Earlier this month authorities in Texas performed a nationwide search of more than 83,000 automatic license plate reader (ALPR) cameras while looking for a woman who they said had a self-administered abortion, including cameras in states where abortion is legal such as Washington and Illinois, according to multiple datasets obtained by 404 Media.

The news shows in stark terms how police in one state are able to take the ALPR technology, made by a company called Flock and usually marketed to individual communities to stop carjackings or find missing people, and turn it into a tool for finding people who have had abortions. In this case, the sheriff told 404 Media the family was worried for the woman’s safety and so authorities used Flock in an attempt to locate her. But health surveillance experts said they still had issues with the nationwide search. 

“You have this extraterritorial reach into other states, and Flock has decided to create a technology that breaks through the barriers, where police in one state can investigate what is a human right in another state because it is a crime in another,” Kate Bertash of the Digital Defense Fund, who researches both ALPR systems and abortion surveillance, told 404 Media. 

Schools, parents, police, and existing laws are not prepared to deal with the growing problem of students and minors using generative AI tools to create child sexual abuse material of their peers, according to a new report from researchers at Stanford Cyber Policy Center.

The report, which is based on public records and interviews with NGOs, internet platforms staff, law enforcement, government employees, legislators, victims, parents, and groups that offer online training to schools, found that despite the harm that nonconsensual content causes, the practice has been normalized by mainstream online platforms and certain online communities.

“Respondents told us there is a sense of normalization or legitimacy among those who create and share AI CSAM,” the report said. “This perception is fueled by open discussions in clear web forums, a sense of community through the sharing of tips, the accessibility of nudify apps, and the presence of community members in countries where AI CSAM is legal.”

The report says that while children may recognize that AI-generating nonconsensual content is wrong they can assume “it’s legal, believing that if it were truly illegal, there wouldn’t be an app for it.” The report, which cites several 404 Media stories about this issue, notes that this normalization is in part a result of many “nudify” apps being available on the Google and Apple app stores, and that their ability to AI-generate nonconsensual nudity is openly advertised to students on Google and social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok. One NGO employee told the authors of the report that “there are hundreds of nudify apps” that lack basic built-in safety features to prevent the creation of CSAM, and that even as an expert in the field he regularly encounters AI tools he’s never heard of, but that on certain social media platforms “everyone is talking about them.”

The report notes that while 38 U.S. states now have laws about AI CSAM and the newly signed federal Take It Down Act will further penalize AI CSAM, states “failed to anticipate that student-on-student cases would be a common fact pattern. As a result, that wave of legislation did not account for child offenders. Only now are legislators beginning to respond, with measures such as bills defining student-on-student use of nudify apps as a form of cyberbullying.”

One law enforcement officer told the researchers how accessible these apps are. “You can download an app in one minute, take a picture in 30 seconds, and that child will be impacted for the rest of their life,” they said.

One student victim interviewed for the report said that she struggled to believe that someone actually AI-generated nude images of her when she first learned about them. She knew other students used AI for writing papers, but was not aware people could use AI to create nude images. “People will start rumors about anything for no reason,” she said. “It took a few days to believe that this actually happened.”

Another victim and her mother interviewed for the report described the shock of seeing the images for the first time. “Remember Photoshop?” the mother asked, “I thought it would be like that. But it’s not. It looks just like her. You could see that someone might believe that was really her naked.”

One victim, whose original photo was taken from a non-social media site, said that someone took it and “ruined it by making it creepy [...] he turned it into a curvy boob monster, you feel so out of control.”

In an email from a victim to school staff, one victim said “I was unable to concentrate or feel safe at school. I felt very vulnerable and deeply troubled. The investigation, media coverage, meetings with administrators, no-contact order [against the perpetrator], and the gossip swirl distracted me from school and class work. This is a terrible way to start high school.”

One mother of a victim the researchers interviewed for the report feared that the images could crop up in the future, potentially affecting her daughter’s college applications, job opportunities, or relationships. “She also expressed a loss of trust in teachers, worrying that they might be unwilling to write a positive college recommendation letter for her daughter due to how events unfolded after the images were revealed,” the report said.

In 2024, Jason and I wrote a story about how one school in Washington state struggled to deal with its students using a nudify app on other students. The story showed how teachers and school administration weren’t familiar with the technology, and initially failed to report the incident to the police even though it legally qualified as “sexual abuse” and school administrators are “mandatory reporters.” 

According to the Stanford report, many teachers lack training on how to respond to a nudify incident at their school. A Center for Democracy and Technology report found that 62% of teachers say their school has not provided guidance on policies for handling incidents

involving authentic or AI nonconsensual intimate imagery. A 2024 survey of teachers and principals found that 56 percent did not get any training on “AI deepfakes.” One provider told the authors of the report that while many schools have crisis management plans for “active shooter situations, they had never heard of a school having a crisis management plan for a nudify incident, or even for a real nude image of a student being circulated.”

The report makes several recommendations to schools, like providing victims with third-party counseling services and academic accommodations, drafting language to communicate with the school community when an incident occurs, ensuring that students are not discouraged or punished for reporting incidents, and contacting the school’s legal counsel to assess the school’s legal obligations, including its responsibility as a “mandatory reporter.” 

The authors also emphasized the importance of anonymous tip lines that allow students to report incidents safely. It cites two incidents that were initially discovered this way, one in Pennsylvania where a students used the state’s Safe2Say Something tipline to report that students were AI-generating nude images of their peers, and another school in Washington that first learned about a nudify incident through a submission to the school’s harassment, intimidation, and bullying online tipline. 

One provider of training to schools emphasized the importance of such reporting tools, saying, “Anonymous reporting tools are one of the most important things we can have in our school systems,” because many students lack a trusted adult they can turn to.

Notably, the report does not take a position on whether schools should educate students about nudify apps because “there are legitimate concerns that this instruction could inadvertently educate students about the existence of these apps.”

If you’ve left a comment on a YouTube video, a new website claims it might be able to find every comment you’ve ever left on any video you’ve ever watched. Then an AI can build a profile of the commenter and guess where you live, what languages you speak, and what your politics might be.

The service is called YouTube-Tools and is just the latest in a suite of web-based tools that started life as a site to investigate League of Legends usernames. Now it uses a modified large language model created by the company Mistral to generate a background report on YouTube commenters based on their conversations. Its developer claims it's meant to be used by the cops, but anyone can sign up. It costs about $20 a month to use and all you need to get started is a credit card and an email address.

Content warning: This article contains descriptions of sexual harassment.

Judd Stone, the former Solicitor General of Texas resigned from his position in 2023 following sexual harassment complaints from colleagues in which he allegedly discussed “a disturbing sexual fantasy [he] had about me being violently anally raped by a cylindrical asteroid in front of my wife and children,” according to documents filed this week as part of a lawsuit against Judd.

“Judd publicly described this in excruciating detail over a long period of time, to a group of Office of Attorney General employees,” an internal letter written by Brent Webster, the first assistant attorney general of Texas, about the incident reads. The lawsuit was first reported by Bloomberg Law.

So, you’ve got a receding hairline in 2025. You could visit a dermatologist, sure, or you could try a new crop of websites that will deliver your choice of drugs on demand after a video call with a telehealth physician. There’s Rogaine and products from popular companies like Hims, or if you have an appetite for the experimental, you might find yourself at Anagen. 

Anagen works a lot like Hims—some of its physicians have even worked there, according to their LinkedIn profiles and the Hims website—but take a closer look at the drugs on offer and you’ll start to notice the difference. Its Growth Maxi formula, which sells for $49.99 per month, contains Finasteride and Minoxidil; two drugs that are in Hims’ hair regrowth products. But it also contains Liothyronine, a thyroid medication also known as T3 that the Mayo Clinic warns may temporarily cause hair loss if taken orally. Keep reading and you’ll see Latanoprost, a glaucoma drug. Who came up with this stuff anyway?

The group behind the Anagen storefront and products it sells is HairDAO, a “decentralized autonomous organization” founded in 2023 by New York-based cryptocurrency investors Andrew Verbinnen and Andrew Bakst. HairDAO aims to harness the efforts of legions of online biohackers already trying to cure their hair loss with off-label drugs. Verbinnen and Bakst’s major innovation is to inject cash into this scenario: DAO participants are incentivized with crypto tokens they earn by contributing to research, or uploading blood work to an app. 

DAOs have been a locus for some of the more out-there activities in the crypto space over the years. Not only are they vehicles for profit if their tokens appreciate in value, but token-holders vote on group decisions. This gives many DAOs an upstart, democratic flavor. For example, ConstitutionDAO infamously tried—and ultimately failed—to buy an original copy of the US Constitution and turn it into a financial asset. HairDAO exists in a subset of this culture called DeSci (decentralized science), which includes DAOs dedicated to funding research on everything from longevity to monetizing your DNA.

Depending on who you ask, it’s either the best thing to happen to hair loss research in decades, or far from it. “They're telling the world, hey, this works,” says a hair loss YouTuber who goes by KwRx and who has arguably been HairDAO’s loudest online critic. “It’s a recipe for disaster.”

HairDAO has turned self-experimentation by its DIY hair loss scientists into research being run in conjunction with people like Dr. Claire Higgins, a researcher at Imperial College London, as well as at its own lab. And, ultimately, into products sold via Anagen. It also sells an original shampoo formula called FolliCool for $49.95 per 200 ml bottle. 

“The best hair loss researchers are basically anons on the internet,” Bakst said on a recent podcast appearance. “Of the four studies that we've run at universities, two of the four were fully designed by anons in our Discord server. And then, now that we have our own lab, all the studies we're running there are designed by anons in our Discord server.”

Dan, who asked to remain anonymous, is just another person on the internet trying to cure their hair loss. He’s experimented by adding melatonin to topical Minoxidil, he says, and he claims he has experienced “serious, lasting side effects” from Finasteride. 

One day, he came across the HairDAO YouTube channel, where interviews with researchers like Dr. Ralf Paus from the University of Miami’s Miller School of Medicine immediately appealed to him.

“These were very interesting, offering deep insights into hair loss—much better than surface-level discussions you typically find on Reddit,” Dan says over Discord. 

To him, it seemed like HairDAO brought a level of rigor to the freewheeling online world of DIY hair loss biohacking, where “group buys” of off-label drugs from overseas are a longstanding practice. If you’ve heard of the real-life Dallas Buyers Club of the 1980s, where AIDS patients pooled funds to buy experimental treatments, then you get the idea. 

“People have become more skeptical and smarter about these things, realizing the importance of proper research, scientific methods, and evidence,” says Dan. “That’s where HairDAO comes in. I hope it succeeds because it could channel the energy behind the ‘biohacking’ spirit and transform it into something useful.”

There is no better example of this ideal than Jumpman, a pseudonymous researcher referred to in Hair Cuts, a digital magazine HairDAO publishes to update members on progress, as their “king,” “lead researcher,” “lord and savior,” and by Verbinnen as “the best hair loss researcher by a wide margin.” He earned thousands of crypto tokens with his contributions and is credited with pushing HairDAO to look at TWIST-1 and PAI-1, proteins that are implicated in different cancers, to search for new treatments that inhibit their expression.

One much-discussed drug is TM5441, a PAI-1 inhibitor that has been investigated to treat cancer as well as lowering blood pressure. It’s often called “TM” by Discord members. 

“Bullish on TM,” Bakst says in a May 2023 Discord exchange. 

“Yeah your blood may have trouble clotting,” he says, acknowledging the potential side effects. “Don't ride motorcycles if you're taking it haha.” Despite this, he’s engaged with users about how they should use it on themselves. 

“I’d think it may be best to apply [TM] topically vs orally, just based on ability to target locally more frequently,” he says in an April 2024 Discord exchange with a user who was debating “upping the doses” of the drug, thinking it could be “a good hack.” Bakst added, “~not medical advice~.” 

Discussion of group buys isn’t allowed in the HairDAO Discord. When one user brought up the topic in August last year, Verbinnen chimed in, “None of this here.” But one risk that comes with funding anonymous internet researchers experimenting with unproven drugs is that they might not play by the rules. 

In messages pulled from a now-deleted Telegram channel seen by 404 Media, Jumpman discusses buying over half a kilogram of TM6541—another PAI-1 inhibitor—and says that the drug “will be ready in 6 weeks.” Jumpman also shares photos showing bags of pill bottles and says, “these are shipping out next week.” The labels on the bottles aren’t readable, and 404 Media can’t confirm if they actually shipped. Jumpman could not be reached for comment. It’s not clear whether the Telegram chat was officially linked to HairDAO, but it included HairDAO members other than Jumpman. In another Telegram message, a user says, “Guys, stop using TM, I found blood in the semen, after [several] tests, the doctor said it’s due to [blood pressure medications], careful.” 

“Maybe you were taking too much TM to cause internal bleeding,” Jumpman responds. 

Dan says this exchange didn’t worry him at the time. “The ‘blood in his semen’ thing happened to me once as well but I was not on any medications and [the] doctor told me it can happen sometimes and it’s not dangerous,” he says. “So I am hopeful that [the user] is alright, and that it resolved quickly, and that whatever he experimented with didn’t hurt him... does it concern or worry me personally? Not really because I don’t plan to use TM.”

Indeed, according to the Mayo Clinic, blood in semen—a condition known as hematospermia—most often goes away on its own, without any treatment. The Cleveland Clinic adds that it’s usually not a sign of a serious health problem and could be caused by a blood vessel bursting while masturbating, like blowing your nose too hard. Both organizations recommend consulting a doctor. 

Jumpman may have actually been on to something with his focus on PAI-1 in particular. Douglas Vaughan is the director of the Potocsnak Longevity Institute at Northwestern University. PAI-1 inhibition is a longtime focus of his research. He has studied Amish populations in Indiana, for example, because of a mutation that inhibits PAI-1 and may protect against different effects of aging. He’s also investigated PAI-1, and TM5441, for hair loss—completely by accident.

“We were thinking, well, someday somebody's going to want to make a drug that blocks PAI-1. Why don't we make a mouse that makes too much of it?” Vaughan tells 404 Media. After engineering the mice, chock full of human PAI-1, he noticed something unexpected. 

“Those mice were bald,” he says. He began working with Toshio Miyati, a professor at Tohoku University in Japan, who convinced Vaughan to try the drug TM5441 on the mice. 

“He sent me a drug that was called TM5441, and we simply put it in the chow of our transgenic mice. We fed it to them for several weeks, and lo and behold, they started growing hair. I said, well, how about that?” he says. 

But, he cautioned, people shouldn’t try TM5441 on themselves to cure their hair loss. “I think it’s foolish,” says Vaughan. “There are all kinds of reasons why you might take a drug or not, but usually you want to go through the regulatory steps to see that it's proven to be safe and effective.”

While TM has been much-discussed by HairDAO members, and it’s currently listed as a “treatment” on its online portal for people to discuss treatments and upload bloodwork, it isn’t named as a drug that HairDAO is formally investigating or sold to the public by Anagen. Vaugn says he was contacted by the group over a year ago, but a research partnership never materialized. Today, the group is pushing forward with investigating different drugs inhibiting TWIST-1 instead. 

“In general, if you're an individual person and you're experimenting on yourself, that is frequently outside the scope of regulation,” says Patricia Zettler, an associate professor at The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law who previously served as Deputy General Counsel to the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services (HHS). 

“Where biohacking activities tend to intersect with existing regulatory regimes, whether at the federal level or the state level, is when people start giving drugs, selling drugs, or distributing drugs to other people,” she adds. 

It’s unclear how much interaction HairDAO has had with regulatory bodies. Messages posted in Discord reference FDA consultants and gathering materials to submit to the agency. 

Last year, the YouTuber KrWx created a series of videos and Substack posts airing his concerns with HairDAO’s DIY approach, generally labelling it dangerous and possibly illegal. He received a cease and desist letter from the group’s lawyers, seen by 404 Media, calling his claims false and defamatory. The merit of KrWx’s claims aside, his spotlight kicked off major shifts in the DAO’s Discord. 

For one, Jumpman disappeared. 

Andrew Bakst sits wearing a white lab coat, blue-gloved hands holding testing equipment. He looks at the camera. “PCR,” he says. “...PCR.” The cameraperson, a Discord user who uploaded the video in early April, laughs. “Got to repeat shit when we’re in the lab late at night.”

This New York-based lab space, opened in November, is where much of HairDAO’s latest work happens—already a far cry from the Jumpman era, just a few months after he vanished. The group is currently pursuing preclinical testing on three different protein targets and drugs, and claims to have filed for six patents. This work includes, for example, testing drugs on mouse skin. 

“We also tested drug penetration on dry versus damp mouse skin,” Verbinnen wrote in an April Discord message, adding that "drugs penetrate damp skin much more than dry skin at least in the mouse model."

HairDAO has even run a human trial for T3, the thyroid drug that it sells via Anagen, involving six patients including Verbinnen and Bakst. In that trial, the participants were given a topical ointment to apply to their scalps, and the hair growth results were measured at the end of a year-long period. That research resulted in a preprint paper, which is available online. 

“It is important to note that this study involved only six participants, which is a small sample size,” a disclaimer on the study included in an update for DAO members explains. “As such, we make no claims about the safety or efficacy of topical T3 based on these results.”

The Anagen listings for its T3 formulations promise “outstanding” and “maximum” results.  

HairDAO conducts this work in collaboration with a handful of accredited researchers. The group says the T3 trial was “overseen” by Dr. Richard Powell, a Florida-based hair transplant surgeon whose name does not appear on the author list. Powell has close ties to HairDAO’s Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Blake Bloxham. The website for Powell’s practice says that it “exclusively uses in-house hair transplant technicians trained by Dr. Alan Feller and Dr. Blake Bloxham.” A 2023 YouTube video describes Powell as “part of Feller & Bloxham Medical.” An early draft of the T3 study design even indicates that both Powell and Bloxham would oversee it. 

According to messages posted to Discord by the founders, Bloxham has a 49 percent stake in Anagen’s US operations. He’s even participated in the business side of expanding the service, such as by setting up corporate entities, according to Discord posts. 

The T3 study discloses several conflicts of interest—including that HairDAO has filed a patent—but does not mention Powell or Bloxham, as they are not listed as study authors. When reached for comment over email, Bloxham initially said, “I’d love to answer any questions you have. In fact, I’d be happy to discuss HairDAO/Anagen in general; who we are, what we do, and why we do it. Pretty interesting stuff!” He did not respond to multiple follow-ups sent over email and Discord. In fact, none of HairDAO’s research collaborators contacted by 404 Media, including Powell, Paus, and Higgins, responded to requests for comment. 

Verbinnen and Bakst did not respond to multiple requests for comment sent over email and Discord. 

In the latest issue of Hair Cuts, HairDAO claims that Anagen earned $1,000 in its first two days of sales. As for its shampoo, FolliCool, it says that it has sold $29,000 worth of product. Meanwhile, its crypto token is worth roughly $25 a pop, down from a high of $150, with a market cap of over $16 million. 

Its marketing costs to date? $0.

This week is a bumper episode all about Flock, the automatic license plate reading (ALPR) cameras across the U.S. First, Jason explains how we found that ICE essentially has backdoor access to the network through local cops. After the break, Joseph tells us all about Nova, the planned product that Flock is making which will make the technology even more invasive by using hacked data. In the subscribers-only section, Emanuel details the massive changes AI platform Civitai has made, and why it's partly in response to our reporting.

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.

• ICE Taps into Nationwide AI-Enabled Camera Network, Data Shows
• License Plate Reader Company Flock Is Building a Massive People Lookup Tool, Leak Shows
• Civitai Ban of Real People Content Deals Major Blow to the Nonconsensual AI Porn Ecosystem

Civitai, an AI model sharing site backed by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) that 404 Media has repeatedly shown is being used to generate nonconsensual adult content, is banning AI models designed to generate the likeness of real people, the site announced Friday.

The policy change, which Civitai attributes in part to new AI regulations in the U.S. and Europe, is the most recent in a flurry of updates Civitai has made under increased pressure from payment processing service providers and 404 Media’s reporting. This recent change, will, at least temporarily, significantly hamper the ecosystem for creating nonconsensual AI-generated porn. 

“We are removing models and images depicting real-world individuals from the platform. These resources and images will be available to the uploader for a short period of time before being removed,” Civitai said in its announcement. “This change is a requirement to continue conversations with specialist payment partners and has to be completed this week to prepare for their service.”

Earlier this month, Civitai updated its policies to ban certain types of adult content and introduced further restrictions around content depicting the likeness of real people in order to comply with requests from an unnamed payment processing service provider. This attempt to appease the payment processing service provider ultimately failed. On May 20, Civitai announced that the provider cut off the site, which currently can’t process credit card payments, though it says it will get a new provider soon. 

“We know this will be frustrating for many creators and users. We’ve spoken at length about the value of likeness content, and this decision wasn’t made lightly,” Civitai’s statement about banning content depicting the likeness of real people said. “But we’re now facing an increasingly strict regulatory landscape - one evolving rapidly across multiple countries.”

The announcement specifically cites President Donald Trump’s recent signing of the Take It Down Act, which criminalizes and holds platforms liable for nonconsensual AI-generated adult content, and the EU AI Act, a comprehensive piece of AI regulation that was enacted last year.

As I’ve reported since 2023, Civitai’s policies against nonconsensual adult content did little to diminish the site’s actual crucial role in the AI-generated nonconsensual content ecosystem. Civitai’s policy allowed people to upload custom AI image generation models (LoRAs, checkpoints, etc) designed to recreate the likeness of real people. These models were mostly of huge movie stars and minor internet celebrities, but as our reporting has shown, also completely random, private people. Civitai also allowed users to share custom AI image generation models designed to depict extremely specific and graphic sex acts and fetishes, but it always banned users from producing nonconsensual nudity or porn. 

However, by embedding in huge online spaces dedicated to creating and sharing nonconsensual content, I saw how easily people put these two types of models together. Civitai users couldn’t generate and share those models on Civitai, but they could download the models, combine them, generate nonconsensual porn of real people locally on their machines or on various cloud computing services, and post them to porn sites, Telegram, and social media. I’ve seen people in these spaces explain over and over again how easy it was to create nonconsensual porn of YouTubers, Twitch streamers, or barely known Instagram users by using models to Civitai and linking to those models hosted on Civitai.

One Telegram channel dedicated to AI-generating nonconsensual porn reacted to Civitai’s announcement with several users encouraging others to grab as many AI models of real people as they could before Civitai removed them. On this Telegram, users complained that these models were already removed, and my searches of the site have shown the same. 

“The removal of those models really affect me [sic],” one prolific creator of nonconsensual content in the Telegram channel said. 

When Civitai first announced that it was being pressured by its payment processing service provider several users started an archiving project to save all the models on the site before they were removed. A Discord server dedicated to this project now has over 100 members, but it appears Civitai has made many models inaccessible sooner than these users anticipated. One member of the archiving project said that there “are many thousands such models which cannot be backed up.”

Unfortunately, while Civitai’s recent policy changes and especially its removal of AI models of real people for now appears to have impacted people who make nonconsensual AI-generated porn, it’s unlikely that the change will slow them down for long. The people who originally created the models can always upload them to other sites, including some that have already positioned themselves as Civitai competitors. 

It’s also unclear how Civitai intends to keep users from uploading AI models designed to generate the likeness of real people who are not well-known celebrities, as automated systems would not be able to detect these models. 

Civitai's CEO Justin Maier told me in an email that "Uploaders must identify any content that depicts a real person; those uploads are automatically rejected." He also said the site uses a company called Clavata to flag well-known public figures, that people can "file a likeness claim" that will be reviewed and removed in 24 hours, and that it's piloting "an opt-in service with a third-party vendor so individuals can register a privacy-preserving face hash and have future uploads blocked at submission."

"No system is perfect with billions of unique faces, but combining these layers gives us the best coverage currently available for both celebrities and private individuals," Maier said. "We’ll keep tuning the models and expanding the registry pilot as the technology matures."

Update: This story has been updated with comment from Civitai CEO Justin Maier.

Data from a license plate-scanning tool that is primarily marketed as a surveillance solution for small towns to combat crimes like car jackings or finding missing people is being used by ICE, according to data reviewed by 404 Media. Local police around the country are performing lookups in Flock’s AI-powered automatic license plate reader (ALPR) system for “immigration” related searches and as part of other ICE investigations, giving federal law enforcement side-door access to a tool that it currently does not have a formal contract for.

The massive trove of lookup data was obtained by researchers who asked to remain anonymous to avoid potential retaliation and shared with 404 Media. It shows more than 4,000 nation and statewide lookups by local and state police done either at the behest of the federal government or as an “informal” favor to federal law enforcement, or with a potential immigration focus, according to statements from police departments and sheriff offices collected by 404 Media. It shows that, while Flock does not have a contract with ICE, the agency sources data from Flock’s cameras by making requests to local law enforcement. The data reviewed by 404 Media was obtained using a public records request from the Danville, Illinois Police Department, and shows the Flock search logs from police departments around the country.

As part of a Flock search, police have to provide a “reason” they are performing the lookup. In the “reason” field for searches of Danville’s cameras, officers from across the U.S. wrote “immigration,” “ICE,” “ICE+ERO,” which is ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations, the section that focuses on deportations; “illegal immigration,” “ICE WARRANT,” and other immigration-related reasons. Although lookups mentioning ICE occurred across both the Biden and Trump administrations, all of the lookups that explicitly list “immigration” as their reason were made after Trump was inaugurated, according to the data.

“Like these games you will,” the quote next to a cartoon image of Yoda says on the website starwarsweb.net. Those games include Star Wars Battlefront 2 for Xbox; Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II for Xbox 360, and Star Wars the Clone Wars: Republic Heroes for Nintendo Wii. Next to that, are links to a Star Wars online store with the tagline “So you Wanna be a Jedi?” and an advert for a Lego Star Wars set.

The site looks like an ordinary Star Wars fan website from around 2010. But starwarsweb.net was actually a tool built by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to covertly communicate with its informants in other countries, according to an amateur security researcher. The site was part of a network of CIA sites that were first discovered by Iranian authorities more than ten years ago before leading to a wave of deaths of CIA sources in China in the early 2010s.

Welcome back to the Abstract!

We begin this week with some scatalogical salvation. I dare not say more. 

Then, swimming without a brain: It happens more often than you might think. Next, what was bigger as a baby than it is today? Hint: It’s still really big! And to close out, imagine the sights you’ll see with your infrared vision as you ride an elevator down to Mars. 

Fighting the Climate Crisis, One Poop at a Time

Boyer, Matthew et al. “Penguin guano is an important source of climate-relevant aerosol particles in Antarctica.” Communications Earth & Environment. 

The path to a more stable climate in Antarctica runs through the buttholes of penguins. 

Penguin guano, the copious excrement produced by the birds, is rich in ammonia and methylamine gas. Scientists have now discovered that these guano-borne gasses stimulate particle formation that leads to clouds and aerosols which, in turn, cool temperatures in the remote region. As a consequence, guano “may represent an important climate feedback as their habitat changes,” according to a new study. 

“Our observations show that penguin colonies are a large source of ammonia in coastal Antarctica, whereas ammonia originating from the Southern Ocean is, in comparison, negligible,” said researchers led by Matthew Boyer of the University of Helsinki. “Dimethylamine, likely originating from penguin guano, also participates in the initial steps of particle formation, effectively boosting particle formation rates up to 10,000 times.”

Boyer and his colleagues captured their measurements from a site near Marambio Base on the Antarctica Peninsula, in the austral summer of 2023. At times when the site was downwind of a nearby colony of 60,000 Adelie penguins, the atmospheric ammonia concentration spiked to 1,000 times higher than baseline. Moreover, the ammonia levels remained elevated for more than a month after the penguins migrated from the area. 

“The penguin guano ‘fertilized’ soil, also known as ornithogenic soil, continued to be a strong source of ammonia long after they left the site,” said the team. “Our data demonstrates that there are local hotspots around the coast of Antarctica that can yield ammonia concentrations similar in magnitude to agricultural plots during summer…This suggests that coastal penguin/bird colonies could also comprise an important source of aerosol away from the coast.” 

“It is already understood that widespread loss of sea ice extent threatens the habitat, food sources, and breeding behavior of most penguin species that inhabit Antarctica,” the researchers continued. “Consequently, some Antarctic penguin populations are already declining, and some species could be nearly extinct by the end of the 21st century. We provide evidence that declining penguin populations could cause a positive climate warming feedback in the summertime Antarctic atmosphere, as proposed by a modeling study of seabird emissions in the Arctic region.”

The power of penguin poop truly knows no earthly bounds. Guano, already famous as a super-fertilizer and a pillar of many ecosystems, is also creating clouds out of thin air, with macro knock-on effects. These guano hotspots act as a bulwark against a rapidly changing climate in Antarctica, which is warming twice as fast as the rest of the world. We’ll need every tool we can get to curb climate change: penguin bums, welcome aboard.

A Swim Meet for Microbes

Hartl, Benedikt et al. “Neuroevolution of decentralized decision-making in N-bead swimmers leads to scalable and robust collective locomotion.” Communications Physics.

The word “brainless” is bandied about as an insult, but the truth is that lots of successful lifeforms get around just fine without a brain. For instance, microbes can locomote through fluids—a complex action—with no centralized nervous system. Naturally, scientists were like, “what’s that all about?” 

“So far, it remains unclear how decentralized decision-making in a deformable microswimmer can lead to efficient collective locomotion of its body parts,” said researchers led by Benedikt Hartl of TU Wien and Tufts University. “We thus investigate biologically motivated decentralized yet collective decision-making strategies of the swimming behavior of a generalized…swimmer.”

The upshot: Decentralized circuits regulate movements in brainless swimmers, an insight that could inspire robotic analogs for drug delivery and other functions. However, the real tip-of-the-hat goes to the concept artist for the above depiction of the team’s bead-based simulated microbe, who shall hereafter be known as Beady the Deformable Microswimmer.

Big Jupiter in Little Solar System

Batygin, Konstantin and Adams, Fred. “Determination of Jupiter’s primordial physical state.” Nature Astronomy.

Jupiter is pretty dang big at this current moment. More than 1,000 Earths could fit inside the gas giant; our planet is a mere gumball on these scales. But at the dawn of our solar system 4.5 billion years ago, Jupiter was at least twice as massive as it is today, and its magnetic field was 50 times stronger, according to a new study. 

“Our calculations reveal that Jupiter was 2 to 2.5 times as large as it is today, 3.8 [million years] after the formation of the first solids in the Solar System,”  said authors Konstantin Batygin of the California Institute of Technology and Fred Adams of the University of Michigan. “Our findings…provide an evolutionary snapshot that pins down properties of the Jovian system at the end of the protosolar nebula’s lifetime.”

The team based their conclusions on the subtle orbital tilts of two of Jupiter’s tiny moons Amalthea and Thebe, which allowed them to reconstruct conditions in the early Jovian system. It’s nice to see Jupiter’s more offbeat moons get some attention; Europa is always hogging the spotlight. (Fun fact: lots of classic sci-fi stories are set on Amalthea, from Boris and Arkady Strugatsky’s “The Way to Amaltha” to Arthur C. Clarke’s “Jupiter Five.”)

Now That’s Infracredible

Ma, Yuqian et al. “Near-infrared spatiotemporal color vision in humans enabled by upconversion contact lenses.” Cell. 

I was hooked on this new study by the second sentence, which reads: “However, the capability to detect invisible multispectral infrared light with the naked eye is highly desirable.” 

Okay, let's assume that the public is out there, highly desiring infrared vision, though I would like to see some poll-testing. A team has now developed an upconversion contact-lens (UCL) that detects near-infrared light (NIR) and converts it into blue, green and red wavelengths. While this is not the kind of inborn infrared vision you’d see in sci-fi, it does expand our standard retinal retinue, with fascinating results. 

“Humans wearing upconversion contact lenses (UCLs) could accurately recognize near-infrared (NIR) temporal information like Morse code and discriminate NIR pattern images,” said researchers led by Yuqian Ma of the University of Science and Technology of China. “Interestingly, both mice and humans with UCLs exhibited better discrimination of NIR light compared with visible light when their eyes were closed, owing to the penetration capability of NIR light.”  

The study reminds me of the legendary scene in Battlestar Galactica where Dean Stockwell, as John Cavil, exclaims: “I don't want to be human. I want to see gamma rays, I want to hear X-rays, and I want to smell dark matter.” Maybe he just needed some upgraded contact lenses! 

Hold the Door! (to Mars)

Aslanov, Vladimir. “An anchored space elevator under the L1 Mars-Phobos libration point.” Acta Astronautica.

This week in space elevator news, why not set one up on the Martian moon Phobos? A new study envisions anchoring a tether to Phobos, a dinky little space potato that’s about the size of Manhattan, and extending it out some 3,700 miles, almost to the surface of Mars. Because Phobos is tidally locked to Mars (the same side always faces the planet), it might be possible to shuttle back and forth between Mars and Phobos on a tether. 

“The building of such a space elevator [is] a feasible project in the not too distant future,” said author Vladimir Aslanov of the Moscow Aviation Institute. “Such a project could form the basis of many missions to explore Phobos, Mars and the space around them.”

Indeed, this is far from the first time scientists have pondered the advantages of a Phobian space elevator. Just don’t be the jerk that pushes all the buttons. 

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 the benefits of spending 14 hours a day on the internet, getting cozy for AI slop, and a what a new law in Sweden means for the rest of us.

JOSEPH: So I don’t cover generative AI anywhere near as much as Emanuel, Sam, or Jason. Sometimes I think that’s a benefit, especially for the podcast, because I can ask questions more as an outsider or observer than someone deep in the weeds about all these different models and things, then the others can provide their expertise.

As a general outsider or just ordinary passive consumer of AI slop now that it’s ubiquitous, I saw videos this week that I’m sure many other people did: those from Google’s Veo 3.

Here’s a quick selection of ones I came across:

• A musical about garlic bread
• A very British newsreader announcing the presumed death of J.K. Rowling
• Interviewing people at this car show (except the misspelling of Hell’s Angels on the biker’s jacket)

Fans reading through the romance novel Darkhollow Academy: Year 2 got a nasty surprise last week in chapter 3. In the middle of steamy scene between the book’s heroine and the dragon prince Ash there’s this: "I've rewritten the passage to align more with J. Bree's style, which features more tension, gritty undertones, and raw emotional subtext beneath the supernatural elements:"

It appeared as if author, Lena McDonald, had used an AI to help write the book, asked it to imitate the style of another author, and left behind evidence they’d done so in the final work. As of this writing, Darkhollow Academy: Year 2 is hard to find on Amazon. Searching for it on the site won’t show the book, but a Google search will. 404 Media was able to purchase a copy and confirm that the book no longer contains the reference to copying Bree’s style. But screenshots of the graph remain in the book’s Amazon reviews and Goodreads page.

This is not the first time an author has left behind evidence of AI-generation in a book, it’s not even the first one this year. 

Pocket, an app for saving and reading articles later, is shutting down on July 8, Mozilla announced today. 

The company sent an email with the subject line “Important Update: Pocket is Saying Goodbye,” around 2 p.m. EST and I immediately started wailing when I saw it. 

“You’ll be able to keep using the app and browser extensions until then. However, starting May 22, 2025, you won’t be able to download the apps or purchase a new Pocket Premium subscription,” the announcement says. Users can export saved articles until October 8, 2025, after which point all Pocket accounts and data will be permanently deleted. 

Hackers On Planet Earth (HOPE), the iconic and long-running hacking conference, says far fewer people have bought tickets for the event this year as compared to last, with organizers believing it is due to the Trump administration’s mass deportation efforts and more aggressive detainment of travellers into the U.S.

“We are roughly 50 percent behind last year’s sales, based on being 3 months away from the event,” Greg Newby, one of HOPE’s organizers, told 404 Media in an email. According to hacking collective and magazine 2600, which organizes HOPE, the conference usually has around 1,000 attendees and the event is almost entirely funded by ticket sales. “Having fewer international attendees hurts the conference program, as well as the bottom line,” a planned press release says.

On Tuesday, Google revealed the latest and best version of its AI video generator, Veo 3. It’s impressive not only in the quality of the video it produces, but also because it can generate audio that is supposed to seamlessly sync with the video. I’m probably going to test Veo 3 in the coming weeks like we test many new AI tools, but one odd feature I already noticed about it is that it’s obsessed with one particular dad joke, which raises questions about what kind of content Veo 3 is able to produce and how it was trained. 

This morning I saw that an X user who was playing with Veo 3 generated a video of a stand up comedian telling a joke. The joke was: “I went to the zoo the other day, there was only one dog in it, it was a Shih Tzu.” As in: “shit zoo.”

Other users quickly replied that the joke was posted to Reddit’s r/dadjokes community two years ago, and to the r/jokes community 12 years ago.

I started testing Google’s new AI video generator to see if I could get it to generate other jokes I could trace back to specific Reddit posts. This would not be definitive proof that Reddit provided the training data that resulted in a specific joke, but is a likely theory because we know Google is paying Reddit $60 million a year to license its content for training its AI models. 

To my surprise, when I used the same prompt as the X user above—”a man doing stand up comedy in a small venue tells a joke (include the joke in the dialogue)”—I got a slightly different looking video, but the exact same joke.

And when I changed the prompt a bit—”a man doing stand up comedy tells a joke (include the joke in the dialogue)”—I still got a slightly different looking video with the exact same joke.

Google did not respond to a request for comment, so it’s impossible to say why its AI video generator is producing the same exact dad joke even when it’s not prompted to do so, and where exactly it sourced that joke. It could be from Reddit, but it could also be from many other places where the Shih Tzu joke has appeared across the internet, including YouTube, Threads, Instagram, Quora, icanhazdadjoke.com, houzz.com, Facebook, Redbubble, and Twitter, to name just a few. In other words, it’s a canonical corny dad joke of no clear origin that’s been posted online many times over the years, so it’s impossible to say where Google got it. 

But it’s also not clear why this is the only coherent joke Google’s new AI video generator will produce. I’ve tried changing the prompts several times, and the result is either the Shih Tzu joke, gibberish, or incomplete fragments of speech that are not jokes. 

One prompt that was almost identical to the one that produced the Shih Tzu joke resulted in a video of a stand up comedian saying he got a letter from the bank.

The prompt “a man telling a joke at a bar” resulted in a video of a man saying the idiom “you can’t have your cake and eat it too.” 

The prompt “man tells a joke on stage” resulted in a video of a man saying some gibberish, then saying he went to the library.

Admittedly, these videos are hilarious in an absurd Tim & Eric kind of way because no matter what nonsense the comedian is saying the crowd always erupts into laughter, but it also clearly shows Google’s latest and greatest AI video generator is creatively limited in some ways. This is not the case with other generative AI tools, including Google’s own Gemini. When I asked Gemini to tell me a joke, the chatbot instantly produced different, coherent dad jokes. And when I asked it to do it over and over again, it always produced a different joke.  

Again, it’s impossible to say what Veo 3 is doing behind the scenes without Google’s input, but one possible theory is that its falling back to a safe, known joke, rather than producing the type of content that embarrassed the company in the past, be it instructing users to eat glue or, or generating Nazi soldiers as people of color.  

Participating in interactive adult live-streams or ordering custom porn clips are about to be punishable by a year in prison in Sweden, where a new law expands an already-problematic model of sex work criminalization to the internet.

Sex work in Sweden operates under the Nordic Model, also known as the “Equality,” “Entrapment,” or “End Demand Model,” which criminalizes buying sex but not selling sex. The text of the newly-passed bill (in the original Swedish here, and auto-translated to English here) states that criminal liability for the purchase of sexual services shouldn’t have to require physical contact between the buyer and seller anymore, and should expand to online sex work, too. 

Buying pre-recorded content, paying to follow an account where pornographic material is continuously posted, or otherwise consuming porn without influencing its content is outside of the scope of the law, the bill says. But live-streaming content where viewers interact with performers, as well as ordering custom clips, are illegal.

Criminalizing any part of the transaction of sex work has been shown to make the work more dangerous for all involved; data shows sex workers in Nordic Model countries like Sweden, Iceland, and France are put in more danger by this model, not made safer. But the objective of this model isn’t actually the increased safety of sex workers. It’s the total abolition of sex work. 

This law expands the model to cover online content, too—even if the performer and viewer have never met in person. “This is a new form of sex purchase, and it’s high time we modernise the legislation to include digital platforms,” Social Democrat MP Teresa Carvalho said, according to Euractiv. 

"Like most antiporn and anti-sex work legislation, the law is full of contradictions, all of which come at the expense of actual workers," Mike Stabile, director of public policy at U.S.-based adult industry advocacy organization the Free Speech Coalition. "Why is it legal to consume studio content, or stolen content, but illegal to pay a worker directly to create independent content? If you're really fighting exploitation, why would you take away avenues for independence and push people to work with third-party studios? Why is the consumer liable, but not a platform? These laws make no sense on their face because the goal is not actually to protect workers, but rather to eradicate commercial sex work entirely. Through that lens, it makes much more sense. This law is just another step in making the industry dangerous to work in and dangerous to access, to push it toward back alleys and black markets."

Sweden’s law isn’t isolated to European countries. In the U.S., Maine adopted the Nordic Model in 2023.

"I'm sure they would love to replicate this here, and while we're still a few steps away from them having the judicial clearance to do so, we've seen recently how quickly a moral or political imperative can shift," Stabile said. "People need to realize that criminalizing porn is not ever really about just criminalizing adult content — it's about criminalizing representations of sexuality and gender, and ultimately criminalizing those practices and communities."

The expansion of the law in Sweden goes into effect on July 1.  

Updated 5/21, 3:34 p.m. EST with comment from the Free Speech Coalition.

Kids say they are using pictures of Trump, YouTuber Markiplier, and the G-Man from Half-Life to bypass newly integrated age restriction software in the VR game Gorilla Tag.

Gorilla Tag is a popular game with a global reach and a young audience, which means it has to comply with complicated and contradictory laws aimed at protecting kids online. In Gorilla Tag, players control a legless ape avatar and use their arms to navigate the world and play games like, well, tag. Developer Another Axiom has had to contend with new and developing laws aimed at keeping kids safe online. The laws vary from state to state and country to country.

Researchers published a massive database of more than 2 billion Discord messages that they say they scraped using Discord’s public API. The data was pulled from 3,167 servers and covers posts made between 2015 and 2024, the entire time Discord has been active. 

Though the researchers claim they’ve anonymized the data, it’s hard to imagine anyone is comfortable with almost a decade of their Discord messages sitting in a public JSON file online. Separately, a different programmer released a Discord tool called "Searchcord" based on a different data set that shows non-anonymized chat histories.

We start this week with Jason's couple of stories about how the Chicago Sun-Times printed a summer guide that was basically all AI-generated. Jason spoke to the person behind it. After the break, a bunch of documents show that schools were simply not ready for AI. In the subscribers-only section, we chat all about Star Wars and those funny little guys.

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.

• Chicago Sun-Times Prints AI-Generated Summer Reading List With Books That Don't Exist
• Viral AI-Generated Summer Guide Printed by Chicago Sun-Times Was Made by Magazine Giant Hearst
• American Schools Were Deeply Unprepared for ChatGPT, Public Records Show
• Star Wars Shows the Future of AI Special Effects and It Sucks

The U.S. has one of the largest nuclear arsenals in the world. Its dream has long been that it could launch these nukes and suffer no repercussions for doing so. Ronald Reagan called it the  Strategic Defense Initiative. His critics called it Star Wars. Trump is calling it the “Golden Dome.” Scientists who’ve studied the issue say it’s pure fantasy.

One of Trump’s early executive orders tasked the Pentagon with coming up with an “Iron Dome for America” that could knock nuclear weapons and other missiles out of the sky before they hit U.S. targets. His supporters changed the name to the “Golden Dome” a few weeks later.

The idea—originally pioneered by Reagan—is to launch a bunch of satellites with interceptors that can knock missiles out of the sky before they hit America. Over the past seven decades, the U.S. has spent $400 billion on this dream. Thanks to Trump’s Golden Dome scheme, it’s about to spend $175 billions more.

In a press conference Tuesday, Trump announced that the project would start soon. “It’s something we want. Ronald Reagan wanted it many years ago but they didn’t have the technology,” Trump said during the press conference. He promised it would be “fully operation before the end of my term. So we’ll have it done in about three years.”

Trump claimed the system would be able to deal with all kinds of threats “Including hypersonic missiles, ballistic missiles, and advanced cruise missiles. All of them will be knocked out of the air. We will truly be completing the job that Ronald Reagan started 40 years ago, forever eliminating the missile threat to the American homeland,” he said. “The success rate is very close to 100 percent. Which is incredible when you think of it, you’re shooting bullets out of the air.”

Experts think this is bullshit.

In March, a team of volunteer scientists at the American Physical Society’s Panel on Public Affairs published a study that looked at how well missile defense could work. The report makes it clear that, no matter what the specifics, Trump’s plan for a Golden Dome is a fantasy.

The study was written by a “study group” of ten scientists and included Frederick K Lamb, an astrophysics expert at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; William Priedhorsky, a fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory; and Cynthia Nitta, a program director at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

404 Media reached out to the scientists with questions about why it’s hard to shoot nukes out of the sky and why Reagan’s dream of putting lasers in space doesn’t seem to die. Below is a copy of our correspondence, which was written collectively by 8 of the scientists.It’s been edited for length and clarity.

404 Media: What were the questions the team set out to answer when it started this work? 

In recent years, the U.S. program to develop defenses against long-range ballistic missiles has focused on systems that would defend the continental United States against relatively unsophisticated intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) that would use only a few relatively simple countermeasures and penetration aids. North Korea'’s ICBMs and ICBMs that might be deployed by Iran are thought to be of this kind. 

Previous reports were cautious or even pessimistic about the technical feasibility of defending against even these relatively unsophisticated ICBMs. The current study sought to determine whether the technological developments that have occurred during the past decade have changed the situation. 

What factor does the size of the United States play in building this kind of system? 

There are three phases in the flight of an ICBM and its warhead: the boost phase, during which the ICBM is in powered flight, which lasts three to five minutes; the midcourse phase, which begins when the ICBM releases its warhead, which then travels on a ballistic trajectory in space toward its target for about 20 to 30 minutes; and the terminal phase, which begins when the warhead re-enters Earth’s atmosphere and lasts until the warhead strikes its target, which takes about 30 seconds. 

The large geographical size of the United States is not especially important for defensive systems designed to intercept a missile or its warhead during the boost or midcourse phases, but it is a crucial factor for defensive systems designed to intercept the warhead during the terminal phase. The reason is that the geographical area that a terminal phase interceptor can defend, even if it works perfectly, is very limited. 

Israel’s Iron Dome interceptors can only partially defend small areas against slow, homemade rockets, but this can be useful if the area to be defended is very small, as Israel is. But the lower 48 of the United States alone have an area 375 times the area of Israel.

The interceptors of the Patriot, Aegis, and THAAD systems are much more capable than those of the Iron Dome, but even if they were used, a very large number would be needed to attempt to defend all important potential targets in the United States. This makes defending even this portion of the United States using terminal interceptors impractical. 

Why did you decide to narrowly focus on North Korean nukes? 

We chose to focus on the threat posed by these ICBMs for several reasons. First, the United States has deployed a system that could only defend against a limited attack by long-range ballistic missiles, which was understood to mean an attack using the smaller number of less sophisticated missiles that a country such as North Korea has, or that Iran might develop and deploy. Developing and deploying a system that might be able to defend against the numerically larger and more sophisticated ICBMs that Russia and China have would be even more challenging. 

A key purpose of this report was to explain why a defense against even the limited ICBM threat we considered is so technically challenging, and where the many technical difficulties lie. Our hope was that readers will come away with realistic views of the current capabilities of U.S. system intended to defend against the nuclear-armed ICBMs North Korea may have at present and an improved understanding of the prospects for being able to defend against the ICBMs North Korea might deploy within the next 15 years. In our assessment, the capability of the current U.S. system is low and will likely remain low for the next 15 years.

Why do you think the “dream” of this kind of system has such a strong hold on American leaders? 

Ever since nuclear-armed intercontinental-range missiles were deployed in the 1950s, the United States (and its potential adversaries) have been vulnerable to nuclear attack. This is very unnerving, and has caused our leaders to search for some kind of technical fix that would change this situation by making it possible for us to defend ourselves against such an attack. Fixing this situation is also very appealing to the public. As a consequence, new systems for defending against ICBMs have been proposed again and again, and about half a dozen have been built, costing large amounts of money, in the hope that a technical fix could be found that would make us safe. But none of these efforts have been successful, because the difficulty of defending against nuclear-armed ICBMs is so great. 

A constellation of about 16,000 interceptors would be needed to counter a rapid salvo of ten solid-propellant ICBMs like North Korea’s Hwasong-18, if they are launched automatically as soon as possible.

What are the issues with shooting down a missile midcourse?

The currently deployed midcourse defense system, the Ground-based Midcourse Defense, consists of ground-based interceptors. Most of them are based in Alaska but a few are in California. They would be fired when space-based infrared detectors and ground-based radars confirm that a hostile ICBM has been launched, using tracking information provided by these sensors. Once it is in space, each interceptor releases a single kill vehicle, which is designed to steer itself to collide with a target which it destroys by striking it. The relatively long, 20 to 30 minute duration of the midcourse phase can potentially provide enough time that more than one intercept attempt may be possible if the first attempt fails. 

However, attempting to intercept the warhead during the midcourse phase also has a disadvantage. During this phase the warhead moves in the near-vacuum of space, which provides the attacker with opportunities to confuse or overwhelm the defense. In the absence of air drag, relatively simple, lightweight decoys would follow the same trajectory as the warhead, and the warhead itself might be enclosed within a decoy balloon. 

Countermeasures such as these can make it difficult for the defense to pick out the warhead from among the many other objects that may accompany it. If the defense must engage all objects that could be warheads, its inventory of interceptors will be 

depleted. Furthermore, the radar and infrared sensors that are required to track, pick out, and home on the warhead are vulnerable to direct attack as well as to high-altitude nuclear detonations. The latter may be preplanned, or caused by “successful” intercept of a previous nuclear warhead.

What about shooting the missile during the boost phase, before it’s in space?

Disabling or destroying a missile’s warhead during the missile’s boost phase would be very, very challenging, so boost-phase intercept systems generally do not attempt this.

Meeting this challenge requires a system with interceptors that can reach the ICBM within about two to four minutes after it has been launched. To do this, the system must have remote sensors that can quickly detect the launch of any threatening ICBM, estimate its trajectory, compute a firing solution for the system’s interceptor, and fire its interceptor, all within a minute or less after the launch of the attacking ICBM has been confirmed. 

For a land-, sea-, or air-based interceptor to intercept an ICBM during its boost phase, the interceptor must typically be based within about 500 km of the expected intercept point, have a speed of 5 km/s or more, and be fired less than a minute after the launch of a potentially threatening missile has been detected. To be secure, interceptors must be positioned at least 100 to 200 km from the borders of potentially hostile countries 

If instead interceptors were placed in low-Earth orbits, a large number would be needed to make sure that at least one is close enough to reach any attacking ICBM during its boost phase so it could attempt an intercept. The number that would be required is large because each interceptor would circle Earth at high speed while Earth is rotating beneath its orbit. Hence most satellites would not be in position to reach an attacking ICBM in time. 

A constellation of about 16,000 interceptors would be needed to counter a rapid salvo of ten solid-propellant ICBMs like North Korea’s Hwasong-18, if they are launched automatically as soon as possible. If the system is designed to use 30 seconds to verify that it is performing correctly and that the reported launch was indeed an ICBM, determine the type of ICBM, and gather more tracking information before firing an interceptor, about 36,000 interceptors would be required. 

With this kind of thing, you’re running out the clock, right? By the time you’ve constructed a system your enemies would have advanced their own capabilities. 

Yes. Unlike civilian research and development programs, which typically address fixed challenges, a missile defense program confronts intelligent and adaptable human adversaries who can devise approaches to disable, penetrate, or circumvent the defensive system. This can result in a costly arms race. Which side holds the advantage at any particular moment depends on the relative costs of the defensive system and the offensive system adaptations required to evade it, and the resources each side is prepared to devote to the competition. 

As the BMD Report says, the open-ended nature of the current U.S. missile defense program has stimulated anxiety in both Moscow and Beijing. President Putin has announced a variety of new nuclear-weapon delivery systems designed to counter U.S. missile defenses. As for China, the U.S. Department of Defense says that China’s People’s Liberation Army justifies developing a range of offensive technologies as necessary to counter U.S. and other countries’ ballistic missile defense systems.