The Latest Epstein Dump is a Disaster

0:03Hello, and welcome to the 404 Media Podcast, where we bring you the parallel access to hidden worlds, both online and IRL. Well, 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 the best comments. Gain access to that content at 404media.co. I'm your host, Joseph. And with me are the 404 Media co-founders. The first being Sam Cole. Hey. Emmanuel Mayberg. Yo. And Jason Kebler. What's up? What's up? Jason, you have an urgent, immediate, and unusual request.

0:49What is that? If you live in Otomwa, Iowa, or the surrounding areas, can you please, please email me or signal me? Jason at 404media.co or unsignal at jason.404. Otomwa, Iowa residents. Rise up. No further information. Nothing bad will happen to you because of this. Other bad things might happen to you. But nothing bad will happen to you because you contact Jason. Yeah, we're not going into specifics. It will be very, very fun. It'll be a great surprise. Let's just leave it at that. If you do live there or you know somebody lives there, please have them reach out to us as soon as possible, as soon as you hear this podcast.

1:39Okay. We'll leave that there. Otoma, Iowa population is 25 ,000. So I feel like someone will live there or know someone who lives there. Please, please hit us up. I think it's hopeful, but we'll see. Okay. Changing gears. We're going to talk about this week's stories. There's a lot to get through immediately. You know what we're going to talk about because obviously it's in the headline of the podcast, but I do want to do a straight-up content warning that there's going to be some disturbing stuff in this because it is about the Epstein dump. This article, written by Sam and Emmanuel, DOJ released unredacted nude images in Epstein files.

2:27So on Friday, the Department of Justice released this massive 3.5 million pages of material in the latest Epstein dump, it's obviously, it's got to be the biggest yet, right? It's got emails, videos, audio, images as well, which is what we're going to talk about. So Sam or Emmanuel, I can't remember which one of you got the tip. I think it was Sam. But what was this tip exactly? Yeah, so the tip came from 4-Hour Reader. they were basically like I haven't seen this reported yet anywhere and this was on Friday night they were like I haven't seen this reported anywhere yet and I don't really know what to do with this information but I was looking through the Epstein files and they mentioned that the pagination on the site is awful because it's just a dump of like links to PDFs basically.

3:33And some of those PDFs are images, some of those PDFs are emails, some of them are just like random notes and stuff. But they were like, I was just clicking through randomly and realized that there are unredacted nudes and potential child sexual abuse material in these files in random spots as I was clicking through. And they were like, this is awful for victims to have these unredacted images posted by the literal government and even more awful if anyone in here is underage. So that's the email that I got on Friday night and was at the laundromat and was immediately like, hey, something weird is going on with these files.

4:21Let's check this out a little further. Yes. So we'll get to what happened next in a minute. I don't really want to describe the images in any more detail than what we actually have in the article. So how did you describe the images in that piece? I think you did this in the first paragraph. Yeah. So a lot of the images in the files, just to be clear, are redacted. There is a lot of redacted material in the files. And this was part of the reasoning, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think this was part of the reasoning the DOJ gave saying, you know, we need all this time. We need extra time. That's why we're so late on this deadline for releasing the files because we need time to protect the victims and redact the images and redact the files and redact the names and all that stuff.

5:07So that was kind of like assumed to be done. But these images, unlike many of the others in the files, were full body. Their faces were visible. They were either fully nude or partially undressed, posing, sexual poses, exposing the generals, things like that. You can use your imagination. But yeah, let's not go into a ton of detail because obviously this is gnarly stuff. so yeah that's that's what was what was left out in the open exposed to anyone who's just like this reader clicking through these files on a random friday night so obviously that is highly alarming for the reasons you just laid out then we contact the department of justice Emmanuel, I think you handled that.

6:07When did you contact them and what did you ask or tell them? So I think I emailed them the same night on Friday. I told them there are these unredacted images, both the nudity and the identity of the women are not redacted. These are both things that they're supposed to do and they said that they will do. they got a reply to me, I think, the next day, which is included in the article. You can read it if you want, but it's kind of like a generic, oops, yeah, this happens. We should also note that at the top of the entire Epstein file dump on the DOJ website, there are two things that you have to do.

6:57One is you have to click a button saying that you're 18. That's because they know a lot of the material is not suitable. for kids. And then also there is a message that says, again, you can read it in full if you want, but I'll summarize. And it says, hey, there's a lot of files here. We're dumping all of this because we're required to do so and the public has a right to know, which I agree with. But then there's also like, we might not have redacted everything and we might make mistakes and you might encounter both nudity and the identity of real people. and if that happens, we're sorry, please email us and we'll do something about that.

7:42We do this with the tech platforms a lot. We'll tell them that something bad and against their policy is happening on their website, but we won't say exactly where it is to test their ability to find it. And I did the same thing here. I was just like, hey, just so you know, this stuff exists. They got back to me. they told me you know our bad and then pointed me at that email at which point i told them hey here's exactly where it is and then a few hours later uh the the images were removed and then we felt comfortable reporting it obviously we would not report the story unless the images were removed because that would only draw more people to the images and um you know re-traumatize the victims and expose their identity to God knows who.

8:36Yeah. Sam, what was your thinking there? Because as Emmanuel says, we essentially held off because we have to for ethical obligations not to amplify some really, really horrible stuff in there. What's your line of thinking on there as well? Yeah, I mean, it's like Emmanuel said, something we have to think about a lot. we're not kind of holding our cards close to our chest for drama reasons. We're trying to make sure the things that we're reporting on, which are usually exposing people's, or not usually, but like often exposing people's personal information, identity, maybe their data, things like that, sensitive material to the world by reporting on it on our website that's read by a lot of people.

9:27So yeah, we just kind of were like, okay, let's see when or if they take it down. I was also interested to see how fast they would take it down because this is something that people who are victims of abuse material in general and abusive imagery like this just on the internet in general, on Twitter, on whatever, talk about a lot. It's like the speed at which the things get taken down matters a lot. If it's up for days, even hours, it makes a huge difference between if you find it and it's removed within minutes because this stuff spreads like wildfire. So yeah, I was like, I wonder how, considering it's DOJ, I wonder how slow they'll be in actually taking any action on this, even though we've handed them directly the way to to take it down and the spots where they were located, like it still took, let's see, we emailed them first on Friday and then again on Saturday.

10:32And then it was Sunday afternoon, I think, when we were like, okay, the images are actually removed, which is a long time. Yeah, they were out for like 48 hours around something like that. And at the same time, as we're doing that, the New York Times is doing its own reporting on the nude images as well. And just to flag some of their reporting, they found essentially the same thing. And they said they were contacting DOJ as well. They also spoke to a lawyer for one woman who was identified in the files, even though she had not previously been linked publicly to Epstein. The lawyer, obviously, the New York Times report does not name the victim.

11:18That would be entirely counterproductive. But the lawyer was Brittany Henderson, and she called the redaction failures, quote, abhorrent. And then she said, we're frankly shocked by the level of carelessness that the department has shown towards these women. I mean, we did an earlier podcast episode a few months ago at this point, I think, about how messy the rollout has been, where they just throw these files on the internet and they're hard to dig through for journalistic reasons that back then was much more about emails now this is about images and files and all of that so the same point stands but the consequences are much much more serious than the wall street journal i think before the nude stuff came out the wall street journal reported the files included the full names of victims quote including many who haven't shared their identities publicly or were minors when they were abused by the notorious sex offender a review of 47 victims full names on sunday also around about the same time found that 43 of them were left unredacted in files that were made public by the government on friday several women's full names appeared more than a hundred times in the files so it's not just the nude images which we focused on because obviously that is incredibly be fucked up just straight up lists of victims who have you know not come forward for whichever reason which is their choice obviously uh to do that and i guess to wrap up this bit just before i asked jason to talk about the the dump more broadly what do you think sam about the dumps here putting basically the responsibility on the victims like of course the ultimate responsibility with DOJ.

13:04They should have redacted it. But effectively, they're shifting that to the victims who have to quickly find out whether they're in this dump and then tell the DOJ to try to get them out of it. What do you think of that? It's very classic. It's very part of a much bigger story, like I said, about abuse imagery online and how it spreads and the way that it's treated by all sorts of people, especially the people who are responsible for getting it removed or protecting it, things like that. So it's not, unfortunately, it's just not that surprising that, first of all, that they took so long to take it down and also that they were so sloppy about doing it in the first place.

13:46It's just a total mess. And it's really sad in a lot of ways, the way that this story of the files in general has been treated by, you know, influencers and news outlets and things like that, that are kind of feeding on this, the conspiratorial stuff, the sensational stuff, which is all like valid and fine to report on. But I just keep thinking about there, this is a story about real people whose lives were ruined by this man and his network and by some of the most powerful people in the world. And they've been saying for so many years exactly what happened. They were there. It happened to them.

14:33And now we're in some kind of like constant, all-encompassing debate slash conversation about the files in general and who's in them and who's and, you know, what actually happened. It's like, they told you a long time ago what happened and it took this long and it's taking so much more chaos and damage to their livelihoods and their reputations and their mental well-being to actually get the story fully out when it was already something that victims have been saying for so long. So, I don't know, I just keep thinking about that. It's like, it's highly depressing thought that they're out there kind of watching all this go down and thinking, God, this is just endlessly damaging.

15:23Yeah, exactly. Jason, just to wrap up this section, you briefly wrote about Musk, Elon Musk being in the emails. And I think you probably looked at a few others as well. What was your takeaway from seeing some of these people in there? Yeah, I mean, we talked about this a few months ago or a month or two ago, last time there was a big release and just how messy and sloppy all of this has been. I think that this dump feels like there has been the most attention on it. I think because the photos that we just talked about, but also there's a lot of really high-profile people in here sending really, really insane emails.

16:11lots of celebrities lots of tech barons there's like an entire like Peter Thiel subplot here and you know information about like the tanking of Gawker things like that I think Ryan Broderick who runs Garbage Day had a really good post about some of the things that these like tech barons were talking about with Jeffrey Epstein and like what the bigger ideological project was. And I don't know, I think Ryan read thousands of pages of these emails. I feel like I read hundreds of pages of these emails and started to lose my grip on reality, if I'm being real with you, just because there's so much in here.

16:52There's fodder for lots and lots and lots of different articles and stories and conspiracy theories and non-conspiracy theories. It's just really, really, there's a lot in here. But one thing that stood out to us kind of immediately was that Elon Musk has been saying for a really long time that he didn't really have anything to do with Jeffrey Epstein, that he never went to his island, that he never planned to go to his island. There was some previous reporting based on previous dumps where there was talk that he had planned to go to the island. And in these emails that are most recently released, there's multiple emails showing that he did at least plan to go to the island.

17:41There was talk about Epstein sending a helicopter to him. And then there's this one email that really stood out to me where Elon Musk says to Jeffrey Epstein, quote, what day slash night will be the wildest party on your island? Which doesn't sound... That's not what I say when I'm like, I don't want anything to do with you. I don't want to see you. I don't want to party with you. I don't want to be at your weird island. Asking when the big party on the island is going to be is the opposite of not wanting to go to the island. Exactly. Just asking to steer clear of it. He's like, let me know so I don't go.

18:16Oh, let me know so that I can make plans not to be there. I do that all the time. This has caused quite a big stir on X and Elon Musk has been tweeting a lot about it. There's like SpaceX is buying XAI. Like, I don't know. There's just like a lot going on right now. And, you know, it's our job to kind of try to get to the bottom of it and try to determine like what matters and what doesn't matter. And I think that with a dump of this size put into the context of all the previous dumps and all that, it's like kind of quite hard to make sense of a lot of it. And I think you can take like this, the main story here is the same story that it's always been, which is like this man committed really heinous crimes and had many, many, many very powerful friends.

19:13But I think that the emails that have been coming out show that he had his hands in like all of these sorts of things that we didn't know about previously. and I hate to say this, but it's like there's something here for everyone as in like if you have an interest of any sort, you can find like an Epstein email that is about your interest and be like, whoa, this is like fucked up. And I think that that is like, I think that we're going to be hearing about these emails in particular for a very long time. Yeah. The last thing I'll add to that on the idea that there's unfortunately something for everybody in there.

19:49our former co-worker Lorenzo Franceschi Bicari from Motherboard. He is Italian, obviously, and he covers a lot of the Italian spyware industry. That's where a lot of these surveillance companies come from. He found in the dump that Epstein allegedly, according to, I would say, an unverified piece of testimony from an informant to the FBI, that Epstein had an Italian hacker who was finding zero days for... That's what they do. And then they were working on Epstein's behalf. So it's like, if anybody was going to find the Italian hacking company surveillance angle in a big data dump, I'm glad it was Lorenzo.

20:31But that was absolutely insane. All right. Can I add something before we move on real quick? Yes, of course. Sorry. Just quickly. I know we say this a lot and I just want to reiterate it for this story as well. We rely on readers to tell us when they see something a lot of the time. A lot of our reporting is based on reader tips and people who trust us to do the reporting and do it the right way. So if you see something weird going on, end of sentence, let us know because there might be something there. It's like if someone hadn't reached out to us and said, hey, I don't know what to do with this, but maybe you do.

21:13These images might still be online. they might have been up for much longer. They might have been up for weeks. So it's like because that person reached out, we were able to tell the DOJ, hey, get this down. And then they're down. So yeah, if you see something, say something. That's kind of the move here for sure. And all of our emails are on the website. All of our signals are on the website. It's just our first name at 4formedia.co. But just wanted to plug that. Yeah. Or if you live in Ottumwa, Iowa. If you live in Ottumwa, Iowa. a tumwa aisle come forward. Oh my God. You're not in trouble. No, no, no.

21:50That is a very, very different story. Entirely, entirely different. Unless there's something weird going on in a tumwa, then... Well, maybe there's also a tip from there as well. Yeah, absolutely. All right. We'll leave that there. When we come back, we're going to be joined by Matthew, I think. And we're going to talk about Silicon Valley's favorite AI agent and how it actually has a ton of vulnerabilities. and it actually was pretty scary for a minute. We'll be right back after this.

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25:03All right, we are back. And now we have Matthew here as well. The headline of this first piece he wrote is Silicon Valley's favorite new AI agent has serious security flaws. First of all, what is MaltBot? And why is it suddenly everywhere? Well, it's no longer MaltBot, which is very confusing. No, no, no. I thought it was ClaudeBot. Now it's MaltBot. No. Right? No? That's the second name. They've abandoned that too because everyone felt like... I don't think anyone felt good about calling it MaltBot. That was gross. They changed it from MaltBot also? They changed it from MaltBot. It's now OpenClaw AI.

25:47That's what its official name is now. I'm sure that this will be the last time they changed the name. At some point, you stop updating the article. I mean, we're not updating it. That's like ridiculous. Because... So, for those who don't know, and obviously I learned this from reading the article, it was Claudebot, C-L-A-W-T-B-O-T. They were then asked to, hey, could you please use a different name, bianthropic, that makes Claude, as in like the name. They go to Maltbot. And now, as you say, Matthew, people don't like saying Malt apparently or something, so it's whatever you just said. Yeah, open claw.

26:22I think Malt is like a moist, right? It's one of those words that some people just find on plus Jason shaking his head, he gets it. He gets it. No, I feel like Maltbot was a good name. It's distinct, yeah? Well, what is it? Is that the question? Well, the good thing for Jason is that we're going to keep calling it that because that's what I have in the Google Docs. So I'm calling it Maltbot and I don't really care if they get angry or not. But yes, Matthew, what is it and why is it everywhere? It's an AI personal assistant, basically. Why it's everywhere, I think, is a little bit more of a complicated question.

27:01so it is a it's like imagine if you had Siri or whatever the Google's robot name is it escapes me but it had a little bit more autonomy and it would read your emails and make suggestions about who to interview and set up calendar dates for you and it would kind of do this stuff by itself why it's everywhere I was thinking about this before we jumped on the call because if you've got like If you know anybody that knows anything about AI or has been playing with it, they've kind of been doing this already for years. It's pretty trivial to fork any of these big models and run it on your own hardware.

27:44And what MoltBot is, is an open source, easy to use version of that that people are deploying on their own hardware. They're buying Mac minis. They're throwing one of these agents on there. And I think the big draw is that it has a little bit of autonomy. And critically, the communication window is stuff you're already using. So you can talk to this thing, and it can talk to you through Telegram, through Signal, through Discord. And I think that interface medium makes people feel a more close relationship with a thing. So you're not opening up a chat window on ChatGPT or Claude or whatever. and running this thing through a browser window or an app on your phone, you're actually talking to it the way you would talk to a friend.

28:34So this thing blows up over the last couple weeks. Silicon Valley Twitter is all over it. It's extremely popular. It's GitHub. I checked right before we got on. It has 156 ,000 stars, which is a lot of endorsements. And people love this thing. But as we'll get into, it has some serious security issues. Yeah. So it's super, super popular. People are using it almost to live the, and I'm not trying to give it too much credit here, but almost like the sci-fi dream of what AI is almost supposed to be or what was promised to us where, wow, I can actually interface with this thing and it will go out and it will do things for me.

29:15Sometimes for better or for worse, there's a few reports going around that somebody let one go and then it figured out how to make phone calls or something. And obviously depending on what APIs you link it up to or what capabilities you give it. But the idea is that it's at least semi-autonomous and it can kind of go and do stuff, which I don't know, it sounds kind of nuts in my opinion to put anything important or even trivial in my life to that sort of technology. My favorite small stupid one was a guy had left it running overnight and it filled up one of the token wallets. And it drained the token wallet because it was asking one of the other LLMs, like, hey, is it the morning yet?

29:58Like every 30 minutes. And it would spend a little bit of the token every time. It's like something you don't need an AI to be checking for you, but it burned like$20,$20 of this guy's money, which I thought was very funny. I mean, that's very, very good. So people are using this. They're linking up to do various capabilities, but there seems to be some pretty fundamental problems, or there were, perhaps I should say. There's like two or three here, so maybe we keep it brief because we actually have another, I think, more important story to talk about. But briefly, what did Jameson O 'Reilly find, who is a security researcher?

30:37You know, I've known him for a while. They post on XLR when they find interesting stuff. You then spoke to him. what did he find that was wrong with Moldbot? So in credit to the Moldbot team, they have been closing these up as he's been discovering them. Three kind of very quick. He found one vulnerability where if you had an open, like if you had one of your bot open to the internet through something like Discord, it was pretty trivially easy to then, for a malicious actor to access that Discord, use that to get to the bot, and then use that to get to everything else. They closed that up. Then there was a vulnerability on Claude Hub, which is kind of, you think of it kind of like an app store for Moltbot, where people have designed all these different scripts.