Behind the Blog: The 'View From Nowhere'
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 viewing terrible images online and giving out zines at a benefit show.EMANUEL: Ive seen a lot of terrible videos in my years online but by far the most upsetting type of video shows police using excessive force and especially videos of police killing people. There are more graphic videos from battlefields and other dark corners of the internet but what happened to Renee Nicole Good this week could happen to anyone living in America, and when I imagine the tragedy that has been visited on her loved ones I cant help but imagine how easily I or anyone I care about can find ourselves in the same situation.I think everyone who sits down to watch these videos does this as well, but as reporters our job is often to go frame by frame and analyze what exactly happened, which only highlights how brutally, quickly, and unnecessarily law enforcement can kill someone. Bellingcat has a good video on that if youre interested. Reporting on these videos fairly also requires us to look at the video and credulously see if and how it matches claims made by law enforcement, and in this case the White House as well, that the shooting was justified, that the officer was acting in self-defense, that despite the horror we all immediately feel because it is a normal human reaction to seeing someone die, that we entertain the idea that this was the best choice the officer could have made.Theres also a difference between what any reasonable human being would consider justified, and what law enforcement can legally qualify as justified in court. As I was telling Joe when he was writing his story about this shooting Wednesday, I 100 percent agree with him that the DHS is lying to us about what happened, and at the same time, given our legal system, the current administration, and our history with police shootings generally, I wouldnt at all be surprised of those lies could be laundered in court and the officer will never pay a price.DHS Is Lying To You About ICE Shooting a WomanAt least four videos show what really happened when ICE shot a woman in Minneapolis on Wednesday. DHS has established itself as an agency that cannot be trusted to live in or present reality.404 MediaJoseph CoxWhich is why I appreciate him writing the story so much. The morning after the shooting I listened to NPR in the car and heard them frame what happened as an argument. The mayor claimed it was unnecessary, DHS claimed it was self-defense, and this was the framing across most of the big news publications. I completely understand that these publications want to seem impartial and strive for objectivity, which are totally good goals, but this is exactly what we mean when we talk about how the view from nowhere can actually undermine the truth.Its our job to look at the details but its also important not to get lost in them. We can recognize that a situation is complicated, that videos can be deceiving, and that the law doesnt always meet our expectations for justice, but we can also see what is painfully obvious: The administration has deployed masked, armed thugs to terrorize communities across the country with no accountability, and what happened to Good is an inevitable outcome of those policies.JOSEPH: Ill preface straight away that this is just some off-the-top-of-my-head thoughts. I wouldnt publish this to the wider internet, at least not yet and not before Ive done some additional reporting and research. But I feel fine jotting it down for paid subscribers because I know people who read Behind the Blog engage with our articles more closely and carefully than randos on social media.After we published Inside ICEs Tool to Monitor Phones in Entire Neighborhoods, there were a lot of people in my Bluesky mentions telling one another how to thwart this sort of surveillance. Some information was fine. Other parts were flat out wrong. When I saw people in my mentions spreading straight up bullshit based on my article, I blocked them. I dont want people reading (well, theyre not reading) my work then spreading dangerous misconceptions about it. Go away.So I wanted to clarify some things, to correct some misunderstandings and provide more information about the topic and tool we covered.Some people said this data came from telecoms. No, it doesnt. As the article says, it most likely comes from ordinary apps installed on your phone selling this data to a location data broker or being co-opted by a company in the online ad business. Its not from the telecoms like AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile. So, anything about the tool is triangulating your position with celltowers is wrong. It is absolutely not rare for location data companies to get information from sources that arent the telecoms. In fact, it is the much, much more common route. Its dizzying how many of these companies there are and how many feed into one another.If the collection is via SDK, thats going to mean its about what apps are installed on your phone. Its going to be about that weird ass storm following app you downloaded five years ago and never opened again.Inside ICEs Tool to Monitor Phones in Entire Neighborhoods404 Media has obtained material that explains how Tangles and Webloc, two surveillance systems ICE recently purchased, work. Webloc can track phones without a warrant and follow their owners home or to their employer.404 MediaJoseph CoxIf the collection is via RTB, its going to be the advertising process inside the apps on your phone, and that means its likely not just obscure apps, but some massively popular ones. When Gravy Analytics got hacked (Gravy is the parent company of Venntel, which used to sell location data to ICE), we built a list of apps that were linked to coordinates of phones inside the U.S. and around the world. At the time I wrote this:The list includes dating sites Tinder and Grindr; massive games such as Candy Crush, Temple Run, Subway Surfers, and Harry Potter: Puzzles & Spells; transit app Moovit; My Period Calendar & Tracker, a period tracking app with more than 10 million downloads; popular fitness app MyFitnessPal; social network Tumblr; Yahoos email client; Microsofts 365 office app; and flight tracker Flightradar24. The list also mentions multiple religious-focused apps such as Muslim prayer and Christian Bible apps; various pregnancy trackers; and many VPN apps, which some users may download, ironically, in an attempt to protect their privacy.We uploaded the list here.I think its more likely Webloc is getting its data from RTB than SDK. Its been a while since Ive seen a location data company connected to government contractors or agencies using an SDK. When we covered Patternz it was explicitly collecting data through RTB.Now, would an adblocker at the browser level, or a virtual private network that blocks connections to ad networks, stop this sort of data being collected? Maybe, I dont know 100%.What likely would stop both is turning off location services on your phone at the operating system level. Unless the app is doing some insane fuckeryand that would be a huge story in itself, meaning the app was able to somehow exploit a vulnerability and get around Apples and Googles protectionsturning off location services entirely probably stops this. I would say sometimes these location data companies also sell data derived from IP addresses, which can give a broad sense of where someone might be located. So thats in addition.Someone flagged to me that Penlink has an opt-out process. It requires physically mailing a letter or calling them! California now has DROP, which allows consumers to request the deletion of their data from over 500 data brokersall in one request, according to the states website. Deletion requests will actually start in August, it says.It doesnt look like Penlink or Cobwebs (the tools previous owner) is registered as a data broker in California. Ill email Penlink now and ask why. If anyone goes through any of these opt-out processes with Penlink, please let me know.Side note: I didnt mention this in the piece because it was focused on Penlinks and Webloc, but the FTC actually enforced against Venntel back in 2024.SAM: My BTB is incredibly short this week because I'm behind schedule due to rage-blogging about Grok, the coverage of Grok from my esteemed colleagues in the journalism profession, and general first week of the year sleepiness.But here is a very academic and illuminating peek behind the blogging process: When I worked for my college newspaper, our advisor, the very wise and calm Kirsten Beachy (who also just published a new book, which I haven't gotten my hands on yet but I'm sure is a delight) told us, the newspaper leadership a group of 18-20 years olds with varying degrees of drinking problems, anger management problems, and authority problems that the best way to come up with new story ideas is to think about what pissed us off that week, and why. This was an incredible way to harness our energies away from defacing school property and into typing furiously. The things we were pissed off about included the administration trying to shut down our underground theater productions for being too lewd, the college's refusal to divest from Israel, Republicans killing the DREAM Act, the overuse of sprinklers on the lawns, and a variety of other issues ranging from serious to petty. Whenever I blog angry I think about that advice. I think about it when I'm out of ideas, too. I thought about it a lot this week.Masterful Gambit: Musk Attempts to Monetize Groks Wave of Sexual Abuse ImageryIn an attempt to push more people toward a paying subscription, Grok now refuses to generate images in replies. The paywall is pretty leaky, though.404 MediaSamantha ColeJASON:A couple months ago, we got asked if we wanted to participate in a concert in Los Angeles, which was surprising because despite all of our group photos looking like were an early 90s band, we dont play music. The concert was called LA Fights Back, and it was a benefit concert for CHIRLA, an immigrant rights groups helping people in California that has had a specific focus on families torn apart by ICE in recent months.We got invited to do it because we had an event over the summer where we talked about some of our reporting on the surveillance tools used by ICE, and people really seemed to like it. Our podcast producer and editor is also a musician who goes by the name Primer, and she was invited to play the concert. She told the promoter that we do good reporting on ICE, and we were asked to do something at the concert.We decided to make a print zine of our work on the issue, which set into motion the actual creation of the zine which you have surely heard about by now. We donated a bunch of them at the show to people who were interested. The concert was this past Sunday, and I am pleased to say that it was incredibly fun, and, more importantly, it raised $52,688 for CHIRLA. The show was sold out or was close to sold out and took place at a real, very cool concert venue in LA called the Regent Theater, where I once saw the death metal band Blood Incantation and the emo band Say Anything (separately).404 Media Is Making a ZineWe are publishing a risograph-printed zine about the surveillance technologies used by ICE.404 MediaJason KoeblerThe concert was kind of a whoa dude experience, because I have always been a big concert guy, and it gave me the opportunity to see at least a little bit about how a professional concert goes. I didnt have a lot of glamorI mostly sat at the merch booth where we had zines set up in between bands, and watched the bands like everyone else during their sets. But it was still a fun behind-the-scenes experience, getting there way before the show started, watching people set up, vaguely pretending I was a rockstar. Things feel very bleak right now, but it was heartening to see so many people show up to support CHIRLA, and it was good to feel like we were doing something. But most of all, it was clear that very few people there had ever heard of 404 Media and were not familiar with our work, or ICEs surveillance tactics, or that sort of thing. But they did care about what was happening, and were generally aware of the things that ICE is doing all over the country. So it was a chance to give our reporting to mostly a younger crowd of people who care, and that felt incredibly empowering. This was before ICE killed a woman in Minneapolis, but that made the work feel more important than ever. Hoping we can do more stuff like this this year.An update on the zine, for those of you who have ordered: We got far more orders than we were expecting. Like, many, many more than we were expecting, and more than we originally asked our printer to make. Because of the way the zine is being made (riso printed, hand assembled), its a huge lift for the print shop to put everything together. We wanted more people to have the zine, obviously, so we asked them to print as many as they could. A small batch of zines were finished for this event, but the rest are still being assembled. Im expecting to have them in the next ~10 days or so and then will start shipping them out. Over the break, I started printing and labeling envelopes with postage, so Im hoping once we get the copies well get them out to yall in very short order. Weve mentioned this before, but this first print run is a bit of an experiment. I think its going smoothly so far, but we are a bit delightfully overwhelmed with how many people have been interested, so fulfillment is a bit slower going than I was expecting. Were excited for everyone to get their copies and excited to see what you think. Once we have copies in hand, well make the zine available online as a PDF both in English and Spanish for our subscribers. We also are technically sold out at the moment but Im looking for ways to print more in a timely fashion.Heres some pictures!
Arabic
French
Spanish
Portuguese
Deutsch
Turkish
Dutch
Italiano
Russian
Romaian
Portuguese (Brazil)
Greek