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Let's recap on what went down this week. On the podcast this week: Our investigation into Nexar, a popular dashcam company that was catastrophically hacked and is also uploading user footage to a publicly available map without some drivers’ knowledge, and the sentencing of a sex trafficking ringleader. In the section for subscribers at the Supporter level, we talk about the Charlie Kirk assassination and our reporting around that.
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Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube.  Attorney General Pam Bondi. Image: DOJ DISAPPEARING ACTThe Department of Justice removed a study showing that white supremacist and far-right violence “continues to outpace all other types of terrorism and domestic violent extremism” in the United States. The study, which was conducted by the National Institute of Justice and hosted on a DOJ website was available there at least until September 12, 2025, according to an archive of the page saved by the Wayback Machine.  Photo by Iñaki del Olmo / Unsplash PROTECT LIBRARIANSReference librarian Eddie Kristan said lenders at the library where he works have been asking him to find books that don’t exist without realizing they were hallucinated by AI ever since the release of GPT-3.5 in late 2022. But the problem escalated over the summer after fielding patron requests for the same fake book titles from real authors—the consequences of an AI-generated summer reading list circulated in special editions of the Chicago Sun-Times and The Philadelphia Inquirer earlier this year.  Photo by Alfred Kenneally / Unsplash THAT'S QUITE A LISTA bill introduced by Michigan lawmakers last week would ban pornography, ASMR, depictions of transgender people, and VPNs for anyone using the internet in the state. House Bill 4938, called the “Anticorruption of Public Morals Act,” would prohibit distribution of “certain material on the internet that corrupts the public morals,” the bill states. The bill would forbid all “pornographic material,” which the lawmakers define as “content, digital, streamed, or otherwise distributed on the internet, the primary purpose of which is to sexually arouse or gratify, including videos, erotica, magazines, stories, manga, material generated by artificial intelligence, live feeds, or sound clips.”  Screenshot via 404 Media DE MINIMIS NIGHTMARESSome international sellers on large platforms like eBay and Etsy have jacked up their shipping costs to the United States to absurd prices in order to deter Americans from buying their products in an effort to avoid dealing with the logistical headaches of Trump's tariffs. A Japanese eBay seller increased the shipping cost on a $319 Olympus camera lens to $2,000 for U.S. buyers, for example. The seller, Ninjacamera.Japan, recently updated their shipping prices to the United States to all be $2,000 for dozens of products that don't weigh very much and whose prices are mostly less than $800. As many hobbyists have recently discovered, the end of de minimis has made things more expensive and harder to come by. READ MOREResponding to Airlines Sell 5 Billion Plane Ticket Records to the Government For Warrantless Searching, Richard R Brooks writes: “Thank you so much for this article and all your privacy related research. You are one of the few sources of up to date information on these issues. That is a major reason why I subscribe and will stay subscribed.”
And replying to Michigan Lawmakers Are Attempting to Ban Porn Entirely, Crouchsnap writes: “For those of you who are unfamiliar with Michigan state politics, Josh Schriver is a well known shit-stirrer and was in the news last year when he was removed from a State House committee after endorsing Great Replacement theory on Xitter. I am hopeful that the Overton window hasn’t shifted enough for this to be taken seriously.”
BEHIND THE BLOGThis is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss San Diego and Costa Rica reporting trips. SAM: Some weeks I feel like I’ve absorbed way too much internet to be able to formulate any more thoughts by Friday, especially after the past week and a half, but because the entire world went a little more batshit last time we sat down to BTB, I didn’t get to write about my trip to San Diego. So I guess I’ll do that now. Content warning for everything here on out re: sexual violence. I had the chance to fly out for a few days to cover the sentencing of GirlsDoPorn ringleader Michael Pratt. I talked at length about what it was like and what I saw there in the second half of the free version of the podcast this week, so check that out if you’re able. But the TL’DListen of it is: it was incredible to get to go in-person to one of these court dates, and arguably the biggest one, after covering GDP for six years. Read the rest of Sam's Behind the Blog, as well as Joseph's, by becoming a paid subscriber.
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