It’s that time again! We’re planning our latest FOIA Forum, a live, hour-long or more interactive session where Joseph and Jason (and this time Emanuel too maybe) will teach you how to pry records from government agencies through public records requests. We’re planning this for Wednesday, 18th at 1 PM Eastern. That’s in just one…

A judge ruled that John Deere must face a lawsuit from the Federal Trade Commission and five states over its tractor and agricultural equipment repair monopoly, and rejected the company’s argument that the case should be thrown out. This means Deere is now facing both a class action lawsuit and a federal antitrust lawsuit over…

Much of this episode is about the ongoing anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles. We start with Joseph explaining how he monitored surveillance aircraft flying over the protests, including what turned out to be a Predator drone. After the break, Jason tells us about the burning Waymos. In the subscribers-only section, we talk about the owner…

Web domains owned by Nvidia, Stanford, NPR, and the U.S. government are hosting pages full of AI slop articles that redirect to a spam marketing site.  On a site seemingly abandoned by Nvidia for events, called events.nsv.nvidia.com, a spam marketing operation moved in and posted more than 62,000 AI-generated articles, many of them full of…

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) flew two high-powered Predator surveillance drones above the anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles over the weekend, according to air traffic control (ATC) audio unearthed by an aviation tracking enthusiast then reviewed by 404 Media and cross-referenced with flight data. The use of Predator drones highlights the extraordinary resources government…

The federal government is working on a website and API called “ai.gov” to “accelerate government innovation with AI” that is supposed to launch on July 4 and will include an analytics feature that shows how much a specific government team is using AI, according to an early version of the website and code posted by…

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

Michael James Pratt, the ringleader for Girls Do Porn, pleaded guilty to multiple counts of sex trafficking last week. Pratt initially pleaded not guilty to sex trafficking charges in March 2024, after being extradited to the U.S. from Spain last year. He fled the U.S. in the middle of a 2019 civil trial where 22…

Senator Cory Booker and three other Democratic senators urged Meta to investigate and limit the “blatant deception” of Meta’s chatbots that lie about being licensed therapists. In a signed letter Booker’s office provided to 404 Media on Friday that is dated June 6, senators Booker, Peter Welch, Adam Schiff and Alex Padilla wrote that they…