News
ICE Spends Millions on Clearview AI Facial Recognition to Find People ‘Assaulting’ Officers
A new contract with Clearview AI explicitly says ICE is buying the tech to investigate "assaults against law enforcement officers."
News
This Company Turns Dashcams into ‘Virtual CCTV Cameras.’ Then Hackers Got In
A hacker has compromised Nexar, which turns peoples' cars into "virtual CCTV cameras" that organizations can then buy images from. The images include sensitive U.S. military and intelligence facilities.
Impact
Congress Pushes DHS for Details on ICE’s New Facial Recognition App
404 Media first revealed ICE’s new app, called Mobile Fortify, in June. Now members of a congressional committee are pressing DHS for more information, including ICE's legal basis for using the app inside the U.S.
Podcast
Podcast: Trump Take LEGO
How Trump's tariffs are impacting all sorts of hobbies; how OnlyFans piracy is ruining the internet for everyone; and ChatGPT's reckoning.
Behind The Blog
Behind the Blog: Dogfooding and Datasets
This week, we discuss our top games, “dense street imagery," and first-person experiences with apps.
Podcast
Podcast: 404 Media Live—NYC!
Here's the podcast recorded at our recent second anniversary party in New York!
News
Flock Wants to Partner With Consumer Dashcam Company That Takes ‘Trillions of Images’ a Month
That dashcam in your car could soon integrate with Flock, the surveillance company providing license plate data to DHS and local police.
Podcast
Podcast: The Underground Trade of Car Hacking Tech
The Flipper Zero is being modified to break into cars; the wave of 80s nostalgia AI slop; and how the Citizen app is using AI to write crime alerts.
News
Citizen Is Using AI to Generate Crime Alerts With No Human Review. It’s Making a Lot of Mistakes
Three sources described how AI is writing alerts for Citizen and broadcasting them without prior human review. In one case AI mistranslated “motor vehicle accident” to “murder vehicle accident.”
404 Media
404 Media at Two Years: How We've Grown, and What's Next
We're reflecting on the impact our journalism had in year two, how we've grown with your support, and what we aspire to accomplish in year three.
Behind The Blog
Behind the Blog: Our Second Anniversary Party!
This week, we have some party pics and musical selections from last night.
Features
Inside the Underground Trade of ‘Flipper Zero’ Tech to Break into Cars
“Kia Boys will be Flipper Boys by 2026,” one person in the reverse engineering community said.