factory until you die, and your children will work at the same factory until they die, and your children’s children will work at the factory until they die. You will all make mid-to-high five figures; there is no pitch for or thought of upward mobility, of working in a factory to fund your children’s education so that they might one day manage or own the factory (or do something else entirely!) Lutnick said that the thousands of Americans who work in car factories now are “trained to care of robotic arms, they’re trained to keep the air conditioner working.”
Left unsaid and totally unexamined is who, in the long term, will make the basic scientific discoveries or invent the technologies and products of the future that will keep the United States an economic superpower; the administration is firing the scientists, defunding and threatening universities, trying to abolish the Department of Education. The hope literally appears to be that Elon Musk’s AI will invent new things for us and will replace all of the knowledge work and expertise that this administration has already inexplicably destroyed.
There is nothing wrong with working at a factory and there is nothing wrong with investing in American manufacturing or creating programs that incentivize it. We have long needed to invest in community colleges, technical colleges, and vocational schools to do job training and to offer alternative paths for people who can’t or don’t want to go to college. But “factory worker” is the only job that anyone in this administration can imagine. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Tucker Carlson that the fired government workers, many of whom are coders, scientists, medical professionals, etc, will also become factory workers: “We are shedding excess labor in the federal government … that will give us the labor that we need for the new manufacturing,” he said.
But even this administration realizes that eventually, robots will do those jobs. And so the only jobs that follow them are air conditioning guy for the automated factory and guy who helps the robot arm move. Lutnick himself seems to have no idea how many jobs there will be or what they will be, whether they will be “automated,” or what.
“We are inventing everything in the world, but we’re letting everyone else build it. We invent the iPhone, which is awesome,” he said on Newsmax. “Why do we let everyone else build it? Why can’t we build it here? The key is AI and automation have made that in reach. I understand why you need zillions of other people to work on it, but it’s time now, can automation build that plant here? Where we can employ, we don’t need millions of Americans to do it, we need hundreds of thousands of Americans to work in those factories, and I think we’re going to create 5 million great tradecraft jobs in America.”
your child will toil valiantly in the factory. it will be masculine. it will restore our national character. it will make america great again. oh my child? my child will run a lucrative rightwing podcast
Stephen Miller says the country will eliminate the Department of Education and that, “children will be taught to love America. Children will be taught to be patriots.” Perhaps they will go to the taxpayer-funded religious charter schools?
It is possible to imagine a grand back-to-America manufacturing strategy that does not require inflicting pain and economic suffering on the American people and on the rest of the world. It is possible and good to bring manufacturing jobs back to America, and to rebuild an upwardly-mobile middle class by focusing on technical training, local ownership, and reskilling through incentives and strategic, carefully-considered tariffs that are rolled out over time. But that is not what is being pursued, and it's not what is being done. What is being pursued is a self-inflicted emergency designed to purge immigrants, scientists, and higher education from American life and the American economy in favor of an economy that may have worked many decades ago but will not work now.
The only upshot of any of this is that these policies are wildly unpopular, and that this future is exceedingly unlikely to actually come to pass.
But here’s what this future, being pitched by the plain language and plain actions of this administration, is. It is very sad and very small. It lacks imagination. It lacks dynamism. Men will not be allowed in women’s spaces and women will not be allowed in men’s spaces. Women will be tradwives and will be paid $5,000 have babies. Those babies will not have parents who can afford to buy them 30 dolls, they will have two dolls instead, and they will like it. The boys will not have any dolls, though. The rich and powerful will stockpile supplies because they know the impacts of their policies. You will not buy breakfast at McDonald’s as a treat. Your friends will be AI chatbots. Your therapist will be a chatbot. You will pay massive tariffs to try food from other countries. You will work in the factory. You will not own the factory. They will own the factory. You will die at the factory. Your kids will learn about AI at the technical college, and then they will work in the factory. Your kids will not own the factory. Their kids will own the factory. Their kids will go on Fox News and tell you that they have created good jobs, patriotic jobs. American jobs, not Chinese jobs. Jobs that your kids and their kids and their kids' kids can work at until they die. Your kids will repair the air conditioning. Your kids will screw in the screws. Your children's children will move the robot arms, like their father and grandfather did before them.
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 eyebrow-raising apps, more media mess, and lovingly gazing at AI slop.
JASON: I was planning on BTBing about the Reddit AI experiment, but today is my birthday and my 404 Media colleagues got me an incredibly thoughtful gift: A smart picture frame preloaded with a picture of the three of them (and not me) from our anniversary party that says “fuck you bitch” and dozens of images of AI slop. I love it, it brought a tear to my eye. Many of the images are NSFL just as I’d want them to be.
One of the interesting things about this picture frame is that it essentially lets the people who bought it drop new pictures onto it, which means, as Emanuel pointed out, “it’s more a present for us than for you.”
