Welcome back to the Abstract! 

Beware: This week’s offerings are not for the faint of heart. There will be blood. There will be gore. There will be death. There will be…honeydew? 

First stop is a gladiator cemetery, which has got to be one of the most haunted varieties of burial ground. There is very bad mojo at a gladiator cemetery! This one is no exception. Next, meet a very hungry caterpillar with a very grotesque fashion sense and behold a hell ant from the age of dinosaurs. 

If you make it through a cavalcade of horrors, you will be rewarded with some chimp sangria. Go forth and good luck! 

Are You Not Entertained? (Personally, I Am Not)

Thompson, T.J.U. et al. “Unique osteological evidence for human-animal gladiatorial combat in Roman Britain.” PLOS ONE.

Some 1,700 years ago, a young man of about 30 was publicly decapitated and fed to a lion during a gladiatorial event. That’s the speculative conclusion of a new study about the skeleton of this man, known as Individual 6DT19, which presents “the first physical evidence for human-animal gladiatorial combat from the Roman period seen anywhere in Europe.”

Gladiators have been a cultural obsession for thousands of years because, let’s be real, people are sickos. Spectators across the Roman Empire packed arenas to watch gladiators kill each other, or kill dangerous animals, or be killed by dangerous animals. You get the idea: Blood spilling on the arena floor and blood pumping in the stands. Sicko stuff.

Driffield Terrace, a Roman site near the English city of York, is packed with the bones of dead men that bear obvious signs of blunt force trauma, hinting that it might be a gladiator cemetery. Many of the bodies at Driffield Terrace are also decapitated, with the heads placed at the feet for burial. Individual 6DT19, who lived between 200 and 300 CE, is unusual in that his head, while still chopped off, was placed in the correct anatomical position. But what really sets him apart is his punctured pelvis, which looks like it was used as a chew toy. 

Now, researchers have re-examined the holes on this man’s pelvic bone with a 3D-scanner and concluded that they were probably made by a big cat with a taste for human flesh.

“It is proposed, based on the evidence from the archaeological, medical and forensic evidence, that the bite marks on 6DT19 derive from a large felid, such as a lion,” said researchers led by Tim Thompson of Maynooth University. “The location solely on the pelvis suggests that they were not part of an attack per se, but rather the result of scavenging at around the time of death. The decapitation of this individual was likely either to put him out of his misery at the point of death, or for the sake of conforming to customary practice.” 

In other words, this guy might have got off lucky; he was beheaded before he was thrown to the lions. Others were not so fortunate, as animals in these gladiatorial shows were used “as the agents of spectacular mutilation and execution of criminals, captives from warfare and other perceived deviants, including Christians, who were also sometimes forced to participate in such events, known as ‘damnatio ad bestias’,” the team said. “These would sometimes include the re-enactment of mythical narratives as executions.”

Blech, just evil stuff, though you can’t accuse it of lacking creativity. And though it’s unclear why 6DT19 was condemned to a public death, the new study does expose a fleeting glimpse of these iconic and brutal spectacles, which continue to live on in our modern imaginations. 

Personally though, when it comes to gladiators, I’ll take the spandex-clad TV stars of the 1990s over the gory Roman death matches any day of the week.  

The Bone Collector’s Lookbook 

Rubinoff, Daniel et al. “Hawaiian caterpillar patrols spiderwebs camouflaged in insect prey’s body parts.” Science. 

Amazingly, the tale of a man who was fed to a lion is not even the gnarliest study that was on offer this week. Enter the “bone collector,” a newly described species of carnivorous caterpillar that invades spiderwebs, eats the ensnared insects, and then wears their body parts like prized armor. 

“We have identified body parts belonging to more than six different families of insect attached to the silk caterpillar cases, suggesting that they are adaptable scavengers and predators,” said researchers led by Daniel Rubinoff of the University of Hawaii. “When decorating their silken portable cases, the caterpillars are particular. Body parts are carefully measured for size before the caterpillar weaves them into its collection. Each prospective new addition is rotated and probed with its mandibles several times, and parts that are too large are chewed down to a size that will fit its case.” 

In other words, the caterpillars are bedazzling themselves with the bodies of their victims. Imagine all of this unfolding from the point of view of an entrapped insect. You’ve already had the worst day of your life—you are cached spider chow—then you see a caterpillar methodically eating your cell mates and sewing their remains into a dapper outfit? 

But wait, it actually gets better:

“If denied access to arthropod body parts in captivity, the caterpillars do not accept other bits of detritus, suggesting that they recognize and exclusively use corpses in nature and that this decoration is important to their survival,” the team said. “Given the context, it is possible that the array of partially consumed body parts and shed spider skins covering the case forms effective camouflage from a spider landlord; the caterpillars have never been found predated by spiders or wrapped in spider silk.”

Gladiators, eat your heart out (assuming a lion hasn’t already done that).The caterpillars refuse to adorn themselves in anything other than dead bodies, which they use to avoid detection by “spider landlords.” Great animal, no notes.

Sadly, though, this species has only been observed in the forests of one mountain on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, and may be facing extinction. “Without conservation attention, it is likely that the last living representative of this lineage of carnivorous, body part–collecting caterpillars that has adapted to a precarious existence among spider webs will disappear.”

It makes you wonder how many weird, trippy species have already vanished without documentation. “Save the Bone Collectors” does not have the same ring as “Save the Whales” but nonetheless these macabre fashion mavens deserve a helping hand—especially a disembodied one that they can wear.

The Deadest Ant

Lepeco, Anderson et al. “A hell ant from the Lower Cretaceous of Brazil.” Current Biology.

Hold onto your butts, because we’re not done with grisly insects yet. Our next entomological curiosity is a fossilized “hell ant” that lived an astonishing 113 million years ago, making it “the oldest definitive ant known to science and also the most complete evidence for the early evolution of ants in the fossil record,” according to a new study.

The exquisitely preserved ant was discovered in Brazil’s Crato Formation and represents a new species called Vulcanidris cratensis. It is at least 10 million years older than the next unambiguous ant fossils, pushing the timeline of ant evolution deeper into the Cretaceous period and shedding light on the first radiations of ants during the age of dinosaurs.  

“​​As part of this initial radiation, hell ants of the subfamily Haidomyrmecinae are arguably the most fascinating group discovered to date,” said researchers led by Anderson Lepeco of the Universidade de São Paulo. “They are readily recognized by their bizarre scythe-like mandibles, often pointed upward and coupled with facial projections, representing unparalleled morphologies in the context of modern ants. Many hypotheses have been raised to explain their anatomical uniqueness, including prey impaling, clasping, or even honeydew collection.”

Wow, there’s a real vibe shift between impaled prey and collected dew. These ants have range. Indeed, the discovery of this new species demonstrates that hell ants had “achieved a wide geographical distribution during the Cretaceous, spreading through Laurasia (i.e., Canada and France) and South America,” according to the team. Though they went extinct along with the dinosaurs, may they live on forever in our nightmares.

Boozy Breadfruit, Family Style 

Bowland, Anna et al. “Wild chimpanzees share fermented fruits.” Current Biology.

Lion bites, bone outfits, and exhumed hell ants. It’s time for a drink. The special this week is a fermented African breadfruit that has been left in the Sun too long. At least, that’s what’s being served at chimpanzee cocktail bars, according to a study this week that presents “the first evidence for ethanolic food sharing and feeding by wild nonhuman great apes” (also known as a booze-up).

“The use of fermented foods and drinks by humans is so widespread as to be considered ubiquitous, with their use largely linked to dietary benefits and social bonding,” said researchers led by Anna Bowland of the University of Exeter. “However, little is known about the inclusion of ethanolic foods in the diet of nonhuman great apes.” 

You know what that means: Time to party with some chimps. The team observed troops of wild chimpanzees sharing fermented breadfruit in Cantanhez National Park, Guinea-Bissau. The alcohol content of the fruits is about 0.61 percent, similar to kombucha, so it’s not like the animals are getting obliterated. Still, the consumption of alcoholic beverages in friendly group settings suggests that humans aren’t the only apes that bond and unwind over libations.

“Chimpanzees were seen to regularly select and feed on T. africana fruits when available (70 events),” the team said. “Sharing was observed on 10 separate occasions…between 17 individuals across all age- and sex-classes. Nine of ten sharing events were ‘passive’ (i.e., a possessor tolerates feeding from the fruit but does not facilitate its transfer), with one event classed as ‘active–passive’, whereby the possessor tolerated the taking of a food portion held in their mouth.”

I admire the gumption of the chimp that grabbed spiked breadfruit out of its companion's mouth, and I appreciate the tolerance of the chimp that allowed it. The team concluded that “the use of alcohol by humans is not ‘recent’ but rather rooted in our deep evolutionary history,” according to the study. Whether you imbibe or abstain, here’s a toast to the happy hours of prehistory.

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

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 cheating in job interviews, "scary good" surveillance tech, and prudes in payment processing.

EMANUEL: First I want to say that the response to our piece about “economic headwinds” has been really positive and energizing. Like we said in that post, we are doing just fine either way, but it’s nice to see that people continue to respond very well to us being transparent about how we’re thinking about and running 404 Media, so we’ll continue to do that. That post also originated as a Behind the Blog, which we always wanted to be a weekly behind-the-scenes look at the site for anyone who was interested, but it’s also become a place for us to test out some ideas with our most loyal readers before we make them public and that is also working out nicely, so thank you!

The other thing I wanted to talk about was this great story from Matthew Gault about Cluely, the AI app that helps you “cheat on everything.”

Civitai, a hugely popular site for sharing AI models and a critical piece of infrastructure for AI-generated pornography across the internet, yesterday announced that it will now ban content depicting incest, self-harm, and fetishes featuring “bodily excretions” like urine, vomit, menstruation, and diapers, following pressure from payment processors. The site is also demonetizing content featuring the likeness of real people and making it harder to find.

“As many of you know, the world of AI content is under increasing scrutiny - from regulators, legislators, and the general public,” Civitai said in a post explaining the policy and content “adjustments.” “Platforms like ours are being held to higher standards around safety, legality, and accountability. We’ve always striven to be a place for innovation, creativity, and openness, but some things have to change in order to continue operating, growing, and protecting our users.” Depictions of firearms being pointed at people and “mind-altered states” like hypnosis are also now forbidden on Civitai.

"Our original vision was to host anything legal and consensual," Civitai CEO and founder Justin Maier told me in an email. "Reality check: the financial ecosystem that powers payments is more restrictive than the letter of the law. Over the past few months several partners told us bluntly, 'Here’s what you must do if you want to keep processing payments.' Rather than risk sudden cut-offs that would hurt every creator on the platform, we chose to meet, or in some places exceed those requirements."

Despite its claim that it’s being held to a higher standard, the type of content Civitai has updated its policies to ban has long been on the edge of what’s acceptable even on porn sites, and is in fact banned on many platforms. While it’s an established fetish that consenting adults engage with regularly, adult content involving diapers is especially sensitive for internet platforms because it could be interpreted as featuring minors. In 2023, for example, Sam reported that Patreon had banned a ton of accounts that created “adult baby/diaper lover,” or ABDL content which was popular in the furry community and a source of income that suddenly disappeared for some.

Incest as well is normally a step too far for most porn sites because it’s illegal in many jurisdictions, which is why so many adult videos engage with this taboo via the now common porn trope of step- sister/brother/mother/father. Weapons, content depicting self harm or harm to others, and content featuring certain bodily fluids are also commonly prohibited even on adult platforms. All of these are banned on OnlyFans, for example.  

Civitai is giving users 30 days before it starts removing content violating these new policies. Click any of these links at your own risk, but a quick search reveals that Civitai currently does hold many AI image generation models specifically for the purpose of generating images of people inserting guns into vaginas, ABDL, menstrual pads, and so on. Did I mention this website is backed by Andreessen Horowitz, one of the biggest venture capital firms in silicon valley? Anyway…

On one hand, despite trying to downplay the obvious popularity of adult content on its site and its critical role in making it easier for people to generate non-consensual adult content, in many ways the policy update shows that Civitai is dealing with the same moderation challenges that all adult sites deal with, and that it’s subject to the same pressures. One of the big reasons adult sites and other internet platforms are banning the same type of content is that they are all getting pressured by payment processors, without which it is much more difficult for them to make money. This is famously why Pornhub changed its entire approach to content moderation and banned millions of unverified content from its platform in 2020. Civitai, Visa, and Mastercard did not respond to requests for comment. 

On the other hand, Civitai’s moderation might be more challenging because AI image generators make it incredibly easy to produce an infinite stream of images that will create more or less whatever a user describes in a prompt. It’s just a massive amount of wild content. 

That’s probably why Civitai also announced that it now demands users include generation metadata on all mature content, and why it announced it has partnered with AI moderation service Clavata, “whose image ingestion and analysis system represents the most advanced and accurate solution we have encountered to-date,” according to Civitai.

"Explicit AI images need verifiable provenance for age-verification and consent audits," Maier said when I asked him why Civitai now requires metadata on adult content. "The easiest path is embedding generation details (model hash, steps). Prompts can still be hidden if authors prefer. We think this approach should become the norm for any platform that hosts AI-generated adult content because it aligns with the spirit of federal 2257 record-keeping."

“The one upside of the changes will be not seeing 20 new diaper loras [AI models] a day,” one user said in the official Civitai Discord. “But the new censorship is a bit over the line when it gets into common themes like drunk hanky panky and gunplay.”

“Even though scat, diapers, piss, etc are squicky for me, I’m always apprehensive when they get censored, because then it’s usually a matter of time until things that I do enjoy, and other things, get censored as well,” another user said. “The canary in the cave, as it were.”

Other updates to Civitai’s policy signal that the site is finally taking some type action on models that are designed to recreate the likeness of real people. Content tagged with the names of real celebrities or “real-person” will be hidden from feeds, ads will not show up next to this content, and users will not be able to tip each other with Buzz, Civitai’s on-platform currency, for this content. The latter is especially notable because Civitai had previously introduced a “bounties” feature which allowed people to offer a certain amount of Buzz to any other user who created an AI model for generating the likeness of real people. 

This isn’t the first time Civitai has done a major overhaul of its content moderation policies. Following 404 Media’s investigation in 2023 which showed that Civitai users were generating images that “could be categorized as child pornography,” the platform introduced radical new measures to stop abuse on its site. 

Update: This article has been updated with comment from Civitai CEO Justin Maier. The headline has also been updated from "Civitai Is Banning AI-Generated Incest and Diapers" to "Payment Processors Force AI Site Civitai to Remove Incest and Diapers" to make clear why Civitai made these changes.

The lives of most Wii consoles ended sometime in the early 2010s, left to collect dust in dorm rooms and parents’ dens, having run their last Just Dance disc long ago. But at least one Wii is finding another life hosting a website. 

Security engineer Alex Haydock found a discarded “sacrificial Wii” at the 2024 Electromagnetic Field festival swap shop, he wrote on his blog (which is now running on that Wii). He took it home intending to use it to emulate and homebrew games, but he’d noticed while browsing the website for the open-source operating system NetBSD—which has options for installing a Unix-like operating system on devices like Dreamcasts, Amiga and Atari machines, and many more—that it had an option for a Wii installation. 

“As soon as I discovered this was fully supported and maintained, I knew I had to try deploying an actual production workload on it,” he wrote. “That workload is the blog you’re reading now.” 

Haydock wrote set-by-step instructions on how he softmodded the Wii on his site, which you can check out for yourself if you have a sad old console lying around and a need for a web host. You’ll need the Wiimotes and sensor bar, he notes, because a lot of this process relies on installing channels (applications on the Wii menu, for the unfamiliar) on the Wii itself. 

“Part of it is of course simply the fun of taking a piece of tech people are very familiar with and trying to get it to do something it was never designed to do,” Haydock told me in an email. “But I also find that the fastest way for me to learn new concepts and technologies is when something breaks and I end up having to fix it. If I follow a tutorial and something 'just works', it's almost like losing an opportunity to really appreciate the complexity of what's going on underneath.” 

On Wednesday, his Wii blog made it to the top of technology forum Hacker News, meaning potentially hundreds of thousands of people clicked through to the site at the same time—a load that could easily hug any lesser website to death. But the Wiiweb held up. “This is where the Wii really managed to impress. Watching the graphs as the post went live was great fun. I spent a few hours watching as the load spiked, trying to work out where the post had been shared to cause each of the sudden bursts in traffic,” Haydock told me. The page spent about four hours at the number one spot on Hacker News, he said, and was on the front page for 20 hours. 

“At its peak a few hours in, the Wii was serving around 40 requests per second, and it was still serving a steady 10 requests per second near the end of the front page run. I was shocked but the Wii kept up amazingly well the entire time. It could easily have handled more,” he said. “Based on the figures I've got, I'm pretty sure the (not great) upload speed on my home connection would become the bottleneck way before the Wii itself would.”

He said he hopes to bring the Wii back to the festival where it started in 2026, and continue to serve the blog from it, in the middle of a field. 

“Originally I expected I'd run it like this for a few days or weeks, until I got tired of fixing it when it fell over,” Haydock said. “But it's been so stable that I do now plan to run it like this indefinitely. Especially now that some helpful folk have pointed out how to get it to boot directly into the NetBSD environment. Although I did quite enjoy having a production Wiimote.” 

Adam Chace picked a pretty good time to create a data archiving product for turbulent times. I first saw an ad for PrepperDisk on Reddit soon after the election of Donald Trump: “Take lifesaving websites into any emergency,” and “Be SHTF (Shit Hits the Fan) Proof,” the ads read. 

PrepperDisk is a mini internet box that comes preloaded with offline backups of Wikipedia, street maps, survivalist information, 90,000 WikiHow guides, iFixit repair guides, government website backups (including FEMA guides and National Institutes of Health backups), TED Talks about farming and survivalism, 60,000 ebooks and various other content. It’s part external hard drive, part local hotspot antenna—the box runs on a Raspberry Pi that allows up to 20 devices to connect to it over wifi or wired connections, and can store and run additional content that users store on it. It doesn't store a lot of content (either 256GB or 512GB), but what makes it different from buying any external hard drive is that it comes preloaded with content for the apocalypse.

I was interested in PrepperDisk because I care about data hoarding and archiving more broadly, but I wanted to talk to Chace after it became clear that a lot of his sales seemed to be a direct result of Trump being elected president. 

“Sales increased dramatically in the early part of the new administration as economic uncertainty and even uncertainty about government data prevailed,” Chace told me. “Elon Musk is pulling data off of federal websites, and we want to make sure people realize is like, ‘Hey, this might have a use case even when the internet itself remains up, but there might be political reasons why that data isn’t available.” 

“The National Institutes of Health, we have their entire website on our device, and some of their information has been pulled off the internet,” he added. "We have gotten a lot of questions about the content that’s getting deleted. The National Library of Medicine is one we get asked about a lot as it has had content deleted. We’ve had customer ask about whether the Prepper Disk copy of Wikipedia would continue to have entries that ‘might get deleted by the government.’ Yes. Our copy of FEMA’s emergency management website, Ready.gov, has gotten a lot of questions as that website was part of the DOGE sweep. Amusingly I had a customer also ask what the Gulf of Mexico was called on our maps [it’s still the Gulf of Mexico]. It is clear that folks are looking at the overall permanency of data on the Internet and our product as a way to control some of that.”

PrepperDisk is similar to a DIY, open-source project that started in 2012 called Internet in a Box and which has become popular in rural areas in developing countries where internet access is sparse. The idea is basically that you can carry around an external hard drive-sized, mini version of the internet with you that creates a local network your phone or laptop can access. 

I was also interested in PrepperDisk because, unlike a lot of “prepper” products, PrepperDisk’s marketing is relatively understated. Chace doesn’t consider himself to be a prepper, and generally doesn’t sell the product in apocalyptic or conspiratorial terms. It feels more like a project designed to preserve and distribute vulnerable data from the internet than a project designed for the end of the world.

“I personally wouldn’t categorize myself as a prepper, though I’m the son of an Eagle Scout and was a Boy Scout myself, and I’ve always been a sort of ‘be prepared’ kind of guy,” Chace said. “I was discussing with my son that, especially in the current climate, there’s a threat to the persistence of information, things we always thought would be available, like government resources from FEMA, suddenly there’s a question mark around that information.” 

Chace admits that an enterprising person could (and many do) build similar DIY products with a Raspberry Pi and an external hard drive. But his goal was to build something accessible to nontechnical people. 

“Our goal has been to take what some open source products do and make it more of a refined, commercial-grade consumer product,” he added. Despite the name, Chace said a lot of his customers aren’t necessarily preppers, they are largely people who are worried about important websites going offline. Others are people who want to take a smaller version of “the internet” camping in remote areas.Then there are, of course, people who store them in go bags.

“We do have the kind of classic, ‘I’m getting it and putting it in an EMP bag and putting it somewhere safe and hope I never need it,’” he said. “And then we have a customer who bought it basically to have it be available for his kids to use when they’re on vacation.”

Generative AI is a power and water hungry beast. While its advocates swear it’ll change the world for the better, the tangible benefits today are less clear and the long term costs to both society and the environment may be enormous. Even the federal U.S. government knows this, according to a new report published Wednesday by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), a nonpartisan watchdog group that answers to Congress.

The GAO’s AI report’s goal is to succinctly explain to legislators what media outlets and researchers have been explaining for years: the infrastructure necessary to produce generative AI presents a massive strain on the planet. 

Last month, Roy Lee was suspended from Columbia after he was accused of using AI to “cheat” on technical job interviews for Amazon, Meta, and TikTok. On Sunday, he announced that he raised $5.3 million to start Cluely, a new startup that aims to allow users to similarly “cheat on everything.” 

Cluely went viral when it launched earlier this week thanks to a commercial Lee posted on X. In the video, Lee bumbles his way through a date. A large UI sits between him and his date, feeding him information about the woman’s interests and coaching him on how to talk to her.

In an interview, however, Lee told me that his AI tool is not really cheating. 

“Initially it will feel like cheating, but if we win, nobody will think this is cheating,” Lee told me. 

Adrian Basar did not want to become a distant-water fisherman. With 22-hour workdays and pay of around 450 dollars per month, it’s not the most glamorous—or fulfilling, or generally safe—job. But Basar took it to help support his seven-sibling family. One of them is currently in university, studying mathematics. 

“I support them so they can go to school,” Basar told me, speaking in Indonesian through an interpreter. I met him at a major seafood industry conference last month, where he and another fisherman had come to tell corporate executives about their lives on the ships. 

“I took these steps because I figure, if I can support them, they can get a better education than I did,” he said.

Basar is part of a distant-water fleet of Indonesian migrant fishermen who work for Taiwan’s massive fishing market. They fish thousands of pounds of tuna that is sold all over the world, including in some cases to U.S. consumers. 

We start this week with Emanuel and Jason's big story on Massive Blue, a company that is selling AI-powered undercover bots posing as protesters and children to the cops. After the break, Sam tells us about visiting the millennial saint. In the subscribers-only section, we talk business and the state of 404 Media.

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.

• Leaked: Palantir’s Plan to Help ICE Deport People
• ICE Plans Central Database of Health, Labor, Housing Agency Data to Find Targets
• This ‘College Protester’ Isn’t Real. It’s an AI-Powered Undercover Bot for Cops
• I Went to See ‘God’s Influencer,’ the Millennial Saint Carlo Acutis
• How 404 Media Is Navigating 'Economic Headwinds'

An exploit in Activision-Blizzard’s popular real-time strategy game StarCraft II is allowing people to inject disturbing videos into multiplayer matches and show them to other players without warning, according to several accounts in the StarCraft II community and one player who talked to 404 Media. Some of the videos people said they saw in game include real footage of a mass shooting in a supermarket and a video with rapidly flashing lights, seemingly an attempt to trigger seizures in people with photosensitive epilepsy. 

“We loaded up with a few regulars and some randos who I didn't know,” a user named Tad0422, who saw one of these videos said, said on Reddit. Tad0422 said they were playing a custom map called Monobattles, which is shared via Starcraft II Arcade, an official hub for sharing custom StarCraft maps. “About 3 min a video appeared on my screen. I have never seen this before but it took up the whole screen. It was a Russian pop video or something that played for 20 seconds or so. Most of us were talking in chat about what the heck was happening.”

On Monday, the co-founder of Business Insider Henry Blodget published a blog on his new Substack about a “native-AI newsroom.” Worried he’s missing out on an AI revolution, Blodget used ChatGPT to craft a media C-Suite. Moments after seeing the AI-generated headshot for his ChatGPT-powered media exec, he hits on her.

Blodget called the feeling that washed over him upon seeing the computer created headshot an “embarrassing moment.” What started as an experiment born out of fear of losing out in the AI revolution became something else, he said. “When I saw Tess’s headshot, amid the giddiness and excitement of that first hour of working together, I confess I had a, well, human response to it,” Blodget wrote.

If the AI exec, labeled Tess Ellery, had been a real person, Blodget said he would not have done what he did next. “But did the same rules apply to AI colleagues and native-AI workplaces?” He wrote. “I didn’t know yet. That was one of the things I needed to figure out.”

Something that we’ve been thinking a lot about since we founded 404 Media was how one of the worst parts of working at a big company like VICE was the regular layoffs. A cruel aspect of the job was that whenever there was some kind of cataclysmic event that affected the economy—COVID, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, etc—we had the unique pleasure of having to closely follow and cover news that could and often would ultimately result in members of our teams getting laid off. This was always justified with the term “economic headwinds,” a now-famous euphemism that executives used to absolve them of their mismanagement and which were always impossible to "navigate." The implication was that there was simply nothing they could do to prevent this. 

We worked hard and did our jobs as best we could but we could also feel the axe about to fall, usually in the form of an email from upper management about “economic headwinds” or something like that, followed by a brutal day of slowly finding out who still had a job. Soon after COVID started, some of us were on a call with executives who told us that despite traffic being higher than ever because of the essential work we were doing, our department was millions of dollars behind its expected ad sales goals, which was not anything the writers and editors had any control over, of course. Pay reductions soon followed, and, after that, there were mass layoffs. 

Donald Trump’s tariffs and their manic fluctuating between total global trade war to more limited but still devastating focus on China, stocks taking a nosedive, companies announcing they’re going to stop doing some business in the US, and CEOs putting everything on hold until we’re out of this zone of “economic uncertainty,” means the “headwinds” are here, or it’s at least looking stormy.

We launched 404 Media in August of 2023, and a lot of wild stuff has happened here and in the world since then, but this is the first time we’ve experienced what looks like an imminent recession. What is becoming clear is that, already, there is a significant enough shift in the economy to impact our business. 

For that reason, we wanted to give a small update on the state of 404 Media ahead of our second anniversary in August. The short version is that the state of 404 Media is strong. The support of our subscribers has allowed us to make 404 Media our full time jobs since the beginning. One of the reasons we started the company instead of trying to get new jobs at other media companies is because most have many of the problems that VICE did. We believed there was a better way to run a media company, and we are thankfully not in a position where we need to lay ourselves off. In fact, we are in a position where we can continue to focus on making 404 Media better.

From the beginning, we have said that we want to build something that lasts a long time, and that part of our strategy would be to be very conservative with growing the company and to be conservative with how we spend our money, because it makes no sense to have a company that succeeds only when financial times are good but has to fire everyone at the slightest downturn. Our company is doing better than we ever expected it to, but we also have been in the business long enough to know that we cannot expect growth forever, that the advertising market fluctuates wildly, and that the ways people find and consume news are constantly changing. We know that this is a dangerous “macroenvironment” for journalism, as they say, with news outlets being threatened with existentially costly litigation from the president, his regulators and his Department of Justice, state politicians, and rich and powerful people who do not want to face accountability for their actions. We have already been threatened by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.  

We feel we are currently in a strong financial position and feel endlessly grateful to our subscribers for helping to put us in this position. But the terrible news is that thousands and thousands of people, including federal workers who maintain and operate crucial parts of the government, are losing their jobs. People are either cutting expenses because they lost their jobs, because they are expecting to lose their jobs, or because they are bracing themselves for the rest of the Trump administration now that it’s apparent the dog who caught the car is driving it too. 

We know this is what people are thinking and doing because many of them tell us why they are canceling their subscriptions to 404 Media. The notes we get about this are very generous and heartbreaking. People tell us that they really appreciate the work we do and that they will continue to support us when they can, but that at the moment they feel like they have to cut costs. We have all been there, are grateful for the kind words, and will always be grateful for anyone who is or was willing to support us to any degree. We hope it goes without saying, but we never want or expect anyone to support us if it causes them financial hardship. 

The good news is that while we’re definitely seeing the impact of all this economic chaos, we are still in a very strong, resilient position. Our growth has slowed for the moment, and it might level off or shrink if the economy keeps going off a cliff, but we still have a ton of support thanks almost entirely to thousands of individual subscribers that make up the vast majority of our revenue and a few other streams of revenue like advertising and merchandise.

We are writing this article to let you know that we are thinking proactively about our business inside of the larger economy, and that we’re in good shape. We have begun to cautiously get more ambitious by bringing on new contributors. About six months ago, science journalist Becky Ferreira started writing The Abstract, our Saturday science-focused newsletter.  Last year, Case Hartsfield joined us to help with social media and audience engagement, and has since grown our TikTok, Instagram, and Bluesky accounts significantly so we can reach more people. Most recently, journalist Matthew Gault has started contributing regularly, and we’re taking more commissions as bandwidth allows. One year ago, Jules Roscoe came aboard as the first 404 Media fellow, and in June, we'll have a new intern (stay tuned!). We threw a panel and party at SXSW, which was the first time we’ve thrown an event in a city we didn’t live in; it went very well and we hope to do more of this in the future. We are thinking about how we can bring you more of the journalism we do at a time when the stakes feel higher than ever.

There are also a few things we’re going to try that have worked for other businesses like ours that we haven’t done yet.

Chief among these is a referral program, which companies like Morning Brew have used to build their newsletter lists. The reason a referral program is attractive to us is because, as we have railed endlessly against the algorithmic lottery of social media, we’ve found that the best way for us to grow is from direct, person-to-person recommendations. We have lost count of the number of people who have told us that they found us because a friend or family member told them about us in a group chat, forwarded one of our emails, or was chatting about one of our stories at a party. We want to incentivize this type of recommendation by giving 404 Media merch to people who ask their friends to sign up for our newsletters. We’re not sure how well this will work, but it’s something we want to try and that will start showing up at the bottom of our email newsletters, beginning with this one. There may be some bumps as we get this off the ground and we’re open to feedback on it; we’re using some software that may or may not play well with our email provider, so if you see anything buggy, let us know. 

More importantly, since we launched 404 Media we have talked endlessly about how our goal was to do journalism sustainably, and we’ve been extremely conservative precisely because of our experience at VICE and the inevitable, seasonal “headwinds” in the economy. 

It’s windy as hell right now but we are prepared. We didn’t overextend ourselves, we aren’t relying on investors who are waiting for a 10x return and are now getting cold feet, and we don’t have to change anything about how we do our journalism because every single business decision we’ve made the entire time was in the service of doing that work as best as possible, for as long as possible.

We want to thank you again if you are already a paid subscriber. If you’re not one yet, you can sign up here. On that page you should see a list of all the benefits you get by becoming a subscriber. 

If you’re unable to pay for subscription but still want to support us, there are still plenty of other things we need help with:

• First and always, please tell people about 404 Media. This is how we have built our audience, and it is very, very helpful. Share our stories, share our podcast, forward our newsletter, follow us on Bluesky, Mastodon, TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube and share our posts there. And please, try out the referral program and let us know how it goes.
• Please keep sending us tips. Some of our best stories started as tips from readers, and nothing helps us grow as much as a good scoop. Our contact info is here.
• Please subscribe to our podcast and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. We are proud of how good the podcast is getting, and know we have a following that only gets our stories via our free podcast. We think we still have a lot of room to grow there. Just a few more subscribers and reviews can be more helpful than most people can probably imagine. 
• Please become a free subscriber if you’re not one already! It’s free, but is very helpful for us in order to reach you with our newsletter directly.
• Advertise with us. If you own or work for a company, tell your marketing team that you read us and that they should consider placing an ad in our podcast or in our newsletter!
• Tell your company / university / school about us. We offer discounted group subscriptions to organizations. Please just tell them to get in touch by emailing [email protected] or [email protected]
• If you’re unable to pay for a subscription but still want to give us money in some other way, we have a tip jar where you can give any amount you want and a merch store with really nice stuff! We have restocked this store and added a few new items in the last few days.

An earlier version of this post originally appeared as part of our weekly Behind the Blog series, available only to paying subscribers. We’ve expanded on it for a wider release.

The FBI says it is unable to find records related to its purchase of a series of hacking tools, despite spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on them and those purchases initially being included in a public U.S. government procurement database before being quietly scrubbed from the internet.

The news highlights the secrecy the FBI maintains around its use of hacking tools. The agency has previously used classified technology in ordinary criminal investigations, pushed back against demands to provide details of hacking operations to defendants, and purchased technology from surveillance vendors. 

“Potentially responsive records were identified during the search,” a response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request I sent about a specific hacking tool contract says. “However, we were advised that they were not in their expected locations. An additional search for the missing records also met with unsuccessful results. Since we were unable to review the records, we were unable to determine if they were responsive to your request.”

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is planning to bring together data from a wide variety of other U.S. government agencies, including the Department of Labor (DOL), Health and Human Services (HHS), Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to make a centralized database to identify immigration targets, according to a document viewed by 404 Media.

The news signals ICE’s heavy emphasis on bringing disparate datasets together in order to carry out President Trump’s mass deportation effort. The tool, called ATrac and “Alien Tracker” in the document, is planned to allow for the management of all enforcement priorities, and provide near real-time tracking of both targets on a local level and the broader set of immigration enforcement targets around the country.

The document says ATrac is an ICE tool that displays information on a geospatial interface for officials to identify potential enforcement targets, and then task that enforcement to a particular team. Once a team is sent out, they are required to report the ultimate outcome, such as the target being arrested; the target being located but not arrested; or the target not being located.

Welcome back to the Abstract!

It was a good week for the Fox Mulders among us. We want to believe, and a new study has given us some empirical grist along those lines. I shall say no more, and let the giant planet K2-18b speak for itself.  

Next, remember the time that Earth partied so hard that the Northern Lights showed up in the Sahara and humans had to invent sunscreen? Hahaha…our planet just DGAF sometimes. Then, the Perseus cluster thought it could get away with eating a subcluster, but we have the EVIDENCE. Last, dino-walk with me. 

“It’s Never Aliens”...Oh Shoot, This Time It Actually Might Be Aliens 

Madhusudhan, Nikku et al. ‘New Constraints on DMS and DMDS in the Atmosphere of K2-18b from JWST MIRI.’ The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Scientists have reported some of the most compelling evidence for extraterrestrial life ever identified, teasing what would be the most anticipated scientific breakthrough in history. 

The possibly life-bearing world in question is K2-18b, a giant planet about eight or nine times as massive as Earth located about 124 light years away. It belongs to a tantalizing class of “Hycean” planets that may host global liquid water oceans under thick hydrogen-rich atmospheres. 

K2-18b has attracted a lot of interest in recent years because water vapor, carbon dioxide, and methane have been detected in its skies at concentrations that hint at the presence of life. That said, planets can bake up those compounds in all kinds of ways that don’t involve beasties. That’s why scientists decided to put this world into the sights of the James Webb Space Telescope, the most sensitive observatory ever, to see if they could find anything more concrete.

Webb delivered by confirming the presence of dimethyl disulfide (DMDS) and dimethyl sulfide (DMS)—compounds that are concocted by microbes here on Earth— in the skies of K2-18b. It’s not yet an alien slam dunk, because there are a few abiotic processes that also can make this stuff. But there are simply fewer ways to explain their sustained presence in a planet’s skies without invoking biological processes, compared to water, carbon dioxide, or methane.

“We present a mid-infrared transmission spectrum of K2-18b with JWST, the first for a habitable-zone exoplanet,” said researchers led by Nikku Madhusudhan of the University of Cambridge. “The spectrum shows multiple spectral features…that are best explained by a combination of DMDS and DMS in the atmosphere, both molecules uniquely produced by life on Earth and predicted as promising biosignatures in habitable exoplanets.”

DMDS and DMS are largely produced by marine microbes, such as phytoplankton. It’s alluring to envision a massive ocean world blushing with colorful microbial blooms as it orbits its red dwarf star, just 124 light years away (an immense distance for humans, but just down the street on galactic scales). 

Still, the team emphasized that abiotic sources of these compounds should be rigorously explored, and noted that they can be found on barren comets in our own solar system. It’s possible that similar comets in the K2-18 system may have recently crashed into this massive world, producing some transient signatures captured by Webb, though it would be a bit of a coincidence. Future observations may distinguish the likely sources of the compounds, and perhaps find even more signs of life (or signs of not-life). 

Humans have often imagined our “first contact” moment with aliens as irrefutable. We receive an unambiguously artificial transmission. An ancient alien artifact is unearthed from a nearby planet. Aliens straight-up show up on Earth to invade or enlighten us. 

But it seems much more likely that this vexing mystery—is life on Earth a fluke or the norm?—will be constrained through a slow and grinding probabilistic framework. We may never conclusively determine if K2-18b hosts life; the best we might get is a gradient of more to less probable. As scientists accumulate reams of data from other planets, we will get a lot more smoke signals but may never find an actual smoking gun.  

“Overall, our findings present an important step forward in the search for signatures of life on exoplanets,” according to the study. “However, robustly establishing both the veracity of the present findings and their possible association with life on K2-18 b needs a dedicated community effort in multiple directions—observational, theoretical, and experimental.” 

“The central question now is whether we are prepared to identify the signatures of life on such worlds,” the team concluded. “The opportunity is at our doorstep.”

A Tale of Auroral Escapes and Neanderthal Capes

Mukhopadhyay, Agnit et al. “Wandering of the auroral oval 41,000 years ago.” Science Advances.

Even Mother Earth, the one world that we know hosts life, can be a bit of a chaotic parent at times. For instance, our planet went on a little bender about 41,000 years ago, called the Laschamps geomagnetic excursion, in which it temporarily lost its magnetic bearings for about 2,000 years. 

As the magnetic poles shifted from the geographic poles, Earth’s magnetic shield was reduced to 10 percent of its strength, exposing everything on its surface to a flood of cosmic radiation. The excursion also caused auroras to become unmoored from the poles, thereby drifting to lower latitudes and causing the Northern Lights to dance over the Sahara.

This bizarre episode may have inspired our human ancestors to invent sunscreen out of ochre and develop tailored clothing to avoid radiation exposure, according to a new study. The work also suggests that Neanderthals may have failed to adapt to the changes, perhaps contributing to their extinction around the same time as the Laschamps excursion.

Ochre shows “increased frequency in archaeological sites dating to the peri-Laschamps” which “could be due in part to its use as a sunscreen” by anatomically modern humans (AMH), said researchers led by Agnit Mukhopadhyay of the University of Michigan. 

“Although both Neanderthals and contemporary AMH produced technologies associated with clothing manufacture, only AMH appear to have produced technologies consistent with the manufacture of tailored clothing; Neanderthals are assumed to have produced only relatively simple, draped clothing (e.g., capes)...Neanderthals’ decline was almost certainly multifactorial, but it is possible that topical sunscreens and tailored clothing provided AMH essential photoprotection and access to resources in places and at times they would otherwise have been inaccessible” which may have been “a competitive advantage.”

First of all, we need to bring back Neanderthal capes. They have been out of fashion for 41,000 years, so a revival is frankly overdue. Second, it would be wild if humans outlived Neanderthals in part because we wore sunscreen. Has there ever been a better advertisement for Big SPF? 

But that is only the skin-deep part of this cool and expansive study, which also speculated that the excursion may have inspired new forms of art and music. “Others have noted co-occurrence of the Laschamps with the earliest known representational cave art—which depicts animals, anthropomorphs, and other figures or scenes, as opposed to abstract marks or designs—including images of animals,” the team said. “To this, we add that the Laschamps event coincides with early examples of portable art and musical instruments.”

The researchers also warned that if the same event happened today, we would be up a magnetic creek without a paddle. “Considering the probable impact of the Laschamps excursion on early humans and their way of life, a similar event today would likely have dire consequences for modern humans,” the team noted. “The ramifications of a Laschamps-like magnetospheric configuration and auroral oval would reverberate across all facets of modern communication, satellite infrastructure, and intercontinental travel.”

I know, I know, you really needed one more thing to worry about. You had so many wonderful worries, but to fill out your collection, I present you with this one about Earth’s magnetic field shutting down for a millennium or two. No geomagnetic excursions are imminent, according to the study, but it will eventually happen again, so something to be aware of, I guess. 

In the meantime, honor your ancestors by wearing sunscreen!  

SOLVED: The Case of the Missing Subcluster Halo

Hyeonghan, Kim et al. “Direct evidence of a major merger in the Perseus cluster.” Nature Astronomy.

We’ll now zoom out from planetary scales all the way up to the mind-detonating expanse of the Perseus Cluster, one of the most massive objects in the known universe. This thing is just a lot of galaxies—at least 1,000, probably a lot more—that are all gravitationally jostling around each other some 240 million light years from Earth. 

Based on its dynamics, it looks like the cluster ate a smaller “subcluster” in the past as part of a “major merger.” But until now, scientists have not been able to track down the companion that was absorbed into the Perseus whole, which is a missing piece that has really been bugging them. 

“Although the Perseus cluster has often been regarded as an archetypical relaxed galaxy cluster, several lines of evidence ...suggest that the cluster might have experienced a major merger,” said researchers led by Kim HyeongHan of Yonsei University. (I also identify as an “archetypical relaxed” entity).

“However, the absence of a clear merging companion identified so far hampers our understanding of the evolutionary track of the Perseus cluster consistent with these observational features,” the team said.

We simply must not be hampered in our understanding of the evolutionary track of the Perseus cluster. To that end, the team used weak lensing, an observational technique based on gravitational distortions, to locate the swallowed companion.

Well, everyone: We got ‘em. “Here, through careful weak-lensing analysis, we successfully identified the missing subcluster halo,” which is located about 430 kiloparsecs (1.4 million light years) west of the Perseus main cluster core,” the team said. “This discovery resolves the long-standing puzzle of Perseus’s dynamical state.”

And to think, Perseus would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for those meddling weak lenses. Another cosmic cold case closed. 

Slap a “Coexist” Bumper Sticker on These Armoured Dinosaurs

Arbour, Victoria et al. “A new thyreophoran ichnotaxon from British Columbia, Canada confirms the presence of ankylosaurid dinosaurs in the mid Cretaceous of North America.” Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

We’ll close by walking in the footsteps of an ankylosaurus, the dinosaurian equivalent of a tank. Some 100 million years ago, these giant armored dinosaurs left footprints in what is now the Canadian Rockies, which paleontologists have identified as the only known ankylosaurid ankylosaur tracks in the world. 

The name “ankylosaurid ankylosaur” may seem a bit redundant, but it exists because there is such a thing as—you guessed it—a non-ankylosaurid ankylosaur (also known as a nodosaurid). These two major ankylosaur lineages differed in many ways, including in the number of digits on their hind feet (ankylosaurids had three, nodosaurids had four). 

Paleontologists had previously identified the footprints of Tetrapodosaurus borealis, the four-toed variety, in mid-Cretaceous trackways near the town of Tumbler Ridge, in British Columbia, and at Dunvegan Bridge, Alberta. Now, a team has pinpointed the tell-tale “tridactyl” prints of an ankylosaurid ankylosaur representing a new species, named Ruopodosaurus clava.  

“This new taxon is currently known exclusively from the Cenomanian of northeastern British Columbia and northwestern Alberta, and provides confirmation that ankylosaurid ankylosaurs were present in North America prior to the Campanian–Maastrichtian,” said researchers led by Victoria Arbour of the Royal BC Museum. “Ruopodosaurus clava is found in the same localities and deposits as Tetrapodosaurus borealis, indicating that both ankylosaurid and non-ankylosaurid ankylosaurs co-existed in the mid Cretaceous of the Peace Region.”

Co-existence between giant armoured dinosaurs in a place now named the Peace Region? The reality simulation writers did well with this one.  

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

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 Palantir scoops, coping mechanisms, and feeling God in this Samsung television.

JOSEPH: I’m going to talk about how our Palantir leak story came about, Leaked: Palantir’s Plan to Help ICE Deport People, because I think it shows the value of just hammering on a broader story, finding a way in, then getting more and more specifics on it.

It really starts with Jason’s story on April 9 called Inside a Powerful Database ICE Uses to Identify and Deport People. This was about ICE’s tool called the Investigative Case Management (ICM) system. The tool was not new. It had been around for multiple years and other outlets had covered it. What was new was that we got to see actual parts of the database. This provided an opportunity for us to cover it in new, specific detail. 

We're excited to share audio and video of our panel at SXSW, where Jason, Sam, and our friend Brian Merchant of Blood in the Machine discuss how AI slop has taken over the internet, how it is a brute-force attack against the algorithms that control what we see on social media, and what we can do to fight back against it.

Here's the panel:

It's better with the video, because there are some visual aids, but we also released an audio-only version of this on our podcast feed:

This was our first big live event, and we hope to do more in the future. If you're throwing a conference or event, hit us up! We had a wonderful time talking about AI spam, labor, and the future of the internet. Thanks to everyone who came out to meet and party with us.

This panel was held at Speakeasy in Austin, Texas at SXSW on March 10, 2025. Thanks to our friends at Flipboard for giving us the space and to DeleteMe for sponsoring the event.

SPONSORED

This segment is a paid ad. If you’re interested in advertising, let's talk.

Your Personal Data May Not Be Hidden. Take Control with DeleteMe.

Don't want just anyone finding your information on Search Engines? Remove your personal information from Data Brokers using DeleteMe.

Use code 404MEDIA for 20% off

Learn more

And here's a bunch of photos, taken by Case Hartsfield:

This article was produced in collaboration with Court Watch, an independent outlet that unearths overlooked court records. Subscribe to them here.

A judge in Nevada has ruled that “tower dumps”—the law enforcement practice of grabbing vast troves of private personal data from cell towers—is unconstitutional. The judge also ruled that the cops could, this one time, still use the evidence they obtained through this unconstitutional search. 

Cell towers record the location of phones near them about every seven seconds. When the cops request a tower dump, they ask a telecom for the numbers and personal information of every single phone connected to a tower during a set time period. Depending on the area, these tower dumps can return tens of thousands of numbers.

Cops have been able to sift through this data to solve crimes. But tower dumps are also a massive privacy violation that flies in the face of the Fourth Amendment, which protects people from unlawful search and seizure. When the cops get a tower dump they’re not just searching and seizing the data of a suspected criminal, they’re sifting through the information of everyone who was in the location.

A Nevada man, Cory Spurlock, is facing charges related to dealing marijuana and a murder-for-hire scheme. Cops used a tower dump to connect his cellphone with the location of some of the crimes he is accused of. Spurlock’s lawyers argued that the tower dump was an unconstitutional search and that the evidence obtained during it should not be. The cops got a warrant to conduct the tower dump but argued it wasn’t technically a “search” and therefore wasn’t subject to the Fourth Amendment.

U.S. District Juste Miranda M. Du rejected this argument, but wouldn’t suppress the evidence. “The Court finds that a tower dump is a search and the warrant law enforcement used to get it is a general warrant forbidden under the Fourth Amendment,” she said in a ruling filed on April 11. “That said, because the Court appears to be the first court within the Ninth Circuit to reach this conclusion and the good faith exception otherwise applies, the Court will not order any evidence suppressed.”

Du argued that the officers acted in good faith when they filed the warrant and that they didn’t know the search was unconstitutional when they conducted it. According to Du, the warrant wasn’t unconstitutional when a judge issued it.

Du’s ruling is the first time the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has ruled on the constitutionality of tower dumps, but this isn’t the first time a federal judge has weighed in. One in Mississippi came to the same conclusion in February. A few weeks later, the Department of Justice appealed the ruling.

There’s a decent chance that one of these cases will wind its way up to the Supreme Court and that SCOTUS will have to make a ruling about tower dumps. The last time the issue was in front of them, they kicked the can back to the lower courts.

In 2018, the Supreme Court considered Carpenter v. United States, a case where the FBI used cell phone location data to investigate a series of robberies. The Court decided that law enforcement agencies violate the Fourth Amendment when they ask for cell phone location data without a warrant. But the ruling was narrow and the Court declined to rule on the issue of tower dumps.

According to the court records for Spurlock’s case, the tower dump that caught him captured the private data of 1,686 users. An expert who testified before the court about the dump noted that “the wireless company users whose phones showed up in the tower dump data did not opt in to sharing their location with their wireless provider, and indeed, could not opt out from appearing in the type of records received in response to [the] warrant.”

Palantir, the surveillance giant, is taking on an increased role with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), including finding the physical location of people who are marked for deportation, according to Palantir Slacks and other internal messages obtained by 404 Media.

The leak shows that Palantir’s work with ICE includes producing leads for law enforcement to find people to deport and keeping track of the logistics of Trump’s mass deportation effort, and provides concrete insight into the Trump administration’s wish to leverage data to enforce its immigration agenda. The internal communications also show Palantir leadership preparing for a potential backlash from employees or outsiders, with them writing FAQs that can be sent to friends or family that start to ask about Palantir’s work with ICE. 

“Hey all, wanted to provide a quick update on our work with ICE,” Akash Jain, the Chief Technology Officer of Palantir Technologies and President of Palantir USG, wrote in a Slack message several days ago. “Over the last few weeks we prototyped a new set of data integrations and workflows with ICE.”

“The new administration’s focus on leveraging data to drive enforcement operations has accelerated those efforts,” Jain wrote.

A page of an internal Palantir wiki obtained by 404 Media says Palantir participated in a three-week sprint, where developers rapidly work on new projects, with Homeland Security Investigations’ (HSI) Innovation Lab, which is the agency’s centralized hub for developing new advanced analytics capabilities and tools. The primary focus of that sprint was providing immigration agents with “improved awareness about the criminality and location of individuals who have already received a final order of removal,” the wiki says. 

This article was produced with support from WIRED. This reporting was also the product of dozens of public records requests.

American police departments near the United States-Mexico border are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for an unproven and secretive technology that uses AI-generated online personas designed to interact with and collect intelligence on “college protesters,” “radicalized” political activists, and suspected drug and human traffickers, according to internal documents, contracts, and communications 404 Media obtained via public records requests.

Massive Blue, the New York-based company that is selling police departments this technology, calls its product Overwatch, which it markets as an “AI-powered force multiplier for public safety” that “deploys lifelike virtual agents, which infiltrate and engage criminal networks across various channels.” According to a presentation obtained by 404 Media, Massive Blue is offering cops these virtual personas that can be deployed across the internet with the express purpose of interacting with suspects over text messages and social media. 

Massive Blue lists “border security,” “school safety,” and stopping “human trafficking” among Overwatch’s use cases. The technology—which as of last summer had not led to any known arrests—demonstrates the types of social media monitoring and undercover tools private companies are pitching to police and border agents. Concerns about tools like Massive Blue have taken on new urgency considering that the Trump administration has revoked the visas of hundreds of students, many of whom have protested against Israel’s war in Gaza.