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 staying power of surveillance coverage, the jigsaw of reporting, and eyestrain. JASON: I’ve started this year in the same way I spent a lot of last…
A group of six Democratic lawmakers is proposing legislation that would dramatically rein in Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) facial recognition app, according to a copy of the draft bill shared with 404 Media. ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) have been scanning peoples’ faces with the app, called Mobile Fortify, across the country,…
🌘 Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week. Astronomers think they have solved the puzzle of so-called “little red dots” in space, a population of bizarre objects at the very edge of the observable universe, according to a study…
We start this week with Joseph’s article about Webloc, a tool ICE bought that can monitor phones in entire neighborhoods. After the break, Emanuel and Sam talk about their recent coverage of Grok. In the subscribers-only section, Jason explains how police inadvertently unmasked millions of their surveillance targets through a Flock redaction error. Listen to…
On the podcast this week, I talked to YouTuber Benn Jordan, who has done some of our favorite reporting on Flock, the automated license plate reader surveillance company. A couple months ago, he found vulnerabilities in some of Flock’s license plate reader cameras. I have been following Benn’s work for a while, and soon after…
Elon Musk, owner of the former social media network turned deepfake porn site X, is pushing people to pay for its nonconsensual intimate image generator Grok, meaning some of the app’s tens of millions of users are being hit with a paywall when they try to create nude images of random women doing sexually explicit…
The biggest AI story of the first week of 2026 involves Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot turning the social media platform into an AI child sexual imagery factory, seemingly overnight. I’ve said several times on the 404 Media podcast and elsewhere that we could devote an entire beat to “loser shit.” What’s happening this week with…
Billionaire Toby Neugebauer laughed when the Amarillo City Council asked him how he planned to handle the waste his planned datacenter would produce. “I’m not laughing in disrespect to your question,” Neugebauer said. He explained that he’d just met with Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who had made it clear that any nuclear waste Neugebauer’s datacenter…
A social media and phone surveillance system ICE bought access to is designed to monitor a city neighborhood or block for mobile phones, track the movements of those devices and their owners over time, and follow them from their places of work to home or other locations, according to material that describes how the system…
For the past two months I’ve been following a Telegram community tricking Grok into generating nonconsensual sexual images and videos of real people with increasingly convoluted methods. As countless images on X over the last week once again showed us, it doesn’t take much to get Elon Musk’s “based” AI model to create nonconsensual images….
