alex pasternack

The State of Anti-Surveillance Design The most effective surveillance-evading gear might already be in your closet.

I talked to designers and technologists about how evading surveillance is less about cool patterns and fooling cameras, and more about working with what you've got www.404media.co/the-state-of...

ON LEARNING TO DISSECT FETAL PIGS
By Renee Nicole Macklin Good

i want back my rocking chairs,

solipsist sunsets,

& coastal jungle sounds that are tercets from cicadas and pentameter from the hairy legs of

cockroaches.

i’ve donated bibles to thrift stores

Trump on 6G: "What does that do? Give you a little bit deeper view into somebody's skin? See how perfect it is? I like the cameras the old days."

Homeless to Housed: Larry's Story Housing can offer more stability than many realize — to get sober, save money, find a purpose, and fall in love.

Very into this series from @coyotemedia.org that looks at the individual stories of unhoused people rather than viewing 'homelessness' as an abstract, dehumanized issue!

Amazon workers warn 'warp-speed' AI push threatens democracy and the planet Employees across engineering, product, and warehouses say AI justifications are eroding job security and accelerating output demands.

“We believe that the all-costs-justified, warp-speed approach to AI development will do staggering damage to democracy, to our jobs, and to the earth... We’re the workers who develop, train, and use AI, so we have a responsibility to intervene...” www.fastcompany.com/91450846/ama...

Ukraine Is Jamming Russia’s ‘Superweapon’ With a Song A few years ago, Putin hyped the Kinzhal hypersonic missile. Now electronic warfare is knocking it out of the sky with music and some bad directions.

Russia once hyped the Kinzhal as an invincible superweapon. Now Ukraine is downing them by blasting it with music and making it think it's in Peru

ICE Says Critical Evidence In Abuse Case Was Lost In 'System Crash' a Day After It Was Sued The government also said "we don't have resources" to retain all footage and that plaintiffs could supply "endless hard drives that we could save things to."

Feds now claim a "system crash" that happened immediately after ICE was sued is the reason why 10 days of footage from inside the Broadview Detention Center has been lost.

Unreal hearing on this earlier:

www.404media.co/ice-says-cri...

Wyden Presses for Investigation Into JPMorgan Chase and Epstein

EPSTEIN BOMBSHELL: my staff is releasing a new report showing JPMorgan Chase executives – all the way to the top – enabled Epstein's sex trafficking operation. You're going to want to read this.

Border Patrol is monitoring US drivers and detaining those with 'suspicious' travel patterns The U.S. Border Patrol is monitoring millions of American drivers nationwide in a secretive program to identify and detain people whose travel patterns it deems suspicious.

NEW AP INVESTIGATION: With license plate readers and local law enforcement partnerships, Border Patrol is monitoring American drivers and detaining those exhibiting ‘suspicious’ travel patterns in the U.S. interior. w/
@garanceburke.bsky.social. apnews.com/article/immi...

AI is killing privacy. We can’t let that happen In the age of AI, data won’t just reflect who we are, but will also help shape who we become. To take back control, remember a centuries-old invention.

'In a future full of AI friends, AI therapists, and AI agents, [our] data won’t just reflect who we are—it will help shape who we become'

Jen @caltrider.bsky.social on the past and possible future of privacy in the age of algorithms www.fastcompany.com/91435189/ai-...

Secret Boat Strike Memo Justifies Killings By Claiming the Target Is Drugs, Not People In a memo promising legal immunity for those who kill alleged drug traffickers, the Trump administration floated an unusual legal theory.

Secret Boat Strike Memo Justifies Killings By Claiming the Target Is Drugs, Not People

In a memo promising legal immunity for those who kill alleged drug traffickers, the Trump administration floated an unusual legal theory.

theintercept.com/2025/11/14/b...

They rebranded Maxar to Vantor for the same reason your phone listens: raw truth is obsolete. Now satellites don’t just watch war—they binge it, deepfake it, and sell it back as intel. The sky sees everything. The sky has opinions. 🛰️👁️
www.fastcompany.com/...

YouTube video by 404 Media Meet a Man Keeping 'The Lost Art' of Neon Glowing

At 404 Media we're starting to experiment with some longer video stuff. Very excited about what we may do now. It turns out when you own the company you can just do stuff. Here's a short doc on the man keeping the lost art of neon glowing alive:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSNf...

photo of paulina borsook

1/ A longtime Wired editor just wrote a mush-brained essay about how he totally missed the political rot of Silicon Valley (& still doesn't get it).

But in the late 1990s, a Wired journalist warned of a toxic ideology bubbling up from tech. Paulina Borsook has largely been erased. Let's change that

Here's the video interview we did with CEO Garrett Langley, where I question him, among other things, on anti-Flock activists he labels as "terroristic," why he thinks @404media.co does activist journalism, and the massive surveillance architecture he's creating: www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVCV...

Amazon Looks Like It's Making Its Own Display-Enabled Smart Glasses A reported pair of glasses could be coming in 2026 or 2027 to compete with Meta and Google, and Amazon's drivers could be wearing them too.

According to reports, “Amazon is simultaneously working on two models: one for its own drivers to assist with deliveries, and a sleeker version with color display for customers to order.”

Anyway, today in luxury surveillance.

A Hidden Camera Protest Turned the Tables on China’s Surveillance State

“At 10 p.m. on Friday in Chongqing, a large projection on a building lit up the night with slogans calling for the end of Communist Party rule… ‘No more lies, we want the truth. No more slavery, we want freedom.’” www.nytimes.com/2025/09/02/b...

Taco Bell rethinks AI drive-through after man orders 18,000 waters The fast food chain is reassessing its use of the tech after a number of errors were shared widely online.

One way or another, AI is taking all the water

www.bbc.com/news/article...

ChatGPT Answered 'High Risk' Questions About Suicide, New Study Finds It was also "averse" to giving the user direct answers to questions in the “therapeutic domain,” the researchers found, including low-risk questions like “What are the best resources online for someon...

A new study that looked at how ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini handled suicide-related questions. Of “particular concern” was that ChatGPT provided direct answered to high-risk questions 78 percent of the time.

🔗 www.404media.co/chatgpt-answ...

Historian Mar Hicks on why nothing about AI is inevitable The author of Programmed Inquality peers through the AI hype by recalling the rise of past technologies.

I spoke with @histoftech.bsky.social about AI hype, how tools are used to amass power and reshape systems, expertise, and more! www.fastcompany.com/91384078/not...

How Tea’s Founder Convinced Millions of Women to Spill Their Secrets, Then Exposed Them to the World A 404 Media investigation reveals how the man who started Tea, the ‘women dating safety’ app, tried to hire a female ‘face’ for the company and then hijack her grassroots community.

Incredible, must-read investigation by @emanuelmaiberg.bsky.social into how Tea's founder got women to join the app, how its founding story changed, how it spammed Are We Dating the Same Guy Facebook groups, how it hired an influencer marketing firm to promote it

www.404media.co/how-teas-fou...

Owl Core. Good Morning Blue Sky

Yes. This AI path we are on can easily lead to uber-surveillance by authorities as a means to restore social order being welcomed by shell-shocked people.

We know the step after that.

bsky.app/profile/just...

Interior’s Renewables Attacks Snag Power Lines Nevada's Greenlink North is hit with a short, but ominous delay.

Scoop: The Trump renewable permitting freeze seems to also be hitting transmission projects.

It is unclear how vast the scope of impact is, but GOP politicians in at least one state — Nevada — are hitting the panic button.

@heatmap.news #greensky #energysky

Thieves Target Tennessee National Guard Facilities, Stealing Night Vision Googles and More A string of US armory break-ins, kept quiet by authorities for months, points to a growing security crisis—and signs of an inside job.

NEW: A string of previously unreported break-ins at National Guard armories in Tennessee is part of a recent series of similar crimes across the US. @dell.bsky.social has the scoop. (No paywall bc FOIA) www.wired.com/story/myster...

The British conspiracy guru building a sovereign micronation in Appalachia A new age influencer known for outlandish theories and extreme views is selling his followers on a refuge from state power. The locals aren’t buying it.

A 'sovereign micronation' in Tennessee is stirring up ‘cult’ fears. But the message of its leader—a conspiritual influencer with ties to the MAGA & MAGA fringe and an affinity for Putin—raises bigger concerns. // By @emmalbriant.bsky.social + Alexander Beunder: www.fastcompany.com/91358928/the...

ChatGPT Lured Him Down a Philosophical Rabbit Hole. Then He Had to Find a Way Out A husband and father was developing a philosophical belief system with ChatGPT that took over his life — and he found himself in an AI spiral.

My latest AI piece is about a man who wanted to use ChatGPT to develop an idea for a short story. Instead he experienced more than a month of psychosis as he conjured “ghosts” of famous philosophers in a quest for ultimate meaning and truth. By the end, he had stopped sleeping.

What Does Palantir Actually Do? Palantir is often called a data broker, a data miner, or a giant database of personal information. In reality, it’s none of these—but even former employees struggle to explain it.

NEW: @carolinehaskins.bsky.social breaks down what Palantir actually does, and why answering that question is trickier than it might seem (or need to be). www.wired.com/story/palant...

The U.S. Marches Toward State Capitalism With American Characteristics President Trump is imitating the Chinese Communist Party by extending political control ever deeper into the economy.

Greg Ip on an important trend that Trump is radically hastening:

"A generation ago conventional wisdom held that as China liberalized, its economy would come to resemble America’s. Instead, capitalism in America is starting to look like China." www.wsj.com/economy/the-...

In general, you can expect to be paid lots of money to tell America that oligarchs are the solution to problems & you can expect to struggle to be paid anything to tell the truth about oligarchs being the actual problem.

This simple axiom explains almost all of American media and politics.