Anti-Porn Laws' Real Target Is Free Speech

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1:19Hello and welcome to the 404 Media podcast where we bring you unparalleled access to hidden worlds with online and IRL. 404 Media is a journalist founded company and needs your support. to subscribe, go to 404media.co. As well as bonus content every single week, subscribers also get access to additional episodes where we respond to their best comments. Gain access to that content at 404media.co. I'm your host, Joseph, who doesn't normally completely screw up the intro. And with me, the 404 Media co-founder's Sam Cole. Hey, you're doing good. Doing great, Steve. Yeah, good job. Good job. Hang on.

1:56Emmanuel Mayberg. Imagine everyone in their underwear. that will make you less nervous. I don't think it would. Just talk to us like we're your friends and you don't need to be nervous. Imagine that. Imagine that hard. That last voice you heard was Jason Kevler and then joined by us is also our regular contributor, Matthew Galt. Hello. I feel like I'm throwing you off today. I think it might be that and I don't mean to blame you, but I think it might actually be that. Websiting. So we have a bunch of stories to get into just before we do that. I guess it's not really housekeeping, but last week we had a big bumper episode all about Flock safety, those automatic license plate reader cameras all across the United States.

2:40We wrote about and spoke about a tool called Nova, which was going to use hacked data in combination with that license plate reader information. Flock has now decided to not use that hacked data in response to internal pressure and our reporting as well. So I just wanted to give people an update on that. And of course, subscribers are what power that impactful journalism. So thank you so much for being a listener. And please do subscribe if you want to continue to power that work as well. All right. As a massive change and pivot into a different subject, here is a really, really good one from Sam.

3:20The headline is, The Egg Yolk Principle. human sexuality will always outsmart prudish algorithms and hateful politicians i guess i guess i should put a content warning here just in case we talk about stuff that is sexual but almost part of the point of the story is that stuff is not being overtly i mean we're going to get into it it's it's very very complicated but content warning there if you want it um um sam can you describe this egg video at the top of the piece i think that's a really good introduction you can even read it if you want or just what is this what is this video that you start the piece with yeah i mean i will not read it because it is straight up erotica um that is the first paragraph of the story so you should go read my egg erotica writing um so there's this account on TikTok and Instagram also that is just a guy or a girl or somebody making fried eggs.

4:22I don't want to assume the gender of this fried egg pervert. And the fried egg is on a plate, and they have a fork, and it's not the yolk is like intact. And they're like dragging a fork across the egg very like, sensually, there's no other way to put it. It's just like, it's like a really like i don't it's just it's freaky i don't know how to really like put it into words better than what i did in the story but like the the yoke like bulges and they like back off it and they're like teasing it almost and the comments tell it all because people are like why are you teasing the egg why are you edging the egg i just i just walked in on something um like obviously people are like oh you're like you're trying to allude to something with this weird egg striptease that is sexual but there's nothing sexual about it and some of the videos it's like r &b tracks or like cardi b or whatever but like other ones are just like goofy like fun songs and then he's like edging an egg um so it's just a strange strange account and obviously it's gotten a lot of engagement because people comment people like it people reply people are like oh my god why is this in my for you page what does this say about me what does this say about society um why is everything so just like uncomfortably sexual yeah there is a tension there and um of course you use that as the opener to talk about this very important issue and i think there are that there are sort of two prongs of the piece.

6:06And the first is about this law that we're going to talk about. And then the other is sort of what you got at the end there, that everything is sexually suggestive now because platforms are awful for overtly sexual content. But you write this really, really good, jarring paragraph in there. You describe this video. And then the next section says, if right-wing leadership in this country has its way, the person running this account, being that egg video one, could be put in prison for disseminating content that, quote, intended to arouse, end quote. There's a nationwide effort happening right now to end pornography and call everything pornographic at the same time.

6:46So I guess let's get into that. What is this law that aims to criminalize spreading this content that's intended to arouse, apparently even if that's a fried egg and somebody, you know, potentially popping the oak of it? Yeah, so we wrote about this a couple weeks ago but Mike Lee who's a Republican senator in Utah introduced the Interstate Obscenity Definition Act which in my head I say it is IOTA that's the acronym so we'll just go with that I guess. You always have to have a good well you gotta have it you gotta yeah you gotta have an acronym yeah yeah um and he's been trying to pass IOTA for years it's like every couple years he comes back with this and is like, maybe this time.

7:29But the foundation of this bill is that porn would be effectively banned at a federal level in the US. And it does that by changing the current definitions of obscenity to remove standards for community standards, which would be like someone in Maine does not have the same standards for obscenity as someone in New York City. Not to say anything disparaging about the good people of Maine. But it changes that part of the law, which has been in place since the 70s. And it also removes the part of the law that mentions intent so the current law says that obscenity requires the intent for the purposes of amusing threatening or harassing a person and it's saying now that it's just anything that's intended to arouse uh without that part of the current law which would be a lot of things it would be sex scenes in movies it would be I would imagine like romance books a lot of like what's on Netflix and of course like porn and adult content on the internet but I started writing about this egg thing a long time ago because I had just been noticing that everything is becoming weirdly uncomfortable in a way that's like roundabout alluding to sex without actually being sexual or without being pornographic at the same time the walls are closing in on actual porn and you can't actually put anything pornographic on a lot of the internet without getting age-gated or banned or downranked or whatever of course like meta is in its fuck it era so they're going the other direction I think with a lot of stuff but on a lot of the internet that's still the case where sex is straight up uh not welcome um and especially sex work and real sex workers humans so yeah that was kind of the the original thought of this and then as the year went on it was like okay now there are more and more bills more and more laws that are being passed more age verification laws this iota law um that or this iota bill it's not a law yet thank god um that that are reacting to a moment in American politics where leadership is openly supporting and saying that pornographers should be in jail.

10:06Yeah. And I mean, on that, maybe to take a step back slide, you mentioned the romance novel authors, and I think we'll get to that. But almost to go to the much more obvious impact, let's just say OnlyFans creators. like just how simple how would they be be impacted by this if this came to law and i know that's almost like a stupid question but just so people actually hear it like yeah how would this impact people who work on only fans for example i mean it would be a federal crime to disseminate anything obscene and the obscene definitions are now blown wide open so everything is obscene that is you know even mildly considered obscene by the greatest stretch of your imagination um and yeah it would it would mean like it's that's a federal crime it would be people would go to prison um but in reality if this in a really wacky future where this actually passed which is looking more and more not that wacky i guess um crazier things have happened recently crazier things are crazy things are happening currently but um it wouldn't even take anyone going to prison or anything like that like no one would need to be prosecuted for this to actually have an effect on how people use the internet consume the internet it would just be a total chilling effect on anything online that would be remotely considered sexual pornographic um obscene which now like a lot of legislators are trying to push the idea or have been trying to push the idea that So like queer people and trans people are obscene.

11:45Drag queens are obscene. Just in virtue of them existing, essentially. Yeah, like these are like pornographic lifestyles or people. So you can kind of see where this goes. It's catching more and more in its net. And more and more people, more and more types of content, more and more types of speech are not allowed on the internet. if this even came near becoming law or any version of it became law even without anybody going to jail so yeah the idea that like the guy is going to jail is like obviously like it's an overstatement of a point that it doesn't even need to get that far you know it's but but the point is like the laws are super over broad and like poorly written and like it's hard to put this stuff into a box yeah um sam i think you've talked about the egg a little bit and i like the egg is very important the egg yolk principle but can you give like more examples of the types of things that people are sexualizing on instagram like i feel like that would probably be helpful yeah we uh i went back and forth with emmanuel and jason because they have the most fucked up um algorithms trying to figure out or having them send me things that were in their feeds on social media that were pornographic that were not pornographic that were not explicit but were still obviously like quote-unquote intended to arouse and it actually became kind of hard to draw a line between what is and isn't that but some of the examples that I ended up on were there was a this is basically an ad for a lactose pill but this woman was like I'm gonna chug a bunch of milk knowing that I'm lactose intolerant and then see what happens and what happens is obviously she's just like spends like hours farting and like burping and being uncomfortable like super close to the camera it's like that's a fetish that's a kink um yeah there were let's see there was an ai um like bodybuilding women account like these like crazy proportioned women's bodies that were all ai generated it's all ai slop um but like in like dominant like positions over men or just very obviously this is a kink but nothing is actually being shown as like explicit um there was there were two girls making foot pottery i don't know i feel like that's pretty self-explanatory they're using their feet to make pottery like on a wheel um that's a collab by the way just to clarify something just i don't know i don't know if you're deep into these accounts as i am but it's a foot what is clearly like a foot fetish account that i believe links out to platforms where she can monetize uh but the clay uh you know pottery account is also does that it's like a very sensual video of a lady making pottery that's that's her like that's her lane that's her hook you know and that also links out to her like accounts where she she monetizes and i think it just speaks to the thing you said where i'm not aware of a pottery fetish i'm sure it exists because like that's how rule 34 works because we've theorized it exists probably it does exist um but whether or not it does it is designed to arouse therefore it could fall under this law yeah that uh would categorize it as pornography and therefore illegal there's also like women who are fully clothed but are just like spitting into a cup yeah and then the last woman in the line drinks it uh i'm also watching that should be fans to be clear i'm watching a woman who cracks an egg on a counter and then she like sucks the egg into her mouth and then spits it into a frying pan for example and it's like some of these are again like they their profiles linked to you know an only fans page or somewhere that they can monetize and so it's sort of clear what they're going for but at the same time it's like they're fully clothed you're allowed to like eat a raw egg you're allowed to skate in this country in this country yeah exactly it's like oh i guess we we allow that we allow you to post things like that on the internet and it's like drawing a line for like what the rule is is like and you have to post like that to get people to come to your only fans is very is very specific uh problem that i didn't get into in the story but like only fans does not have a discoverability function so if you want to search for if you're into foot pottery you can't search for that only fans you have to find them through their socials the socials ban sex so they can't just say here i am making pottery naked on instagram they have to kind of tease you into it uh it's the same way that a lot of the trad wife fetish stuff that we talked about a couple months ago works it's like that's not clearly a kink when you come across it online it's just a woman in the kitchen you know in like a lacy apron but she's advertising for her platform where she makes money and that platform is like Pornhub OnlyFans whatever it is um so yeah it's it's kind of this self-perpetuating cycle that's getting weirder and worse because of a lot of the restrictions that are coming down on porn in general um yeah that makes sense um I feel like Jason said something really smart it was going to lead into the next thing but i would just take it as it is what are i mean we're touching on it but what are the first amendment experts saying uh because we've spoken very much about the the sensual part the over or or the the subtle sexual parts but obviously as we're getting to this is a much much broader speech issue what are some of the first amendment lawyers you spoke to saying about this yeah so i talked to quite a few folks i talked to someone from the CDT, from EFF, from Woodhull Foundation.

18:23And I think you should go read everything that they have to say in the story. It'll be more than I can put down into this podcast. But I thought they all had really similar points about the chilling effect that this could have on the internet in general and on free speech that it wouldn't take a prosecutor deciding that someone needs to go to trial over this or be indicted over this to actually have an effect on the way people behave. It's like if I talked to it was Becca Branham from the CDT told me that she made a really good point about like, am I going to, as someone who's just like a normal person on the internet, If this law passed, am I going to share a video from like my bachelorette party, which like are notoriously full of like, you know, like dick shaped lollipops and like lots of like sexual interwebio?

19:26Am I going to share a video or recording from my bachelorette party if I know that something like this is in place and could be considered federally illegal? I'm going to curtail my speech. I'm not going to do that. I'm going to change my behavior to avoid attracting the government's ire, even if it would be an extreme overreach for them to actually prosecute that, which I think is increasingly the world that we're living in. I mean, I know I've changed the way that I post in a lot of ways because I don't want to get downranked or downvoted or not downvoted, but like banned from Instagram. Like I've been dinged on Instagram plenty of times and I know the rules and it's just there are more rules that I don't even know about that the algorithm will catch.

20:18um yeah it's just it's it's this fever dream of like the project 2025 leadership that people increasingly feel scared in general uh people feel afraid to speak up which we see happening all over the country with protests um in which with much more um you know immediate problems with like ice deporting people for just speaking out um i think the the overarching like message that they want to send with this type of legislation is be afraid to step out of line and the line is you know heteronormative cisgender white married um i don't know it's like i'm describing it it sounds like handmaid's tale shit and it kind of is without being so good for mentioning handmade yeah exactly yeah it's like it's handmade sailor black mirror like take your pick at this point um but it really is that is the world that they want to go back to with this type of legislation to control people and what you can if you can control people's speech you can control people's actions online and you can control what they're doing in person um which it's not just like oh i can't post instagram anymore, it changes the way that you think and act in the real world too.

21:41Yeah. It sounds like, and again, I'm not a free speech or First Amendment lawyer here, but it sounds like the free speech concerns here are different to that of the Take It Down Act, which is much more concerned with that law could be weaponized to take down any content, which again would happen here. But this one is almost more worrying in another way, because it's going to, as you say, introduce this chilling effect where people are not even going to upload stuff in the first place. They're going to be policing their own speech. I guess just the last question is, as we mentioned a little bit earlier, it's almost like a moonshot bill for these people, but we've seen age verification stuff spread very, very quickly across the country.

22:27And that was seen as a crazy idea, not that long ago. Do you think people, like even ordinary listeners who are just concerned about this, do you think they need to take this law seriously? Like this could actually manifest somehow? I mean, I think at this point, all bets are off as far as what we can and should and can't take seriously. I don't think these bills get introduced without being serious. especially now that the environment is pretty ripe for something like this to be entertained and to begin with um i think we have a much more sex negative society in general someone on blue sky made a good point uh earlier when i posted this story they were like oh this this kind of makes it make more sense to me why like the puritanes feel like like teenagers who were like anti-sex and don't want to see it anywhere in the movies or tv or anything um why they feel like they're being bombarded all the time by sex even though like our experience of the internet is like sex is nowhere it's not in this egg shit it's not like in the foot pottery um but they are seeing it everywhere because that is the um that's the implication that's what's between the lines um and they feel like it's like constant in their faces um so i think there's that generation is definitely grappling with something pretty serious as far as their relationships with sex and the internet.

23:58So yeah, I mean, I think it's definitely worth paying attention to and paying attention to who says what about it and what their feelings are about it. I was pretty surprised when we wrote about the Sweden, the Swedish law that was gonna make it illegal to live stream, do like camming or custom content, people were like, Oh, that makes sense. It's like, what the fuck? No, it doesn't. Like, that's bad. It's really bad. But people are just kind of getting acclimated to this type of rhetoric in a really scary and quick way. You know, people are like, Oh, yeah, it makes sense. But porn is porn is bad.

24:43So we should make it federally legal. It's like, neither of those things are true. Think critically for a moment. So yeah, I don't know. That's a long way of saying I think it's worth taking seriously. It's worth examining because weirder things are happening. Yeah, absolutely. All right, we will leave that there. And when we come back, we're going to talk about one of Matthew's stories about the crazy Ukraine drone attack and the software underpinning it all. We'll be right back after this.

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27:49That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash 404media. all right and the headline is ukraine's massive drone attack was powered by open source software uh matthew you are a military guy you know all about this world on multiple levels what is the top level overview of this drone attack carried up by ukraine then we'll get into the software but like when did it happen? What happened? What were the targets? So Sunday, midday, which is kind of brazen, it was around like noon to two local time across multiple time zones. Ukraine pushed a button and they had over the past 18 months, they say secreted in a bunch of quadcopter drones, about 177 quadcopter drones into Russia and positioned them near air bases spread across the country.

28:51These things take flight and they strike strategic bombing targets, like the strategic bombers that are just kind of out in the open at these Russian air bases. And I just got confirmation literally like while during the previous segment, they also hit two A-50 radar planes and destroyed them. and Russia only had six of them and now they have four and it's kind of a thing where you've got to fly multiple of those to kind of get a lay of the land that's like the whole point of the radar plane is like you make like you do a triangulation uh now they have two less apparently uh somebody just found video of them being destroyed by the by the drones sure so why is it significant is it because this is so deep inside Russia?

29:42Is it because those planes and those capabilities are really important to Russia? Is it a combination of all of it? It's a combination of both things. The targets are pretty wild because these are some of the weapons that would be able to... It's like a third of their strategic bombing fleet, Russia's. And these are the weapons that they've been using to launch some of the nastiest missiles into Kyiv and into the rest of Ukraine. And also it's a part of their nuclear triad. These are the bombers that would be equipped with nukes if they were to do bombing runs with nukes. And war is won with logistics.

30:30Technology is important, but logistics is a big deal. And Ukraine spent 18 months building quadcopters, getting trucks positioned, shipping these things into Russia and doing it secretly, not getting caught, not getting anyone to look in these sheds that they had built. So they launched them from trucks and they launched them from sheds that had dummy roofs. And the roofs were full of these quadcopters. So they push a button somewhere and the shed's roofs open up and then quadcopters come out, which is strange because it's like an image from a Call of Duty game 10 years ago. Well, literally. Here it is.

31:16Literally, yeah. Advanced Warfare had this bit and I saw a clip on Twitter. Oh, was it Ghosts? It's Ghosts, I think. But there's like a bus on the Golden Gate Bridge or something. It opens up and then all these drones fly out. And yeah, it's basically what happened, which is nuts, obviously. And it's also that we live in this era where I've seen a lot of commentary where it's like, oh, you know, this changes things. This proves the power of quadcopter drones. It's like that's been going on for 10 years. Like this is just this is just a really good use of drones, a really smart use of drones for people that have been using them to fight Russia for 10 years now.

31:59um and the other thing i would compare this to which i really haven't seen anyone do and i haven't seen anyone talk about in the piece is this reminds me of like last year's big brazen military attack which was israel sneaking explosive pagers into the hands of hezbollah um it is you know it was a logistical challenge with a lot of moving parts that was kept secret for a long time and then pulled off like expertly in the moment well but the only key difference i would flag there is that the room for collateral in the pager attack was wider and absolutely absolutely true yes whereas this was just against military targets okay military section of the show over let's talk more about the actual software uh and which was our way into the story so what is ardu pilot if if I'm pronouncing that correctly, what is that?

32:53And like, what is it for? So it is a, it's a piece of open source software that is used to autopilot drones, drones of all kinds. And I say drone, I mean like quadcopter, little fixed wing aircraft, like single rotor helicopter style drones. It can kind of do a little bit of everything because it's open source software. And it's been around a long time, kind of started around 2007. And there's three gentlemen that are kind of the fathers of ArduSoft or ArduPilot. I don't know why I keep messing up the last name. Why are you going to that? It was bad. Well, like the first draft, I had called it ArduFlight the whole way through and I had to do like a find and replace, call it ArduPilot anyway.

33:43These three gentlemen kind of were big in the hobbyist drone scene in the late 2000s and started building this software package to help them autopilot drones. And so what it can do now is pretty impressive. You can like, if you've got access to GPS, you can like pull up a map of an area, say, I want it to take off here, put down a bunch of waypoints and your quadcopter or fixed wing aircraft or whatever it is will go through those waypoints and then it can land. It may not do it like super well, but it has all that stuff kind of integrated. But I would say like the main thing that people use it for, and the main thing people, the main thing I think they used it for in Ukraine when they attacked Russia is more pilot assistance.

34:40So it is like flying a quadcopter or an FPV, there's a lot going on, right? It needs to be stabilized. It needs to move in the correct direction. So autopilot will like, it may not do autopilot on every little piece of the flight. It will like keep things stable. And it has like a program, an algorithm that'll run that'll like keep it stable in the moment. And the way that they did this, as best as anyone can tell, is they had these quadcopters that had like an LTE modem on top of it that like hooked into Russian cellular communications networks. And that's what they used to communicate back home to the Ukrainian operators.

35:26So it's not like a great cellular network. There's latency between the operator and the drone itself. And so when you would lose connection or there would be a break in the connection, our pilot would take over and keep things stable until the pilot could come back in and get it where it needed to go. Yeah. And GPS wasn't used here because GPS is notoriously really bad in Russia. Of jamming, right. There's a lot of jamming and they have their own proprietary system that not everyone has access to. So this is not a situation where the Ukrainians pulled up a map and said, we want to blow up this bomber, this bomber, this bomber, and just hit a button.

36:13And R2Pilot took over and ran the things to their targets. Now, R2Pilot was used to assist them as they navigated this military action. Yeah, that makes sense. So, I mean, you mentioned these people who created the software who, if I'm understanding correctly, they're not developing it right now. They created it back in the day, but they did see their tool was using this attack. What was their reaction to that? I mean, it's hard to read tone on the internet, right? But I would say impressed, fascinated. it um chris anderson it's you know chris anderson jason short and uh i think i'm saying it right jordy munoz and munoz i couldn't find any him making any comments i reached out to everybody nobody got back to me uh but anderson and short uh were like reposting the footage on x and saying like wow we made this in our basement 20 years ago this is really wild to see it being used for this short said, like, I can't believe, you know, I like they wipe like some software I made helped them wipe out, helped Ukraine wipe out a third of their strategic bomber fleet.

37:26And on LinkedIn, Anderson has been on quite the tear, commenting on a lot of different threads, and kind of talking about how like this was implying that this was a thing that he saw coming. and like the rise of drone warfare generally, not the specific attack. And that he knew that our pilot might one day be like integrated in something like this and kind of posting links to people who he thinks had been talking about this and no one was paying attention to. Basically acting the Cassandra, you know? Yeah. I think a few interesting things. Chris Anderson was the former editor-in-chief of Wired.

38:13magazine like a long time ago. And then he founded this company called 3D Robotics. And Ardupilot was, I guess, presumably part of that in some way. And all three of them actually worked at 3D Robotics. And it was supposed to be this big competitor to DJI, which is this massive Chinese drone company that has dominated the market for quadcopters. And like a lot of the drones used in the United States by cops are DJI drones. And 3D Robotics was a consumer drone that was competing with the Phantom, which DJI no longer makes, but is like this really popular, was the most popular drone of all time.

38:54DJI has since moved on to making other things. But interestingly, like 3D Robotics failed. It went out of business. And very recently, it has been like reborn as a company called 3DR. And I believe the same people are involved to some extent. It's like not that clear to me. But this has all happened during a time where the Trump administration has tried to make it illegal to sell DJI drones in the United States. And one of 3D robotics or 3DR's things is like, oh, we're an American company. We were a California based company. And I was on their website yesterday when I was editing this story. And they are selling like autopilot type software.

39:43And so it feels like they're sort of continuing this like legacy of autopilot and trying to integrate it and trying to use it to make a comeback. And I just thought that that was like pretty interesting because this all grew out of this like really like the DIY drones website, but also this like open source software that has been around for a really long time and is now being used like on on the battlefield too yeah totally so what about the current developers of rgpilot what did they say uh i pinged them too they they did not respond but they are active on the rgpilot uh reddit and someone obviously posted like because all this this footage was going around social media somebody posted it in there.

40:32And one of the developers responds like, Hey, so, you know, this is our code of conduct. It's not an end user license agreement. The gist of which is we won't knowingly help someone develop a weapon. But then they also say like, it's not up to us to like decide these things. It is up to the UN or some other, you know, a governing body to judge the ethics of this kind of thing, kind of wash our hands. And again, it's like, they aren't selling a product. It's open source software. It is not as if there's no mechanism as far as I can see for them to stop anyone from using the software. It's out there, right?

41:22There's no customer to cut off. there's no customer to cut off it is not like a starlink satellite on top of a on top of a drone which is also being used right right and i guess just my last question is on the open source software i mean what does the use of that show us here um about this this war or conflict in general you know is it that there's obviously asymmetry in some conflicts and some people are going to return to open source software it's available like what's your takeaway there that's uh there's a symmetry in every conflict and people are going to use the tools that are available to them um and if they can do it for free or as cheap as possible i think it behooves them to do that uh i i because i i see like in the west especially because of ukraine and russia quadcopters and drones in general have become very popular and suicide drones have become very, very popular.