The ICE Tool That Tracks Entire Neighborhoods

0:03Hello, and welcome to the 404 Media Podcast, where we bring you unparalleled access to hidden worlds both online and IRL. 404 Media is a journalist family 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, and with me are 404 Media co-founders, Pam Cole. Hello. And Angle Mayberg. Hello. And Jason Kevler. Hello, hello. I don't think we have any housekeeping this week. I'm going to do a quick, quick zine update.

0:50So we are waiting on the last of the zines to come from our printer, which I'm expecting in the next, I don't know, eight to 10 days, something like that. I think I mentioned, but we had to print many, many, many, many, many of them, and they're all being put together by hand. by a small print shop. So I will have them in the next 8 to 10 days. I have all of the envelopes addressed. So once I get them, they'll be in the mail. But I think like two or three people have asked. So if you happen to be listening to this and you happen to have ordered a zine, it will be going in the mail soon and we'll be putting a version online at some point as well.

1:37Yeah, and you've been cataloging the process, right? With videos, filming and printing. Have we posted any of those? No, because I need to put them together to do the editing process and stuff like that. But that's where we are with it. But yes, we're going to do probably YouTube videos, some social videos. It's been a cool process. And I think once you see it is like a very manual process, which is what we wanted to do for this first one. We wanted it to be very human, very manual sort of thing. And we're very happy about a couple thousand of you bought them. And so you're not really supposed to do this type of printing at this scale, I would say.

2:27And we did. But it's actually... We said we're going to ship them in mid-January. It will still be mid-January. It will probably be in the next pretty soon. Yeah, when we put them on sale, it was very much a pre-order situation. It was not a, hey, you're going to get the zine in three to five working days or shipping or whatever. But definitely looking forward to that being out. Should we move to the first story? Jason, do you want to take the lead on this one? Yeah, I mean, this is a very interesting story because the timing of you publishing it aligns with what happened in Minneapolis, which we will talk about, of course.

3:10So the story is inside ISIS tool to monitor phones in entire neighborhoods. Joseph, let's start with your story and then maybe we can zoom out to the killing of Renee Good. So first of all, what did you obtain and what is this company, WebLock? Yeah, so I'll just say, I think we did mention this tool briefly on the podcast before, because I found it in contracting US procurement records. So it's like, hey, ISIS just bought this tool and you can sort of figure it out. But this is obviously new and much more in detail because I obtained material that explains, in a very granular sense, how these systems work.

3:57So there's plenty more detail in this article than we have before. And that applies not just to ICE's potential use of it, but obviously any government user of WebLock and another tool called Tangles as well. I think Texas law enforcement agencies have it, maybe some other ones around the country as well, regional, if not local. But WebLock is a location data tool. It comes from a company called Penlink. Previously, it was run by a company called Cobwebs. They merged with Penlink, blah, blah, blah, whatever. But Weblog is very, very much focused on location data. So, and we'll go into how they get the data in a minute, but it can track movements of mobile phones, essentially, from one location to another.

4:47You could look in a certain area and figure out what phones are there and that sort of thing.

4:55So there's no indication necessarily of where ICE is using this at the moment, correct? This is sort of like how this tool works. You obtained some documents that explained what its specific features are. And as you mentioned, we knew that they had purchased this, but the news here is that now we know exactly some of its capabilities and what they can do. So what can an ICE officer do with WebLock and Tangles? And what are some of the specific features? Yeah. So WebLock makes it really easy for an ICE official to manipulate and use this location data from mobile phones. So whereas ordinarily, if a law enforcement agency got a bunch of location data, say from a company called Ventel or Babel Street, which we've covered before as well.

5:54This tool, and maybe those have this as well, but again, we've seen the material for this. So you can push a button on the interface that will turn it almost into nighttime mode. And you can see where the phones went at night. And the material explicitly explains that, hey, if a phone is at this certain location overnight, and especially, you know, repeatedly over and over again, maybe that is the person's home. If you put it into daytime mode, you click a little button for that and you follow the phone to where it is located during the day, maybe that's their place of employment as well. You can even click a little button which provides the route so you can see not just sort of the start and the end locations, their home and their potential workplace.

6:40You can see the actual route that they took. So presumably, it'll be what highway they drove down, what road they went down. Maybe if they walked or whatever, you could probably figure that out based on the speed as well. So it really allows an ISIS officer or any law enforcement official using this tool to really easily drill down on what phones are there, where they go, and then of course, potentially who they belong to. And I guess just the last thing I'll say on the features is that it's not like they just get a list of phones and they click through and they go one by one. They can do that in a sense.

7:19But what they also do is they draw a circle or another shape around a particular area. And that is going to show, hey, this is all the phones that we have in that location at that day or across that hour or whatever it is. So it really can be used for both quite targeted surveillance, if the target happens to be in this data set, or it can be used for quite broad surveillance as well. Yeah, I mean, I guess I want to be a little speculative here. I'm not saying you are. I mean, maybe you can talk about it. But with this tool, I mean, that's sort of the headline of the thing. It's like monitor phones in entire neighborhoods.

8:01So you can circle a whole neighborhood and it can give you information about the phones in that neighborhood. I mean, we have seen over the last week, and of course, honestly, over the last year, a lot of protests against ICE, a lot of protests outside of ICE facilities, a lot of protests in neighborhoods where there have been clashes between people and ICE, that sort of thing. I mean, it seems like an agency like ICE would be able to monitor protests sort of retroactively using a tool like this? Is there any indication that it could be used for something like that? Yeah, I think that's totally fair.

8:43And I'll say two things. The third, well, actually maybe three things. The first is that there is some local reporting coming out of Minneapolis that I saw and I think Sam saw as well. I still need to digest it all, but there are reports or suspicions that ICE, the HS, may be using data to go after activists and intimidate them in some way. I'm still digesting that, so I can't go much further in depth than that, but I would definitely highlight that report and come out of NPR, I think. The second is that the tool was technically purchased for HSI, Homeland Security Investigations. That is, of course, a part of ICE that's usually focused on criminal investigations, child abuse, cybercrime, money laundering, all of that sort of thing.

9:32That's kind of gone out of the window now because there's this really interesting data that the Cato Institute keeps getting from inside ICE showing that something like 90 % of HSI officials have been pushed over to the deportation arm or rather the deportation mission. So HSI as a criminal investigative entity basically doesn't exist anymore. It's basically part of ICE's deportation arm. The reason I bring that up, though, is that if there was some sort of alleged assault of an ICE officer, or there was a protest outside an ICE facility, ICE wanted to investigate people there, in my opinion, it might be HSI that would do that sort of investigation.

10:14That would probably be within their mandate somewhat. And HSI is the one that has bought this tool. Jason, were you going to say something? Well, yeah, I was going to say that they do a lot of workplace enforcement investigations. They actually always have, in addition to some of the child trafficking, drug trafficking investigations that they really specialize in in previous administrations. But we've seen this administration really focus on enforcement at workplaces. I mean, there's been videos coming out of people getting snatched out of Target during their shift. There was the case where they seized a bunch of people from a Hyundai plant in Georgia, things like that.

11:00And so workplace investigations have been a big part of Trump's deportation campaign. And HSI, that's what they have specialized in traditionally. Yeah. And then the last thing I would say on the protest stuff is that the independent journalist, Jack Paulson, previously got some other material related to Cobwebs. Again, that was the company that first developed this tool before it moved to Penlink. I believe it was Cobwebs branded stuff he got. But that was basically, it sounded like marketing material or training guides where Cobwebs itself was saying, hey, look, you could use this to monitor Black Lives Matter and protests.

11:42So that's not the same as I saying or DHS saying, we're going to use it for this. But the people making, developing and selling the tool are explicitly telling potential customers, hey, you could use this tomorrow. Right, right, right. Okay, so let's talk about where this data is coming from. I think perhaps we can't say exactly for sure where it's coming from, but you've done a lot of reporting on location data, commercial location data sales over the years. And it seems like with many of these companies, the data usually comes from the same types of places. and that has to do with the advertising industry and it has to do with location harvesting from apps usually.

12:27So is that the case here? Is that what we expect is here? Yeah, it looks like that's the case. It is not. I'm almost certain about this. It's not coming from telecoms like your AT &T, your Verizon, T-Mobile, that sort of thing. police now need a warrant to go get location data from that after the you know landmark carpenter 2018 case this according to um a internal ice legal analysis the the aclu got and shared with us discussing location data ice believes it doesn't need a warrant essentially to get that information that lines up with other agencies we've covered like the secret service I bring that up here because in that legal analysis, they were talking about Ventel, another of these location data companies.

13:18And Cobwebs and Penlink and WebLock, they're in that space. So that leads me to... There are two main ways that commercial location data companies get this sort of data. The first is software development kits, SDKs embedded in ordinary apps. So that weird weather app you got, the weird storm chasing one you downloaded five years ago and forgot about and gave location data permissions to, that might have code in it where the SDK developer then harvests the location data and then sells it to companies. The other one, and I think the much more likely one, is that it's connected through real-time bidding.

13:59So RTB. Whenever there is an advert, a programmatic advert being placed inside an app in front of you, there is this near instantaneous and basically invisible to a normal person process where all of these companies are trying to outbid one another to get their ad in front of a certain demographic. A side effect of the online ad industry is that a bunch of companies can simply monitor that process. They don't even need to get an advert in front of somebody. They can just sit there and sort of siphon the data off. And that can include, and often does include, location data and a specific person's unique advertising ID.

14:39So there you have, hey, this person moved to here, they moved to here, moved to here. And also, we have a unique identifier that connects all of that location data together. The reason I say I think that's the most likely is that I just think SDK stuff has gone out of fashion in the location data industry. When I covered that, it was mostly like 2020, 2021, that sort of time. When we exposed a company called XMode that was collecting location data related to a Muslim prayer app and selling it to US military contractors. that was like one of the last SDK-based location data companies that I really remember.

15:19Yeah, there were a couple more afterwards, but it just seems that RTB is the way now. We got that from a hack of Gravy, the parent company of Ventol, and it showed a bunch of apps that were subject to RTB data harvesting. We published a big list of those. We've covered another company called Patterns out of Israel, and we got them kicked out of the Google advertising ecosystem after we showed, yes, they were getting data from RTB. So I think that is most likely how WebLock is getting its data and by extension how ICE is getting that data. Yeah. Joe, so this is obviously all kind of happening in the context of broader crackdowns by ICE.

16:02And then, of course, the huge national conversation spurred in the killing of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis last week. You want to talk real quick about how we covered that with this piece, DHS is lying to you? Yeah, it's difficult to cover because of course we're not on the ground and we don't feel like we have to cover everything. But of course, this case is monumentally important. For me, it was the disconnect between seeing these videos come out of the shooting of Renee Goode, first from sort of angles further away, and then actually later, after we published the first-person perspective of Jonathan Ross, the ICE official themselves, obviously a huge disconnect between what those videos showed and the statements that DHS, DHS head were putting out, the Trump himself as well.

16:55And they just simply did not line up. I think people intuitively who probably listen to us and read our website, probably agree with that, probably saw the same thing. And subsequently, you had Bellingcat come out and do amazing technical forensic analysis. There was New York Times as well. They did their own sort of visual investigation as well. I think those are always good and they're always amazing to see and they're always helpful. Here, you did not need Bellingcat or the New York Times to tell you what was going on. You could watch the videos with your own eyes. And that's what we encourage people to do, provide links to them in the piece, explain what we thought had happened based on those videos.

17:37And of course, as the headline says, DHS is lying to you and absolutely believe that based on the statements and the videos themselves. That's... Sorry, were you going to say something? I was just going to say, I mean, this is going to continue to be probably one of, if not the most discussed stories this year. So we're going to stay on it. But yeah, let's leave that there and move to the second half of the show. Absolutely. When we come back, Emmanuel and Sam are going to talk us through some of their recent Grok and X coverage. We'll be right back after this.

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22:59all right and we are back emmanuel we'll start with you the headline of this piece you wrote is inside the telegram channel jailbreaking grok over and over again so on the on the podcast last time we spoke about Jason's piece and Grok and how it's been using to undress people, put people in bikinis, you know, also some straight up child sexual abuse imagery as well. So how does this Telegram channel differ to what we were sort of talking about last time? The short version is that the user's there and the prompts they use to create images with Grok that it's not supposed to create are much more sophisticated.

23:47The prompts that we saw on X were very straightforward. They were simple texts like, put her in a bikini, take her clothes off, things like that. And I think we can say now, based on the reaction from Musk and X and mostly the things that they are not doing in response to this, that they consider this to be pretty much a legitimate, okay use of Grok. On the Telegram channel, the reason it exists, it is part of a larger community where people create non-consensual AI-generated images of real people. and there are various rooms within the community where people focus on different celebrities. They focus on different types of what they call edits, which are using Photoshop, using AI to manipulate images.

24:57And then there's one channel that is just dedicated to prompts for different AI image generators. and basically how to find loopholes within them in order to produce non-consensual images with mainstream tools that are not supposed to do that. We've reported on this thing many times. The most notable example was at 2014 when this image of Taylor Swift went viral. People were using Microsoft's designer tool in order to make that image. And the loophole there was basically misspelling her name and describing sexual acts without using any explicit terms, which is kind of like the first line of defense that AI image generators have to prevent abuse.

25:47But it is a primitive, not very good way to stop that. And those filters get better, but this community where thousands of people participate keep coming up with extremely elaborate, more sophisticated prompts to do that, which can produce far worse things than what we've seen on X. On X, we've seen some nudity, images of women in bikinis, and this is straight-up hardcore porn images as well as videos. Gotcha. Yeah, I'm glad you brought up the Taylor Swift one because it's interesting. Whereas before with that, you found this Telegram group and you sort of drew a through line between this group abusing a certain tool and then making those images and then sort of eventually leading out publicly onto Twitter.

26:49And obviously, that was a huge case at the time. I think people can continue to think about it. So there is a through line there. what's a little bit different here is like in some ways there didn't need to be a through line because the prompts on x are just hey grok undress this like it's barely a prompt for the for sort of for the public stuff but what you're saying is that in the telegram group there are still people who are actually making grok do way way worse stuff it's just that it's not sort of reaching x as the public it's not on the surface yet which i think uh is part of the deal and there's probably two reasons for that one is it does take time for this stuff to trickle out from these pretty closed uh groups on fairly obscure corners of the internet to the mainstream which is what happened with the Taylor Swift incident.

27:47So I think it's only a matter of time until you start seeing this type of thing in your feed. But then also the baseline for Grok is so bad that there's like less of a need, right? So it's like you can get Grok to do pretty bad things without trying hard at all, as you said. So I think a lot of people don't even consider the possibility that you can make far worse images if you just went looking for the right prompt. But if you did, you'd find them. Yeah. And I'm trying to think how to phrase this, but the fact that it's not the public version of Grocon X generating straight up hardcore pornography of people works in the technique's favor in it becoming basically a meme.

28:38Like it's abuse and it's horrible but it's taken on this new character on x where even people um sex workers who are selling their only fans or whatever it may be they're leveraging it or other accounts are sort of piling in like oh i wish grok could unblur this video and then grok does it and of course that's to drive engagement to an only fans page or whatever if people were using grok to generate really hardcore stuff, it might not become a meme. It would just be like, oh, this is horrible, horrible abuse. You see what I'm doing? Yeah, yeah. And I guess just a few more things to note about the group.

29:16Like I said, I think we can say judging on Grok's response that it's just not taking this problem seriously and maybe doesn't consider it a problem. Well, X's response. X's response, yeah. Sorry. But But you can see in the Telegram channel that Grok slash X slash XAI, they do have their limits in terms of what they would allow people to generate. Because the general flow of the chat is somebody comes in with a prompt that they find that works pretty well and is able to generate very graphic images. Everyone gets really excited. Everybody starts generating it. I don't know exactly what is happening on the Grok end of things because they will not respond to our request for comment.