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On the podcast this week: an organization tracking the location of AI data centers around the U.S. and elsewhere in the world, and what Grok got up to over the holiday break. In the section for subscribers at the Supporter level, we talk about how we bought 404media.com. Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube. THE SURVEILLANCE STATE IS CALLINGA social media and phone surveillance system ICE bought access to is designed to monitor a city neighborhood or block for mobile phones, track the movements of those devices and their owners over time, and follow them from their places of work to home or other locations, according to material that describes how the system works obtained by 404 Media. Commercial location data, in this case acquired from hundreds of millions of phones via a company called Penlink, can be queried without a warrant, according to an internal ICE legal analysis shared with 404 Media. The purchase comes squarely during ICE’s mass deportation effort and continued crackdown on protected speech, alarming civil liberties experts and raising questions on what exactly ICE will use the surveillance system for.  Image: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, via Flickr USE YOUR EYESDHS lied. Trump lied. Noem lied. The Honda driven by Renee Good, who an ICE agent shot and killed this week, was already turning to the right away from the officers when the one who allegedly feared for his life fired the shots. There were no other officers up the road where the car did fully level out, meaning no other fellow officers were at risk. This is a pattern. Some event happens as part of the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign, DHS rushes out a misleading, wrong, or incendiary statement that does not reflect reality, and it becomes another piece of ammo for the X.com grifters, right wing media ecosystem, or people who just love the idea of others being hurt. DHS’s serial lying has become such a problem that even a judge called it out. In November, U.S. District Judge Sara L. Ellis wrote a more than 200 page opinion that in large part catalogued DHS officials’ bullshit. Parts of the opinion were scathing: “The Court finds Defendants' evidence simply not credible.”  Screenshots via Bluesky EVERYTHING'S BIGGER IN TEXASIf built, Project Matador would be one of the largest datacenters in the world at around 18 million square feet. “What we’re talking about is creating the epicenter for artificial intelligence in the United States,” billionaire Toby Neugebauer told Amarillo City Council. According to Neugebauer, the United States is in an existential race to build AI infrastructure. He sees it as a national security issue. “You’re blessed to sit on the best place to develop AI compute in America,” he told Amarillo. “I just finished with Palantir, which is our nation’s tip of the spear in the AI war. They know that this is the place that we must do this. They’ve looked at every site on the planet. I was at the Department of War yesterday. So anyone who thinks this is some casual conversation about the mission critical aspect of this is just not being truthful.” But activists aren’t letting him take Amarillo without a fight.  Image via Fermi America THE EVERYTHING APPElon Musk, owner of the former social media network turned deepfake porn site X, is pushing people to pay for its nonconsensual intimate image generator Grok, meaning some of the app’s tens of millions of users are being hit with a paywall when they try to create nude images of random women doing sexually explicit things within seconds. Some users trying to generate images on X using Grok receive a reply from the chatbot pushing them toward subscriptions: “Image generation and editing are currently limited to paying subscribers. You can subscribe to unlock these features.” Grok’s recent explosion as an AI abuse generator is part of a long history of Twitter, and is also the mainstream bubbling of an underground Telegram channel where people have been perfecting these prompts for weeks.  Image credit: Gage Skidmore on Flickr READ MOREReplying to Texans Are Fighting a 6,000 Acre Nuclear-Powered Datacenter, Paul writes: “It's this kind of detachment from reality that continues to blow my mind - ‘We can pay more for water than the consumer can. Which allows you all capital to be able to re-invest in other water projects,” he said. “I think what you’re gonna find is having a customer who can pay way more than what you wanna burden your constituents with will actually enhance your water availability issues.’ As if you can just magic new water sources into being with money. It's gotta come from somewhere else if they're buying up all the rights in the panhandle area. And again with the immediately increased energy bills caused by the demand/drain on the system. Why should the residents be paying increased bills for this project? Anything of scale should be funded by said project, not the residents surrounding the thing.”
“Enhance” is doing a lot of work in that quote. And replying to DHS Is Lying, Joseph Kohlmann writes: “Radical clarity is one of the reasons I’m a subscriber. Thank you Joseph et al.”
Thanks for subscribing!! This 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 viewing terrible images online and giving out zines at a benefit show. EMANUEL: I’ve seen a lot of terrible videos in my years online but by far the most upsetting type of video shows police using excessive force and especially videos of police killing people. There are more graphic videos from battlefields and other dark corners of the internet but what happened to Renee Nicole Good this week could happen to anyone living in America, and when I imagine the tragedy that has been visited on her loved ones I can’t help but imagine how easily I or anyone I care about can find ourselves in the same situation. I think everyone who sits down to watch these videos does this as well, but as reporters our job is often to go frame by frame and analyze what exactly happened, which only highlights how brutally, quickly, and unnecessarily law enforcement can kill someone. Bellingcat has a good video on that if you’re interested. Reporting on these videos fairly also requires us to look at the video and credulously see if and how it matches claims made by law enforcement, and in this case the White House as well, that the shooting was justified, that the officer was acting in self-defense, that despite the horror we all immediately feel because it is a normal human reaction to seeing someone die, that we entertain the idea that this was the best choice the officer could have made. Read the rest of Emanuel's Behind the Blog, as well as Jason, Sam, and Joseph's, by becoming a paid subscriber here.
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