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What a week it has been. Do I say that every week? It's time for the roundup. On the podcast this week: The ongoing anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles and surveillance aircraft flying over the protests, including what turned out to be a Predator drone, and burning Waymos. In the bonus section for supporters, we talk about the owner of Girls Do Porn pleading guilty to sex trafficking charges. Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube. Don’t forget to mark your calendars for our next FOIA Forum, happening live on Wednesday, June 18 at 1 p.m. EST. Subscribers at the supporter tier can get the link for the livestream at the bottom of this post, and we’ll send out a reminder before the event.
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 Screengrab: CNN NO MO WAYMOSeveral of Waymo’s driverless cars were lit on fire in Los Angeles during anti-ICE protests over the weekend, and the company told 404 Media it temporarily disabled the cars’ ability to drive into downtown. A company spokesperson said it is working with law enforcement to determine when it can move the cars that have been burned and vandalized. Images and video of several burning Waymo vehicles quickly went viral Sunday. 404 Media could not independently confirm how many were lit on fire, but several could be seen in news reports and videos from people on the scene. The fact that Waymos need to use video cameras that are constantly recording their surroundings in order to function means that police have begun to look at them as sources of surveillance footage. In April, we reported that the Los Angeles Police Department had obtained footage from a Waymo while investigating another driver who hit a pedestrian and fled the scene.  Photo by Tim Gouw on Unsplash DATA FLYING ALL OVERA data broker owned by the country’s major airlines, including Delta, American Airlines, and United, collected U.S. travelers’ domestic flight records, sold access to them to Customs and Border Protection, and then as part of the contract told CBP to not reveal where the data came from, according to internal CBP documents obtained by 404 Media. The data includes passenger names, their full flight itineraries, and financial details. CBP, a part of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), says it needs this data to support state and local police to track people of interest’s air travel across the country, in a purchase that has alarmed civil liberties experts.  Image: FBI headshot MEN DO FEDERAL CRIMESMichael James Pratt, the ringleader for Girls Do Porn, pleaded guilty to multiple counts of sex trafficking last week. “According to public court filings, Pratt and his co-defendants used force, fraud, and coercion to recruit hundreds of young women–most in their late teens–to appear in GirlsDoPorn videos. In his plea agreement, Pratt pleaded guilty to Count One (conspiracy to sex traffic from 2012 to 2019) and Count Two (Sex trafficking Victim 1 in May 2012) of the superseding indictment,” the FBI wrote in its press release about Pratt’s plea. Most of Pratt’s associates have already entered their own guilty pleas to federal charges and faced convictions.  Photo by Oberon Copeland @veryinformed.com / Unsplash SIMPLY “YUCK”The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization which hosts and develops Wikipedia, has paused an experiment that showed users AI-generated summaries at the top of articles after an overwhelmingly negative reaction from the Wikipedia editors community. “Just because Google has rolled out its AI summaries doesn't mean we need to one-up them, I sincerely beg you not to test this, on mobile or anywhere else,” one editor said in response to Wikimedia Foundation’s announcement that it will launch a two-week trial of the summaries on the mobile version of Wikipedia. “This would do immediate and irreversible harm to our readers and to our reputation as a decently trustworthy and serious source.”  CLASS telescopes can detect cosmic microwave light signals from the Cosmic Dawn. Image: Deniz Valle and Jullianna Couto INFANT COSMOSScientists have captured an unprecedented glimpse of cosmic dawn, an era more than 13 billion years ago, using telescopes on the surface of the Earth. This marks the first time humans have seen signatures of the first stars interacting with the early universe from our planet, rather than space. This ancient epoch when the first stars lit up the universe has been probed by space-based observatories, but observations captured from telescopes in Chile are the first to measure key microwave signatures from the ground, reports a study published on Wednesday in The Astrophysical Journal. The advancement means it could now be much cheaper to probe this enigmatic era, when the universe we are familiar with today, alight with stars and galaxies, was born. 📚 READ MORE🎙 404 IN THE WILDWe’re everywhere, you can’t escape us! Jason recently joined More Perfect Union to talk about Zuck's cozying up with Trump and his attempt at a rebrand. I went on This Week In Tech to talk about Meta's AI therapist problem. And Joseph talked to Vox’s Today, Explained all about surveillance giant Palantir Replying to AI Therapy Bots Are Conducting 'Illegal Behavior,' Digital Rights Organizations Say, Oliver Sampson wrote: “The AI hype machine is killing people. If people would take a tip from Emily Bender and replace ‘AI’ with ‘mathy maths’, the ridiculousness of the AI Therapy Bot business model really reveals itself. ‘I asked mathy maths advice on how to deal with my abusive boyfriend’ sounds preposterous. If you don't like ‘mathy maths’ use ‘matrix multiplication’ or ‘Magic 8-ball’; it's the same. Big kudos to 404 Media for fighting the good fight.”
And responding to GitHub is Leaking Trump’s Plans to 'Accelerate' AI Across Government, Erik Jensen said: “From the folks who can't be bothered to understand COBOL: US Gov't-grade slop. Outstanding. Surely THIS will put us back on top.”
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 advertising, protests, and aircraft. EMANUEL: On Thursday Meta announced that it has filed a lawsuit in Hong Kong against Joy Timeline HK Limited, the company that operates a popular nudify app called Crush that we have covered previously. Meta’s position is that it hasn’t been able to prevent Crush from advertising its nudify app on its platform despite it violating its policies because Crush is “highly adversarial” and “constantly evolving their tactics to avoid enforcement.” We’ve seen Crush and other nudify apps create hundreds of Meta advertising accounts and different domain names that all link back to the same service in order to avoid detection. If Meta bans an advertising account or URL, Crush simply creates another. In theory, Meta always has ways of detecting if an ad contains nudity, but nudify apps can easily circumvent those measures as well. As I say in my post about the lawsuit, Meta still hasn’t explained why it appears to have different standards for content in ads versus regular posts on its platform, but there’s no doubt that it does take action against nudify ads when it’s easy for it do so, and that these nudify ads are actively trying to avoid Meta’s moderation when it does attempt to get rid of them. Read the rest of Emanuel's Behind the Blog, as well as Jason and Sam's, by becoming a paid subscriber.
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