A powerful Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) database, parts of which have been seen by 404 Media, allows the federal government to search for and filter people by hundreds of different, highly specific categories. Surveillance experts say the database is a tool that could possibly be helping ICE identify, detain, and deport people who are…

The U.S. Army told the government it had a lot of success using AI to “process targets” during a recent deployment. It said that it had used AI systems to identify targets at a rate of 55 per day but could get that number up to 5,000 a day with “advanced artificial intelligence tools in…

We start this week with Joseph’s story revealing how the FBI secretly ran a massive money laundering ring to catch drug traffickers and hackers. After the break, we run through a bunch of tariff stories and how it’s going to impact everything from the Nintendo Switch to the iPhone. In the subscribers-only section, Jason explains…

This weekend, U.S. secretary of commerce Howard Lutnick went on CBS’s Face the Nation and pitched a fantasy world where iPhones are manufactured in the United States:  “The army of millions and millions of people screwing in little, little screws to make iPhones, that kind of thing is going to come to America, it’s going…

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) announced Monday that the General Services Administration converted 14,000 magnetic to digital records, and claimed the process saved a million dollars a year. The problem is, magnetic tapes are regarded by storage and archivist professionals as being a stable, reliable, and safe medium for long-term data storage. Just because…

The shed-sized post office opposite a Baptist Church 40 miles outside of Louisville, Kentucky, was an unlikely starting point for one of the most significant undercover FBI operations in recent years. Inside that post office on September 17, 2021, sat a package that had arrived a few days earlier. On the face of it that…

Framework—a company that makes upgradeable and repairable laptops—has said it will pause sales on several versions of one of its models in America thanks to Trump’s tariffs. “Due to the new tariffs that came into effect on April 5th, we’re temporarily pausing US sales on a few base Framework Laptop 13 systems (Ultra 5 125H…

On Monday stocks plummeted again following President Trump’s tariff announcements last week. For a brief moment, they dramatically shot back up following reports that Trump was considering a 90-day pause in tariffs. But, that turned out to be false, and people have been trying to find out where the idea that there would be a…