Why Are DHS Agents Wearing Meta Ray-Bans?

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1:15Hello, 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-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. And with me are 404 Media co-founders, Sam Cole. Hello. Emmanuel Mayberg. Hello. And Jason Kebler. Hey, it's good to be back. I feel like I was kicked off the pod for a few weeks.

1:55Nobody kicked you off. I was kicked off. I wasn't allowed on. Okay. Well, we're all together now. And coincidentally, very soon, we're all going to be together IRL, I think for the first time since we launched 404 Media. Like, am I remembering this correctly? Because we're going to talk about our second anniversary party coming up. And we'll get into the details of that shortly. We had the first anniversary, obviously last year uh jason couldn't make it unfortunately we just out of the party as well not kicked out of that i think you were sick i had covid i had covid uh which was very unfortunate and then we just had this la party and emmanuel couldn't make that one but we're all going to be at this party um in new york sam do you want to give people the details and i'll say straight away there's a link in the show notes if you don't want to write this down uh if you'll listen to this yeah there's a link in the show notes it's going to be easier to um click on than what i'm about to say because as i was making this bitly link two seconds ago i realized let me try to read this so the tickets are at bit.ly slash 404 turns two so it's 404 the numerals turns and then the word two.

3:18Wait, wait, wait. Why do you have half of it in numerically? I don't know. I was rushing. It's War 4 Turns 2. Just write it how you think it sounds and you'll find it, I think. Or click on the show notes. Or go to the link in the show notes and there's a post on the website. And in that post, there's links to where you buy tickets for$20 if you're not a subscriber. if you are a 404 Media subscriber already, I mean, you get free access. You just have to get a ticket. Is that right, Sam? Yeah. Yeah, you get in free if you're a subscriber. It's a code in the post, at the end of the post, that'll let you get a free ticket at checkout.

3:59We're going to have really good beers by Farm One, which is the venue in Brooklyn. They make their own beers. They're like a microbrewery. And they're also a vertical farm. So you get to watch lettuce grow So if talking to your friends and neighbors is not thrilling enough, you can do that. But yeah, it's on August 21st from 6 to 9. We're going to do a live podcast recording from 6.45 to 7.30 or something. And people can ask questions. And yeah, like Joe said, we'll be together for the first time, I think, since we launched, right? The last time we were together was right before launch. It was like three weeks before launch.

4:38Yeah. It was before. That's crazy. it's really nuts so knock on wood we all make it this year because what we did was we took photos um in anticipation of the launch of 404 media and did that new york times article announced the website as well but yeah it's very very crazy that we talk to each other basically every day i mean it's unusual if we don't speak to each other uh in a day and yet we haven't been in the same place for so long. So yeah, if you want to come to this event, and please do, please sign up. Follow the link in the show notes. Check the post on the site. If you're having real issues, email Sam.

5:21She'll just give you the code. Literally, yeah. I know some people have been doing that, and that's not a problem. Okay. I think also, though, I know a lot of you are not in New York, so sorry. I know our events have been in New York, LA, Austin. we are as Sam said we're recording a live podcast so that's like that's what we're able to do at the moment hopefully one day we'll go on tour and hit an international tour we'll hit every town city etc yeah we're getting a tour bus but yeah we understand that a lot of our subscribers are not in New York City but that's where we're doing it because it's easiest for us to do yeah and hopefully we can do other locations in the future alright let's get to this week's stories.

6:05Jason, we're starting with one you wrote. The headline is, A CPP agent wore meta smart glasses to an immigration raid in Los Angeles. I don't know why I had such trouble with that acronym. It's Customs and Border Protection. Headline's pretty self-explanatory, but a lot of work went into this. Can you just describe what this footage shows. You get this footage. What do we look at when we see it? Yeah, I mean, this was a really tricky article to do, even though the ultimate conclusion is relatively straightforward. It's like an agent who was involved in immigration enforcement in Los Angeles, really, really controversial, heavily covered, heavily media covered, and just like very concerning immigration raids wore meta smart glasses to the raids.

7:05That's like the ultimate conclusion here. But basically we got footage from a source outside of a Home Depot where there was a CBP agent who was wearing meta smart glasses. And these are basically the Ray-Ban sunglasses that have a camera on them. They have additional features, which I'm sure we'll talk about. But it was super hard to do this story because one, although the footage was quite good, it's also just like a hectic, hectic situation, which I think, I guess I'll talk about now. Tell us what's happening. Yeah. So I mean, basically, this person is filming this CBP agent and a few of his colleagues who are around a CBP truck.

7:53They're outside of Home Depot. I believe there were five people arrested at this immigration raid. and it's like in there's an altercation i mean it's it's like a shouting match situation but uh basically like the uh cbp agent is gesturing for them to get away the person filming it is filming it uh just trying to document what is going on and you can see that the cbp agent in question is wearing sunglasses um and you know the source was like hey they were wearing these sunglasses with a camera on it. Like what's going on there? And that's really notable because one, CBP doesn't have a contract with Meta.

8:39And so there are one of two things potentially happening here. It's like either a one-off in which CBP is testing these out in some way, acquiring them in some way that is not standard government contracting bid system, etc. Or this is a CBP officer who's wearing their own personal sunglasses to an ICE raid. I mean, ICE was nearby. This is a CBP agent, to be clear. Wearing these glasses to an immigration raid. And in that case, it could be a personal device in which case there's regulations about bringing your own personal camera to an enforcement action like this so the question is like what are they used for why are they wearing them even if it wasn't recorded like why would someone make a choice like this uh you know all sorts of questions abound yeah uh like in the same way that it became very newsworthy and important when even police officers started wearing body cams or something like that obviously there was this huge shift in policing several years back uh at this point this is similar in some ways different than others but a cpp official is basically wearing one of these pairs of smart glasses which are capable of uh live streaming recording filming some other ai tools in there as well i mean can you tell us a little bit more about what the glasses are actually capable of, Jason?

10:22Yeah. And even on that point, it's like we had an entire... I mean, this was a long time ago, and maybe now it seems quaint, but it's like Hillary Clinton was using her personal email server for a long time, and it was a big scandal. And it's like this person is not a politician, but they're a government employee, and they're using their own personal recording device, potentially, in this extremely fraught situation. And there's a reason why police and federal agents aren't allowed to bring their own cameras to enforcement raids. There's all sorts of reasons. And some of the reasons have to do with privacy.

11:02Others have to do with whether that footage is foiable and obtainable by the public. by the public. Some of it has to do with sharing this sort of information. If he has it on his own account, it's like, who is taking care of it? Was it being live-streamed? Where is it going? That sort of thing. And accountability. If this officer ends up doing something which is abusive, if it's usually a government device, it's like, okay, there's an audit trail and we can go, we can get the body cam footage or the meta Ray-Ban footage in this case and be like, oh, we can determine what happened if there was a case of abuse.

11:42But if it's just the pair of your own sunglasses, that complicates it. Yeah. So what these glasses are able to do, like off the shelf, they can record, they can take photos, they can live stream. They have Meta's AI built into it. So you can ask Meta, you can say like, hey, Meta AI, like what am I looking at? And they have image recognition so they can try to describe sort of like what they're seeing. They have three different microphones on them. And then notably, they do not have facial recognition built into it natively. But Joseph reported previously that students at Harvard University were able to use these glasses, pushing to a smartphone, and then use an app on the smartphone to do facial recognition.

12:32so this is like it's just like there is a precedent for that technology being modded into these glasses and then also the context is joseph has been reporting on a new app that ice has been using uh that is a cell phone version of facial recognition that is connected to all these government databases and again we have no uh like evidence that this person was using facial recognition on these glasses, but like all of that context, I think is important to sort of understand like why this might be a problem or could be a problem at some point. And then the final thing is Meta has, well, the information reported that Meta has considered adding facial recognition to these glasses natively at some point.

13:20We don't have our own reporting on that, but the information is like a really well-respected outlet that frankly doesn't get stuff like that wrong yeah yeah um and i would also add it has a little the pair of glasses have a little led light on the side and in the footage we got the light is not on indicating they weren't filming at that moment but the clip is like 30 seconds basically and we have no idea what else they were doing uh the rest of the time that being said after we publish uh multiple people flag to us some more footage of potentially the same agents maybe other ones uh what did this other footage show that's already been published i think on blue sky but now we were taking another look at it what did that show yeah so uh this original footage was taken june 30th at a home depot um in cypress park los angeles and then there was footage both footage and photographs taken on July 7th at MacArthur Park in Los Angeles.

14:23And if you've been following these raids at all, the MacArthur Park raid was really, really controversial because there were a lot of kids there. Karen Bass was there, the mayor of Los Angeles. It was a very contentious situation, as all of these raids have been. But the journalist Mel Buehr took photos and they show two agents wearing these glasses. And so I don't know, kind of like in my mind, that takes it from like, oh, maybe this person brought them like of their own accord to like, maybe this is CBP experimenting with something, or maybe there's some reason that CBP is there. And then these images are like really quite high resolution.

15:10It's just like very, very, very clear that they are wearing meta smart glasses and i think um i didn't talk about this yet but again the the first footage we got was like super hectic because it was an altercation between uh you know someone who was at the raid and the cbp agent and so i was going like frame by frame really trying to ensure that this is like the correct like that i'm not getting something wrong, that there's not some other model of sunglasses, that it's the current model of meta AI glasses, what they call them, because there was an earlier version that had fewer capabilities, which still would have been a story, but they just didn't have as many like AI features built into them.

15:56The Ray-Ban Stories glasses, which came out a few years ago. And so it was really like quite tough to sort of figure out what was going on. And then these images are just like really clear, the ones that Mel Buehr took. And so, I mean, yeah, it's like undeniably, well, in both cases, undeniably meta AI glasses, but now these are three instances, you know, if you count these two people. I'm also fairly certain that it's not the same agent as the first one. You know, they do have a mask on, but I think that they're different people. And certainly there's an additional one. at the very least it's i mean yeah it's very very noteworthy that we originally go from one uh federal law enforcement officer wearing ray-bans uh meta ray-bans to two it's like i know they just both happened to wear them and then they felt awkward when they both turned up to the raid or whatever wearing the same glasses it's pretty weird and it's pretty noteworthy then um i think a day after we publish an official customs and border protection account run by i think um a senior local uh leader in the la county area published basically a sizzle reel of a raid on a home depot uh location to be clear from everything i've read and understand And that may have violated the court order, which recently passed, which said federal law enforcement agencies aren't supposed to go and just target Home Depot or basically target people based on the time or location where they are because, you know, it amounts to racial profiling, right?

17:42Putting that legality aside for a moment, what was this sizzle reel and did the glasses play into that at all? Yeah, so... Boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop. Breaking news, breaking news. As we're recording this, Jay-Z has filed a DMCA takedown request against the Department of Homeland Security and the video has been deleted off of Twitter. Wow. Because they include his music. Yeah, so to describe what it was, it was like a Jay-Z... It had Jay-Z music in it and then it had... What I can only describe as like, i don't know joseph sorry you got to help me here i don't know it was like industrial techno music uh it was it was trap trap music um i don't know about that okay we disagree we just it's been deleted so nobody can call it wrong now so we'll find it we'll find it but basically uh it it uh was a sizzle reel from a another raid as you mentioned that happened on friday i believe Friday or Thursday of last week that many people are arguing violates a court order about racial profiling, like sort of doing these at Home Depot, doing these based on what people look like, especially targeting Latino people.

19:06And it's a lot of like POV shots of agents chasing down, you know, people who are running away from them in this Home Depot parking lot. So we were able to determine that it all seemingly came from one raid because we like geolocated where the footage is from and that sort of thing. And some of the footage very much appears like it was taken at eye level. and what I mean by that is like you can tell sort of the pov of the footage and then also uh there's one moment where the agent who is being who is filming you know from their perspective turns their head left like really quickly and the camera goes that way and then they turn back like sort of while they're running and I think it's like I could try to recreate that shot with like a camera on a stick doing something like this but it would be like a really awkward and weird thing to do and it seems like far more likely that they were shot either with this with meta ai glasses or with like a gopro attached to a helmet uh is another option but in any case it's like the department of homeland security has been making propaganda videos about their raids um like very notably in the uh footage that we just mentioned you can see people running around with DSLR cameras who are with CBP.

20:32There was also a Fox News, I hesitate to say journalist, but a Fox News person embedded with them filming from within the Penske rental truck that they jumped out of. And so, yeah, it's like this, they are making propaganda videos using cameras. They're really interested in the aesthetics of what they're doing. And it's pretty messed up. Yeah, and I just re-watched the video because I found one that's still online. It's Drum and Bass. Please save it. Save it. Download. Download. I'm going to do it right now while somebody else is talking, but it's Drum and Bass, so I apologize. I corrected that.

21:13So very briefly, I filed a FOIA with Customs and Border Protection for this footage. I think Jason did one date, I did the other, then I did another. and they got back pretty quickly you know in a matter of days and the response to both of my freedom of information requests was customs and border protection or u.s border patrol agents do not have government issued ray-ban smart glasses and thus no video exists and i was requesting the footage collected by the meta ray-bans or really any smart glasses they were wearing um maybe we would go into this on a FOIA forum, Jason, the sort of live stream that we offer to paying 404 media subscribers.

21:58But to me, if this person's wearing metal Ray-Bans during official government activity, such as an immigration raid, even if it's their own personal pair they brought, that is still a government record and should still be subject to FOIA. Like, just briefly, what do you think of that? While I quickly download this video before I get deleted. No, I mean, that's absolutely, absolutely the case. We have FOIA'd often for records that are on a government employee's personal email account or their personal cell phone if it was being used to conduct government business. And there's no doubt here that they're obviously on the job and therefore any footage captured should be a record.

22:46I guess a few other things to note, I spoke to, I believe, four different privacy experts for this article. There are regulations governing what you can bring to the job. And in the body-worn camera regulations for Customs and Border Patrol and for the Department of Homeland Security, which CBP falls under, they're not allowed to bring or record on personal devices. So, you know, everything feels out the window with this administration. Like these sorts of things are not being enforced. Or if they are being enforced, it's like not even a slap on the wrist. It's often just like a reprimand. Like, hey, don't do that again, which we'll probably talk about in the story in the subscribers section.

23:37So there's that. And then there's also, I guess, the meta of it all. which maybe we're getting to, but Meta really didn't want to be in this story. They didn't want to be mentioned. They were like, we don't have a contract with CBP, which is fair enough. They also said, are you going to name all of the types of sunglasses that were worn to this raid, which the other ones don't have cameras in them? Said, are you going to name the cell phones that the officers used, etc.? And it's like, well, no, we're not. But also that's a commodified technology that has been in everyone's pockets for 15 years.

24:18Whereas this is like a new technology that Meta is really pushing. Like they're really trying hard to make these things cool. You know, I saw billboards for it in Mexico City. I saw billboards for it in my neighborhood in Los Angeles. Just like they're really marketing it as like a content creator thing to wear for your like Instagram stories. and it turns out that they're quite... CBP agents are pretty interested in them, whether that's on a personal level or a larger level. I think that's notable. Yeah. Maybe I'll just close with this. If we saw Customs and Border Protection agents running around during an immigration raid wearing an Apple Vision Pro on their face, that would obviously be a story and we would obviously cover it.

25:06They're not doing that. They're doing it with meta Ray-Ban smart glasses. So that's the story. Just a question about the meta response is, why do you think they want to distance themselves so bad from CBP? That's my whole thing. I've been writing about meta over and over and over again for years now. And it's super interesting to me that a company that their founder was at the inauguration, their founder goes on Joe Rogan all the time. Their founder is really pushing the capabilities of these, like Mark Zuckerberg is talking about them in earnings reports and saying they're going to add all these features.

25:56They've rolled back protections on anti-hate speech stuff on Facebook and Instagram. They specifically allow for language that dehumanizes immigrants now. And Zuckerberg is going through his masculine rebranding exercise. I'll just add one more thing to that. Famously fired Palmer Luckey for his politics and for supporting Trump. and recently publicly kind of made up with him around the issue of tech needing to come around, the administration and needing to come around national security and defending our borders, etc. Sorry, that's really important, is that Meta signed a deal with Anduril, which is Palmer Luckey's company, which is a defense contractor, to sell AR solutions to the military.

26:50And Andrew Bosworth, who is, I believe, the CTO of Meta, is like an honorary... Yeah, he's got an honorary figurehead position within the military. And this all happened in the last few months. And so, I mean, the big question, we talked about it over and over again amongst ourselves is like, is Meta based or not? Do they want to be part of this new military, industrial, startup vibes? Like, you know, your Andorils, your Palantirs, etc. or do they not? And like everything that Zuckerberg is doing suggests that they want to be this, but everything that their PR people are doing behind the scenes suggests that they don't.

27:32And it seems like they don't want to be like associated with this. And it's, I don't know why. I think Sam had some theories as to why I'd be curious to hear them on the pod. But like, yeah, it's just like, why not go for it? I mean, it is, it's classic Zuck, like wanting to have all things at all times and be liked by everyone. My theory is that glasses and fashion and consumer goods that you wear are a very different thing than the policies of Instagram and whether or not you're going to be able to post about face rates on Instagram is a very different thing than what you wear on your face. And I think any association with cops generally is quite toxic to widespread adoption by people with money.

28:20So people who wear Ray-Bans, that is hipster, coastal elite type of brand. That's what they want people to be thinking about when they're wearing... When they see those glasses. They don't want people to think about a cop beating the shit out of somebody in a Home Depot parking lot. Which if... It could tip that way very easily. This could become the cop glasses very easily. And I think they know that and they have seen the whole like Google Glass, Glass Holes thing completely crater an entire project. They saw the Metaverse project completely bomb. And now they're like, please, God, let this be cool.

29:06Like, it just needs to be cool. And I don't think, I think as much as like Zuck and Palmer and all those guys are trying to sell like the surveillance state and cop bootlicking as like a cool new wave. It's just not, it's not what people are going to buy if they want to be like the smart, cool hipster brand. So that's my theory. But who knows, really? I mean, they're putting so much behind the smart glasses project. They're hiring like crazy for this. It's like it is their new metaverse. So I think they're very sensitive to it succeeding because a lot is riding on it.

29:53Yeah, I think the Ray-Bans element complicates the PR response. I'll leave it at that. Okay, we'll leave that story there. If anybody else sees similar footage, please send it to us, of course. We're going to continue to look at this. I'm very interested in seeing more. After the break, Sam's going to tell us about this pretty difficult choice that voice actors are having to make in the age of AI. We'll be right back after this.

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