The 404 Media Podcast (Premium Feed)

Joseph: 00:04

Hello. Welcome to the four zero four Media Podcast where we bring you unparalleled access to hidden worlds both online and IRL. Four zero four Media is a journalist founded company and needs your support. To subscribe, go to 404media.co. As well as bonus content every single week, subscribers also get access to additional episodes where we respond to their best comments.

Joseph: 00:27

Gain access to that content at 404media.co. I'm your host, Joseph, and with me are the four zero four media cofounders, the first being Sam Cole

Sam: 00:37

Hello.

Joseph: 00:37

Emmanuel Mayberg.

Emanuel: 00:39

Hello.

Joseph: 00:41

And Jason Kebler.

Jason: 00:43

I feel like, Sam, there's like a radio rainbow, a rainbow background behind Sam. Very cool. Very cool.

Sam: 00:49

People complained that it was too much distracting light when it rotated colors, so now it's just this color.

Jason: 00:56

I think it's cool.

Joseph: 00:58

You had, like, a RGB gamer light setup or something?

Sam: 01:03

I sure did, which was cringe. So we're not doing that anymore. Thank you YouTube commenters for setting me straight.

Jason: 01:09

Well, Emmanuel is still in the, like, like, the shades are drawn vampire in a vampire esque way, like, because it it would backlight you, but also perhaps, like, fry you to death if you open those.

Emanuel: 01:24

It's the guy the gamer drawing the blinds meme. That's my life. That's who I am. Yeah.

Joseph: 01:30

Absolutely. Sam, you you mentioned YouTube. Actually been meaning to do this for a while. Maybe you are getting to the swing of it. But if you're listening to the audio version of the podcast, I just wanna let you know there is a YouTube version as well where you can see Sam's rainbow light effect and Emmanuel's drawn curtains and my lights, you know, flooding my eyelids at the same time as well.

Joseph: 01:52

So if you'd rather watch on YouTube, there's always a link in the show description. Also, you know, subscribe on YouTube and you can see it there as well. Last week, we had something of a mystery, something of a very strange request. We were desperately trying to find somebody in Ottawa, Iowa. Right?

Joseph: 02:14

Jason I think Ottumwa, I saw it.

Jason: 02:17

I have been saying it. Yeah. But you're British, so you can be excused. But, yes, the Ottumwa mystery has been solved. Many people many people reached out from Ottumwa or the surrounding areas, so thank you so much.

Jason: 02:30

The podcast was ultimately the place where we found the Ottumwins that we required, So thank you.

Joseph: 02:40

So let's just get into it with this story, and then for those who don't already know, the mystery will reveal itself. The headline, watch four zero four media's Super Bowl ad. I don't think anybody saw that coming. I think barely we saw it coming as well. But, yes, we bought a Super Bowl ad, and we needed people to watch it and document it so then we could, well, confirm it was real and then actually write about it and then then talk about it here.

Joseph: 03:08

So we'll get to all of that. Jason, where did this idea come from for four zero four Media to buy a Super Bowl ad?

Jason: 03:17

Let's let's play the ad first.

Joseph: 03:20

Sure. We'll do that right here.

Sam: 03:22

In a world increasingly controlled by big tech, AI slop, and social media algorithms controlling what you see, four zero four Media focuses on something else, real information you can actually use.

Joseph: 03:32

If you're sick of the mainstream media, support our worker founded and journalist owned publication.

Jason: 03:38

Our reporting has triggered congressional investigations, shut down surveillance programs, and revealed how the world of tech really works.

Emanuel: 03:44

Most importantly, four four Media is made by humans for humans.

Joseph: 03:48

Find us

Sam: 03:49

at 44media.co.

Jason: 03:54

Where did where did this idea come from? It came from I saw something about the Super Bowl, like, ten days ago on Blue Sky, just someone tweeting about the Super Bowl, and I thought, wish to buy a Super Bowl ad. It was like an errant thought on a, I think, a Friday afternoon. I was, like, super bored. And so I decided to start looking into how we could purchase a Super Bowl ad, which famously cost $8,000,000 this year.

Joseph: 04:23

Yeah. Or 10,000,000 as well, you know, according to mine and Jason's favorite podcast, The Town. We listen to all the time about Hollywood and the advertising industry, all that sort of thing. But, well, how do you how do you even go about figuring out how to then get a Super Bowl ad? Like, literally, what do you Google?

Joseph: 04:41

Buy Super Bowl ad, please. Like, how do you start?

Jason: 04:45

So I wish that I had, a better story to tell, but I think I think I'll just be honest. And so I knew that it was possible to buy a regional ad, meaning that the ad would air only in one media market. And so, basically, like, the way that Super Bowl ads work is there's the national broadcast. These are the ones that cost $810,000,000, sometimes more. And everyone in the country that's watching the Super Bowl sees those.

Jason: 05:16

But because the Super Bowl is on broadcast television, each individual station that broadcasts the Super Bowl gets some number of ad slots that they are allowed to sell themselves. And so it will air, like, only on that station. And so I literally just googled smallest media market in United States, and I think, like, three or four came up. But one of them was Ottumwa, Iowa, And they have a station there called KU, so like k y o u, and it reaches about 25,000 people. So it is very small.

Jason: 05:54

That's very small. For example, there's, like, three times that many people at the Super Bowl itself. But I then I was like, well, I don't really know how to buy an ad, but I'm just gonna try. And so I went to KU's website and I clicked the advertise with us button, and I found the email. And I sent an email and said, hello.

Jason: 06:17

I'd like to buy a Super Bowl ad, please. Do you have any Super Bowl ads available?

Joseph: 06:22

Just before you continue there, were you expecting, like, an actual response from that, or is it more I don't know. We'll just email them and see.

Jason: 06:31

Well, the actual truth is that I emailed a different station that was, like, the Fox station in Ottumwa, and they were like, we're not showing the Super Bowl. You've emailed the wrong people. But then I then I looked again, and I found KU that was actually emailing it. And I I did email them, and I said, advertising inquiry dash Super Bowl ad slots. Hi there.

Jason: 06:57

I'm a co founder of the media company four zero four Media looking to do a local ad buy before or during the Super Bowl on KTVO, which was KU actually. Can you please send me your rate slash info about this? And they responded within ten minutes and said, thank you for inquiring. The Super Bowl this year is on OU, which is NBC and one of those things. And then she said, we will get you rates over ASAP.

Jason: 07:24

And then a few minutes later, she sent me the cost for these and said, we have one slot left for the Super Bowl. And she said that the rate was $3,000, and then she said that they had one after the game was over for $12.50, $1,250. And then they had one, like, earlier in the day for just a $150, like, at 11AM, but I figured we needed one during the Super Bowl. And interestingly, like, she said it cost $3,000, but when I actually went to pay, it was actually only $2,500. 2,500 Yes.

Jason: 08:01

50 Yeah. Because we didn't use an agency to buy the ad. We just bought it ourselves. And so there like, normally, there's some sort of, like, markup if you use another company. But because we just did it ourselves, we saved, like, $450.

Jason: 08:17

So that was that was good.

Joseph: 08:20

So you send those emails. They get back to you very quickly, very keen. I mean, probably, they're very, very busy at this time of year, and we're exceptionally lucky that we got in when we did. Like, if if that slot had been taken, we probably would have have to have gone to one of the other media markets. Can you remember what any of those were?

Joseph: 08:43

But, like, they weren't as small as this. Right?

Jason: 08:46

I mean, I actually am not positive what the actual smallest one was because, again, this was, like, such a whim that it's not like I emailed a ton of them. I actually only emailed this one station, and I was like because I didn't wanna do a a lot of a lot of this and, like, have no one respond. So I was like, I wonder, like, maybe they'll maybe they'll respond. And I, like, sent one email. I left the room.

Jason: 09:10

I came back, and they said, sure. So so it it was so quick that I'm, like, actually not sure. But we were kind of inspired by The Verge that did this in 2015, and I think they paid $700 for Helena, Montana. So I would imagine that Helena is probably still a pretty small media market. I think that there's, like, a couple in, like, Idaho.

Jason: 09:36

They're they're largely in, like, towns in, like, the Midwest or, like, the the Badlands region of the country. And I think it's not just like, hey. These are small towns, but it it needs to be a combination of this is a small town, but they also have their own bespoke small TV station that Right. Carries the Super Bowl. And so it's not like you can just, like, look for the smallest town in America.

Jason: 10:07

You need, like, the smallest town that also has a TV broadcaster.

Joseph: 10:11

Yeah. And local TV and local stations may have been gutted in the same way, you know, a lot of local institutions have been gutted. So, like, you might get to a small market and then realize, oh, there isn't actually a market here because we can't deliver an advertisement.

Jason: 10:27

I think also, like, a happy accident in here was that KU is not owned by Sinclair Broadcasting, which is like this mega corporation that has been pushing like, super gutting local news and pushing a lot of it rightward and having these, like they're called must air segments where it's kinda like the nationalization of local news where they they require local broadcasters to run these, like, national stories.

Joseph: 10:54

Which are also often bullshit. They're just, like, read out this script essentially, and, like, it's I mean, it's bordering a propaganda sometimes. It's nuts.

Jason: 11:02

Yeah. And so, I mean, I'm not saying that the company that owns KU is, like, you know, a saint or anything, but, like, of the large ones, it's it's one it's owned by, like, one of the better companies as I can tell. But I guess I ended up pay like, sending the money for this on Tuesday Tuesday before the Super Bowl. So we had to make this very quickly.

Joseph: 11:28

Yeah. That's the next bit. That's oh, shit. So now we have to make it make an ad for the Super Bowl. How how did we go about that quite quickly?

Joseph: 11:39

Probably the quickest Super Bowl ad this ever made.

Jason: 11:42

Yeah. Well, I have I have a couple friends who, like, work in advertising and a couple friends who work in Hollywood because I live in LA, like, writers and things like that. So I mentioned it to them, and they're like, you have to go high concept. You have to go like crazy high like production value. Like, let's see if we can get a celebrity involved.

Jason: 12:00

And I was like, I don't think that's really our I know.

Joseph: 12:04

And we all need to time.

Jason: 12:05

We don't have money. We don't have time. Like, we just gotta do something. So I believe, like, you wrote the script and Sam edited it, and it was just thirty seconds. Like

Joseph: 12:18

Yeah. You you you wrote a quick overview of what we're all about. I went in, did an alternate, editor version, then Sam and Emmanuel did as well, and then we all read it out, basically. I mean, Sam, what did you think of this process in in making the the not only the cheapest and the quickest Super Bowl there, but probably the best Super Bowl?

Sam: 12:43

I mean, what are we if not cheap and quick? You know? I'm looking at the Slacks. It's our new tagline. I'm looking at our Slacks talking about this, and the first time Jason says anything about Super Bowl ads is on the January 29, which is, like, nine days before the Super Bowl.

Sam: 13:01

He just says, should we buy a Super Bowl ad? And you say we could. And Jason's like, you can buy an ad on the Super Bowl broadcast in, like, Butte, Montana for $300, which is not

Speaker 5: 13:13

what we ended up doing. And And then you have a ball a Super Bowl ad, and

Sam: 13:17

then you put it on YouTube. And I was like, not gonna lie. I like that. So and then an hour literally later is when Jason just described KTVO has replied about the advertising inquiry. And at that point, I'm like, okay.

Sam: 13:31

So we're making a Super Bowl ad, I guess. Like, I feel like we have a lot of ideas that are, like, I don't know, schemes for lack lack of a better word, where we have just, like, an idea. And we say, what if we did this? Wouldn't that be funny? And that's kind of where my mind was.

Sam: 13:48

I was like, that wouldn't be really funny, you know, l o l. And then Jason's emailing, like, networks. Like, I guess now we're gonna do that. But, yeah, it was, like, nine days from the moment. I guess Jason had the idea to airing it on the Super Bowl.

Sam: 14:08

Just

Jason: 14:08

so hilarious. I mean, I don't know. I was just feeling very kinda like I had a lot of cold brew that day. It was like

Sam: 14:15

Yeah. That's usually how this stuff happens. Yeah. Yeah. That's probably this happened.

Sam: 14:19

That's probably how this website happened. Like, we just have, like, a lot of caffeine one day and then decide to do something silly, goofy. What

Jason: 14:26

was so so Evie, our social media Evie Kuang, our social media person, edited this together and did, like, an incredible job, in my opinion. She did a very, very good job. But what was y'all's, like, experience of of reading the ad? Did it did it feel did it feel super bully?

Joseph: 14:44

Emmanuel?

Emanuel: 14:47

No. Definitely not. I mean, good good reason to upgrade my setup for sure. I don't know if people noticed or if you've mentioned it already, but as you can tell, if you're watching the video of the podcast, Joe is making very friendly eye contact with the viewer while he's doing the pod and I think Jason is as well or maybe he maybe his his what is it? The teleprompters?

Joseph: 15:18

Yeah. What is it called?

Jason: 15:19

Yeah. We have teleprompters. This is this is the media business, baby.

Emanuel: 15:24

Right. So I need one of those. I need a better camera. I mean, I think our fans in the Midwest will forgive it for now, but I feel like now that we did it once, like, surely we will have to, like, one up it next year. I don't know how we're gonna do that, but I need better equipment for it.

Emanuel: 15:40

Maybe we should have, like, our own alternative Super Bowl halftime show.

Joseph: 15:46

Oh, yeah.

Emanuel: 15:47

Like, it could be like, next year, it could be like, whatever, Bad Bunny, and then there's the Turning Point USA, and then there's us. We'll have our own halftime show.

Sam: 15:57

Had several friends text me and be like, I didn't know it was that easy to do it. Maybe next year, I'll do it. So I'm hoping next year, maybe just like so many, like, completely just like ad buys for no reason, just random people.

Joseph: 16:09

There's just a deluge of terrible terrible efforts all across the country during the Super Bowl. That'd sad.

Emanuel: 16:14

I didn't I did actually think it might not get on the air because I imagine because, I mean, it's going out over the airwaves, I suppose. So I thought there would be like FCC something. They're like, this ad is too stupid to, like, feed to the American people. You can't put this out. Or like

Sam: 16:34

It ran after a lotto ad, like

Jason: 16:37

Yeah. It was the Iowa Lottery ad. Happening. So, I mean, that was the other thing and, I mean, we did the call out, you know, we did the call out last week for Ottumwa, Iowa, but we wanted it in real time. And I feel like Sam and I were, like, semi serious about going to Ottumwa to view this.

Jason: 16:56

I think

Sam: 16:57

was gonna say, like, before we could take it once again. I was like, maybe I can get Jason to fly to Ottumwa and then stand him up.

Jason: 17:02

I feel like if I had one more day like, if you had said it one day earlier, I would have bought tickets. But by the time it

Sam: 17:08

was about it, for sure. It was like, if one of us had shown a ticket receipt, we were going to Iowa for sure that weekend. But

Jason: 17:15

Yeah. But, like, I think a 100 people probably signaled me or emailed me saying that they had a connection to Ottumwa, which is super interesting for a town of 25,000 people. But only, I think, like, three people were actually there at the moment. But I do feel bad because a lot of people were, like, assuming this was for some very high journalistic purpose, like, you need me to go investigate something for you or there's, like, a horrible surveillance situation happening or something like that. But I was like, no.

Jason: 17:51

We we need someone to film our Super Bowl ad. But people seem to to think that it was, like, quite cool in the end. So I think it went over very well. Few places wrote about it, like, I think Inc Magazine or was it Fortune wrote about it?

Joseph: 18:09

Neiman Lab, I think as well. Yeah. Yeah. Then yes. It is goofy.

Joseph: 18:15

Yes. It's something of a stunt. I still, I think, learned sort of what Emmanuel touched on. You know, the FCC stuff there, like, we had to be careful about, you know, what exactly do we put in this advert and footage and all of that sort of thing. And just the fact that it's possible, I don't know.

Joseph: 18:32

It's it's one of those fun experiments that you get to learn about something you wouldn't you wouldn't in any other way, and then your readers and your listeners get to as well, like, that's possible? Sure. Okay. So, yeah, I don't know. It was totally worth it.

Joseph: 18:47

It was fun.

Jason: 18:49

Yeah. I also, to Emmanuel's point, like, I was expecting the station to be like, it has to be in this specific format with this specific resolution and this type of file and, like, it has to be delivered on some, like, weird server and things like that. But I actually just, like, emailed them an m p four file that I think probably came off of Evie's phone. That's crazy. And they were like, looks good.

Jason: 19:13

I was like, okay. That's good. Thank you.

Sam: 19:16

I think something we find out all the time is, like, like, a theme in the things that

Speaker 5: 19:20

we do is just, like, you can just do stuff. You can just

Sam: 19:25

do that. It's not actually it does not actually involve, like, expensive experts in the advertising industry to do this. It does not involve, like I don't know. I mean, it's, you know, it's I feel like that's a common denominator in a lot of things that we do. Just just do do stuff.

Joseph: 19:42

Yeah. Absolutely. Now

Emanuel: 19:43

that I think about it, two things that we should try and actually blog about is

Sam: 19:51

I just got so tired.

Emanuel: 19:54

Times Square Times Square ad. Right? Oh, yeah. That's the biggest space we can get. And then, I mean, we have to ring the bell at the stock exchange.

Emanuel: 20:03

Right? Like, when we go

Jason: 20:05

public IPO. Yeah. Yeah.

Sam: 20:07

When we go public? Mhmm. Okay.

Jason: 20:12

Times Square is definitely on the list. We need to we need to be in Times Square for sure. For sure.

Joseph: 20:18

But you've looked into it and

Jason: 20:19

It's not that expensive. It's not Right. We were gonna do it a few months ago.

Joseph: 20:24

Yeah. And this came up recently because the globe the Golden Globes was having its podcast of the year awards, like, kind of pseudo awards. Right? And who who's that guy? Daily Wire.

Joseph: 20:38

Anyway, whatever, trying on the rights, trying to get the nomination and then eventually win that, and they bought out Times Square for hundreds of thousands of dollars or something like that. So Pete, you can just rock up and do it, but they did it, yes, in a much more expense obviously, much more expensive way than we would ever do, but I do remember Jason exploring that at some point. And I would say, I think this TV ad yes. Obviously, it was a small market and, you know, more people I think it was Ink pointed this out, that more people saw the ad on Instagram when we uploaded it there than probably saw it actually on TV, which is a very funny thing to point out as well. That said, you know, apparently, somebody asked me on Blue Sky saying, hey.

Joseph: 21:24

I just found your podcast because of the ad. So if you're if you're that person I can't remember your username. But if you're that person and you're listening to the podcast now, congratulations on being the single most expensive for a four media podcast listener where we had to die out for the Super Bowl to get one podcast listener. So really, really appreciate that.

Jason: 21:46

Yeah. It is funny. Like, I don't know I don't know if this was, like, worth it on a dollar per user, like, acquisition level. But if you if you did learn about us through that podcast ad only, you've never never heard about us before or that Super Bowl ad only, I think let us know. I did get an email immediately following it.

Jason: 22:11

One email from one guy who was like, I'm in Etumwa and I saw your ad. So that's good. It did work. We've got one podcast listener and one emailer from this.

Joseph: 22:25

Yeah. Very good. Well, we'll leave that there. We'll see what happens next year. When we come back after the break, we're gonna talk about another Super Bowl ad, but the American consumerism surveillance state that his it has reintroduced.

Joseph: 22:43

We'll be right back after this. Alright. And we are back. The headline of this piece, again by Jason. With Ring, American consumers built a surveillance dragnet.

Joseph: 23:05

So I'm sure many listeners will have seen or heard about this other Super Bowl ad from the surveillance camera company Ring. Jason, before we get into sort of sort of the article and the thesis behind it, can you describe this advert the Ring had during the Super Bowl?

Jason: 23:25

Yeah. I think we should play part of that here as well since it's short.

Speaker 5: 23:30

This is Milo. Pets are family. But every year, ten million go missing, and the way we look for them hasn't changed in years. Until now. One post of a dog's photo in the Ring app starts outdoor cameras looking for a match.

Speaker 5: 23:46

Search Party from Ring uses AI to help families find lost dogs. Since launch, more than a dog a day has been reunited with their family. Be a hero in your neighborhood with Search Party. Available to everyone for free right now. Join the neighborhood at ring.com.

Jason: 24:01

Our ad was not the worst Super Bowl ad because this was the worst Super Bowl ad, I think. Like, there were a lot of quite bad ones, but I think this is maybe, like, the most damaging one. Sam had a post about it saying, like, this is gonna be taught in advertising classes someday, which we we can get into. But, basically, Ring is like the doorbell camera company. I'm sure everyone's familiar with with Ring.

Jason: 24:26

And they have launched this new feature called search party. And what search party is, according to the Super Bowl ad and they actually announced this a few weeks ago, but this is, like, where it got the most attention, is, like, if you lose your dog, you will be able to upload a photo of your dog to a form on Ring, and it will activate all of the Ring cameras in your neighborhood to look for this dog using artificial intelligence. So, basically, it is like I mean, it it's not facial recognition because it's a fucking dog, but it's like the same technology that that facial recognition uses. It's like, you know, image matching and things like that. And it, like, turns all of the Ring cameras into this, like, networked spy apparatus and then, like, alerts you if the dog is found.

Joseph: 25:26

Yeah. As you say, not facial recognition in a literal human sense, dog recognition. It's almost like it's almost the thing between object recognition, like identifying a weapon, identifying a vehicle, and facial recognition. It's like this in between, which is like, this is a a unique living creature and the cameras are going to identify it in the local proximity. It's almost like the next step up.

Joseph: 25:53

It's it's strange.

Jason: 25:55

It is, but, like, let me just say before we get more into it that alongside of this and not in the Super Bowl ad, but, like, at the same time, Ring announced a product called Familiar Faces, which is just literally facial recognition where it you tell the Ring camera who your friends and family are so that when they show up to your house, it says their name. Like, when you get a little push notification, like, so and so is at the at your house. Like, I could upload a photo of you, Joseph. And if I had a Ring camera and you showed up at my house, it would say Joseph is here. So they are just straight up doing facial recognition now, which as we'll get into, is something that they claimed that they were not gonna do for a really long time or at least, like, when people were talking about fears of facial recognition, Ring would say, oh, we do object recognition, which is different because they would be like, oh, like a raccoon has come up near your house or like a person or like a car, but not this person or this car or this dog.

Jason: 27:02

And like that is the the thing that is different now.

Joseph: 27:05

Another thing they've launched or introduced is Firewatch, which I need to look into a little bit more, but it's when there's wildfires and the cameras can detect if there are fires nearby, that sort of thing. But, yes, it's sort of this suite of new products which are turning Ring from sort of a passive surveillance collection technology into a much more active one where it's just looking for specific people, specific animals, and specific situations. Before this, I was double checking, know, is it opt in? Is it opt out? And users were reporting that, again, I don't use Ring, so I don't have, like, the app to go check myself.

Joseph: 27:48

But I was seeing what users were experiencing, and it looked like it was enabled by default, and people were teaching one another, well, I don't want to be part of this search party feature, actually. How do I turn it off? And they had to go into the settings and figure that out and all of that sort of thing. So I think it's one thing to introduce the feature and that is the focus. It's another to, like, turn it on by default.

Joseph: 28:14

And, of course, Ring would prefer that because the tool is gonna be a lot more effective if everybody is opted in by default. So before we just get into sort of the the background of Ring and sort of how we got here, Jason, what were people's reactions to the Super Bowl ad? I mean, maybe not representative, but a lot of people didn't seem to like it.

Jason: 28:38

Yeah. I mean, it's a little hard to say just because, like, YouTube comments and social media is really loud, but kind of, like, uniformly online, people are like, this is super dystopian. People correctly were like, I don't think this is for dogs. You know, the initial feature is for dogs, but it's, a very small step from there for it to be used for, I don't know, like, quote unquote suspicious people or suspect of a crime or, you know, all of the things that people have been using Ring cameras for for a long time. But the ways that it has been used in the past have been a lot more manual and a lot more, like, ad hoc.

Jason: 29:20

And, like, we've talked about with things like FLoC and with FuSys, which is the these AI enabled smart cameras that are networked. It's like once you add AI to these surveillance systems, as you said, they go from being something that's, like, passive that you can go say, like, I need to check this camera at this time or whatever, and they become, like, these really proactive, you know, like, surveillance tools.

Joseph: 29:49

Yeah. So Ring does that, has that ads. It seems like a lot of people are annoyed, but this article is more about was a couple of things. It's like a reminder of, hey. Remember Ring?

Joseph: 30:03

They're back. Because they kind of had something of a of a rebrand, and then you talk about, like, how we got here. Can you just talk about that rebrand briefly? Because it does feel like, as you write, Ring kinda went quiet for a while. Like, what was the deal with that?

Jason: 30:19

Yeah. So back at Vice, there was maybe like a two year period between like 2018 and twenty twenty ish where the way that we're writing about Flock now, we are writing about Ring. Like, we were filing so many public records requests. We were writing so many articles about Ring. And it was it was a very similar story to Flock in that Ring kind of went city by city, and they signed cops up to this partnership program that they had.

Jason: 30:55

And then they used the cops to, like, sell Ring cameras to the communities, and then sell, like, the the theory of Ring and, like, the concept of Ring to other police departments. And so, like, we wrote about them probably first when they had a couple dozen partnerships with cops, which I'll get into what those are in a second. But, like, by the end of this period of reporting, they had, like, several thousand, and it happened, like, really, really quickly. And so what these partnerships were were they were footage sharing partnerships with police. And so, basically, like, if you were a police department and you had this partnership, Ring would create a portal where you could request footage from Ring camera owners in your community, and you didn't need a warrant for this.

Jason: 31:44

And so, basically, like, Ring users were able to directly send footage to the cops using this. And the ways that Ring went about signing up cops was, like, really wild in in my opinion.

Joseph: 32:01

Giving them free stuff, parties, that sort of thing?

Jason: 32:04

They were giving cops free stuff. They were throwing them parties with, like, Shaquille O'Neal. They were doing these weird incentive programs. So, basically, like, they would give cops free Ring cameras and then, like, tell the cops to throw a party for their community and then raffle off those cameras to people. They gave, like, discount codes to cops.

Jason: 32:25

So, basically, like, if you were a cop in a small town, you could be, like, use my code and you can save 20% off Ring, you know, in the community. And then they also, like, gamified the sending of information to cops. Like, they talked about, at least based on emails that that we had back in the day, they were like, you could get free Ring swag if you sent footage to cops, things like that. And then, I mean, I think the other thing is that Ring was always sold as like a surveillance product to people. You know, it was like, stop package thieves.

Jason: 33:03

It was, you know, famously, like, bought by Amazon to prevent package thefts. But Ring also did a lot to sort of, like, incentivize people to, like, film viral moments, more or less, like delivery driver and things like that, which I guess I'll get into in a second. But, like, this origin story in the early days, they were, like, really focused on crime. They were super focused on crime, and they're super focused on, like, public safety and things like that. And there was a lot of, like, fear mongering in in the early days of Ring to be, like, stop suspicious people in your neighborhoods and and things like that.

Joseph: 33:47

Yeah. It it very squarely starts with the cop stuff, those partnerships, all of that sort of thing. I can't remember the exact timeline. It's in the article for people who wanna see that. But the CEO or rather the creator does leave for a short period, and then it's around about this time, I feel like Ring goes quite quiet and it does this slight rebrand or pivot to what you describe, which is that, oh, We're just filming funny moments of delivery drivers or really wholesome moments and that sort of thing, and then they get posted on social media or people are encouraged to share them in part by ringing ring the company itself, but also, you know, the social media clout and retweets and likes you'll get from posting that sort of thing.

Joseph: 34:33

Of course, ignoring the fact that this person being filmed has not asked or potentially consented to have interaction just filmed and put on the Internet for your viewing pleasure. Can you talk about that a little bit? Like, what was the deal there? Sort of why I guess we don't really know why they did that pivot, but, like, what did

Jason: 34:56

you like? I think it's because they were getting a lot of scrutiny. There was, like, a it was not just us writing about it, but there was, like, tons and tons of really high profile articles about Ring and its partnerships with cops. And, like, they were getting heat from, like, the EFF and the ACLU and people just saying, like, this is really dystopian. This is really scary.

Jason: 35:15

And I think there was, like, this idea that it was surveillance tech. And I think that maybe alongside of that, this is just me kind of, like, speculating, but alongside of that, there were also these people posting these viral videos of delivery drivers falling down of, like, promposals. Like, I've seen so many promposals shot through Ring cameras where it's

Joseph: 35:38

like Sorry. Why is that?

Jason: 35:39

A high schooler asking someone else to prom through a Ring camera in some sort of, like, viral way. Like, you show up at, like, a girl's house with, like, a guitar and you play a song for her, like, on the porch or whatever and it's filmed. This was an entire genre of viral ring video for a while. And then there's people, like, dancing on porches and things like that. And, you know, it became the subject of this very short lived Ring Nation TV show.

Jason: 36:10

But I think maybe Ring started to pitch itself more as, like, this goofy gadget kind of. And around that time, Jamie Simonov, who is this the founder of Ring, which it should be said was originally pitched on Shark Tank. That's another, like, super critical part of Ring's origin story. But he leaves Amazon. He decides that he's gonna go.

Jason: 36:37

And so I think that maybe it's like the founder is gone. Like, we are gonna try to be more of like a consumer product versus this, like, thing that's targeted at police.

Joseph: 36:49

But he

Jason: 36:49

said that. So then what happens is, like, last summer, Simonov came back to Ring. He came back to Amazon, and he's overseeing Ring again. And, like, from the get go, he's like, police partnerships are back. Like, we're doing them again.

Jason: 37:05

AI is, like, our new thing. We are going to just, like, kind of go like, mask off, foot on the gas, we are doing surveillance again. We're, like, leaning back into to public safety. And that has been you know, a lot of people have reported on that over the last year. We haven't really done much on Ring just because we've been super busy.

Jason: 37:25

But I have always, especially because of our early reporting on this, like, advice, thought, like, Ring is a super important surveillance company to keep tabs on. And I think that this Super Bowl ad and just the fact that people are paying attention to it and the flock partnership that we'll talk about in a second just sort of signals that this is not a company that we can forget about. This is not a company that we can ignore, and this is I mean, it's it's the biggest, like, consumer surveillance tech company that I can think of. And I think to to spoil your podcast document here, you have what is luxury surveillance and how does it tie in here. I did an interview with Chris Gilliard a few months ago about this concept of luxury surveillance, which is surveillance that rich people buy to surveil both themselves, but also to surveil people in their neighborhoods.

Jason: 38:23

And, like, this is exhibit one a of what luxury surveillance is. It's like Ring is bought by homeowners for the most part to surveil their, you know, neighborhoods. It is a lot of them are buying it because of, like, explicit fear mongering about, like, the safety of American cities and American suburbs and things like that. And so there's, like it's tied into consumerism. It's tied into just, like, our media ecosystem.

Jason: 38:53

The fact that, like, for a long time now, there's been this idea that our neighborhoods are getting a lot more dangerous even though the crime stats don't back that up. It's tied to things like Nextdoor, which is, you know, hyper local social media network, and it's tied to Neighbors, which is Ring's explicit social media app where you can just, like, post footage on the social media app. And so this is a surveillance dragnet that we have built ourselves, you know, with sort of the pressures of capitalism and all that. But, like, this is this is something that, like, the American consumer has bought and it is now turned into this nationwide surveillance dragnet that is being networked together, and AI is being added to it. And I don't think it's gonna, like, end well for us.

Joseph: 39:41

Yeah. It's dogs right now, but we'll see later. I think that's a really good way to put it. You mentioned this flock partnership. So, look, there is frankly a lot of misinformation about this.

Joseph: 39:53

Not gonna go super into that, but people are conflating our reporting about FLOC, which shows that local cops were doing lookups and license plate readers made by FLoC for ICE. They're then conflating that with FLoC's partnership with Ring and saying, oh, that means ICE has direct access to Ring cameras. There's absolutely no evidence of that. Maybe that'll turn out to be the case later. Maybe they will go and do that inspired by all of this misinformation, but that is not what is happening right now.

Joseph: 40:22

What is happening is that Flock actually has a lot of different products. It has its all in one crime fighting tool that brings together license plate readers and then maybe body cam footage as well. It's drones as well that it makes, and it brings all of that together. And the idea is to bring Ring footage into that so police can request from Ring camera owners more easily, efficiently access to footage recorded by those cameras. It's basically what they were doing before, but now it's done, like, in an even more efficient way if those cops have bought flock in sort of that overarching system.

Joseph: 41:02

A lot surveillance companies are doing this. They call it like a single pane of glass products because a cop doesn't want to be jumping between different surveillance products. They want to see they're all in one big monitor in their control room in front of them. But, you know, as you say as you say in the article, Jason, people making that leap from, oh, Ring and Flock working together, that means ICE is gonna access Ring cameras. You can see why they would make that because make that leap because they're scared of that and concerned about that.

Joseph: 41:32

Like, is is that fair, you think?

Jason: 41:34

I mean, it's kind of tricky because I do think that this is something to be very concerned about and it's something that could happen. And so I don't wanna say like, oh, it's it's not gonna happen that ICE is not going to access Ring camera footage. Like, it very well may happen. But it's not clear from what has already been reported what the vector for this would be, and it I would say, that is inaccurate at the moment to say that ICE has access to Ring footage. And it's like the way that this would work is like conflating a few different stories that we have reported and other people have reported over the last year in a way that I think is kind of dangerous because, basically, like, the vector is, well, FLoC is used by local police, and local police sometimes perform lookups for ICE of the Flock automated license plate reader system, and Ring has a partnership with Flock.

Jason: 42:37

Therefore, ICE has access to Ring. And it's like, that's too that's too much. You're taking too many leaps there. And that's not to say that this won't happen. It's just to say that we don't have reporting to say that.

Jason: 42:53

And it's not just like, it's good to speculate about this sort of thing and to warn about this sort of thing. And I think, you know, you like, very often when a capability exists, it ends up getting used. But that's different from saying that it is being used now because we don't know that, and I think that the specifics matter. And then the other thing I'll say is that, like, these companies are super litigious. They and some of these posts are, like, really, really viral.

Jason: 43:22

And so I don't know. It's like we are very careful about what we say and what we do with regard to surveillance companies. Like, we're not going to pull punches, but at the same time, like, we need to make sure that what we report is is correct.

Joseph: 43:37

Yeah. Absolutely. Alright. We'll leave that there, but we'll definitely keep a close eye on Ring. If any listeners do have tips about that, of course, always feel free to reach out.

Joseph: 43:48

If you are listening to the free version of the podcast, I'll now play us out. But if you are a paying four zero four media subscriber, we're gonna talk about Apple's lockdown mode and how it stops the FBI. You can subscribe and gain access to that content at 404media.co. We'll be right back after this. Alright.

Joseph: 44:19

We are back in the subscribers only section. Sam, gonna put you on the spot immediately without any warning. You still an Android Yeah.

Sam: 44:30

Why? You just setting up a dunk?

Jason: 44:33

Why do

Joseph: 44:34

you ask? Dude, that's that's it. I don't I don't even need to follow-up

Sam: 44:38

with just checking in?

Joseph: 44:40

Just you admitting you're an Android user. No. No. I'm joking, obviously. This is all the reason I bring it up is that this conversation is gonna be very much Apple focused just because that is the nature of the story, but, you know, there's probably lessons in there for Android users as well.

Joseph: 44:57

I would just be very, very careful about the terminology because it's there there's like an equivalent oh, sorry. There's a very similarly named feature on Android, but I don't think it does the same thing. So that's why I wanted to put you on the spot and ask that.

Speaker 5: 45:13

Should I just head out? Should I leave for

Sam: 45:15

the segment or what? You know? I have all the stuff I could be doing.

Joseph: 45:17

Well, who who wants to ask me the questions for this? Because I actually didn't.

Sam: 45:22

I'll ask.

Jason: 45:23

Yeah. Grilling. Get an ass.

Sam: 45:25

Since you've brought me into this. Sure. Okay.

Joseph: 45:28

If you wanna take take the head on the questions. Yeah.

Speaker 5: 45:30

So this is a story by Joseph.

Sam: 45:32

It's apparently about iPhones. The headline is FBI couldn't get into WAPA reporter's iPhone because it had lockdown mode enabled. Obviously, this story is about the raid on Washington Post reporter, Hannah Nathanson. This happened last month, and they weren't able to get into her phone because she had put it into lockdown mode, which is the specific feature that we just discussed. So what kind of was the context of the raid in question?

Joseph: 46:07

Yeah. So as you say, it's a raid against this Washington Post journalist. The FBI got a search warrant to enter her residence, search her, her person, search the residence, I think her vehicle as well, and sees a bunch of electronic devices. And I didn't put this in the article because I feel like it's obvious because there was already a lot of media coverage about the raid before this. But to be be clear, this is, like, absolutely nuts.

Joseph: 46:36

Like, this is really, really crazy that the FBI raided a reporter's house. There are often, very often, investigations into leaks and especially leaks of classified information. You know, that is on a on a technical and legal level, that is a crime when somebody leaks classified information. So when that happens, it is often the FBI that investigates, but what they'll typically do is only investigate the person who leaked You know, it will be the person from NSA who leaked all of these details and, you know, took took a bunch of classified information home and stored it not very securely, or maybe they pass classified information to a journalist, that sort of thing. They will investigate the source of that information, but they won't really investigate the journalist.

Joseph: 47:36

And if they do, like, you know, get phone records or something like that, they don't typically raid their house and get a search warrant to do that. So even without this lockdown mode stuff we're gonna talk about, it is a really, really crazy case, and it does highlight the press freedom issues in The United States because of that. But that raid happens. The FBI go in, and they grab a bunch of devices, and then, you know, that's how these various variables come in. Yeah.

Sam: 48:11

Yeah. I mean, I I remember when I saw this come up when it happened, I was like, Jesus Christ. Like, this feels like, I don't know, as a journalist, you kinda always know that, like not that you're gonna get raided at any second, but, like, you have an awareness of, like, device security and things like that. But this, I was even like I mean, I looked up how to do it on an Android phone. I was, like, looking up how to do lockdown mode because, god forbid, I'm in a I'm at a protest or, like, I'm at something covering something and, you know, lose my phone or gets taken from me, you know, I wanted to be safe.

Sam: 48:44

So I think also just to that point, after years of talking about protesting and giving you know, not giving a device, but, like, talking about the ways that authorities can get into your device, a lot of people at this point know. And if you don't know, then this is your warning, I guess, that a lot of times authorities can get into they're legally allowed to get into your phone through a fingerprint or through other biometrics, so the safer way to have your phone locked just on a day to day basis is through a PIN or password, but the the warrant that they had for Hannah's devices was to seize these devices, but also could have allowed them to take her finger and put it on the phone hold it up to her face so that it would unlock. So, yeah, why don't you just kinda run us through, like, what they found in the raid and how they were kept from actually doing any of that with lockdown?

Joseph: 49:46

Yeah. And that language in the search warrant saying, hey. We can compel the target to provide their fingerprints or their face for scanning. That is not new or novel that's been in there for years and years and years basically is boilerplate where I imagine that authorities either use a template or they literally copy and paste some of that language. Tom Fox, Brewster from Forbes did a bunch of really, really good coverage at the time when Touch ID, but especially Face ID, when that was first launched for iPhones, and of course, police started to respond to it by including this language, and you would you would start to see it appearing in search warrants.

Joseph: 50:27

You have to remember a search warrant is kind of divorced from the technical way they will get in. Like, it says you can compel them to provide their fingerprint, but it doesn't mean they will necessarily. They might still brute force the PIN. They might just find devices unlocked or something like that. There is always some sort of division between what they're legally allowed to do and what they actually end up doing for technical reasons.

Joseph: 50:52

But what they find is I think they go upstairs and they find a MacBook in a case that they can't get into. Because it was off.

Sam: 51:02

Right? Like, that was the reason why?

Joseph: 51:05

I think it was. Yes. And then they find an iPhone and it is plugged in and it is charging, and then the document set and the document we're talking about is from a prosecutor two weeks after the raid. It's not the search warrant, but it explains this phone was on. It was charging, and something on the screen said the lockdown mode was enabled.

Joseph: 51:29

I'm a little bit puzzled by that because as I thought and then someone else pointed out to me on social media as well, when you use lockdown mode, it doesn't typically say it. You have to have, like, Safari open and the phone to be unlocked, and it says at the bottom, lockdown enabled, something like that. Some a little bit unclear on how the FBI would have seen that, but, okay, that's what they're saying. And then later on in the document, they say the important part, which is that they haven't been able to get into that Mac for whatever reason. They don't really go into that.

Joseph: 52:01

But they haven't been able to get into the iPhone specifically because lockdown mode was enabled. And they're like, I've never seen that in a court document. Maybe it's there. You know, it's impossible to read every single court document except our friends at Court Watch seemingly do read every single court document that comes out in The United States essentially. We can't.

Joseph: 52:23

So maybe there are mentions of it. This is the first time I've ever seen lockdown mode mentioned as the reason for authorities not getting into a phone. Then also just they don't often say the reason why. They'll say sometimes, hey. We can't get into the phone, but they don't say, oh, it's because it's running iOS 20.4 on this.

Joseph: 52:43

They they never get that granular, so that was really, really interesting.

Sam: 52:48

Yeah. I mean, that's it is super interesting in itself that they did get that specific with the reasons why they couldn't get in and accidentally gave a good tip to lots of other journalists maybe who haven't heard of lockdown mode before. So can you describe what lockdown mode is? Because it's not just like your phone is locked. It's something more stringent than that.

Joseph: 53:11

Yeah. So lockdown mode is a feature that Apple launched, I think, a few years ago at this point, and it was around the time there was a ton of attention and coverage and forensic examination of threats like NSO Group. NSO Group being this Israeli company that makes a very powerful piece of mobile spyware called Pegasus. I'm sure lots of people have heard of. We reported back advice that NSO tried to get into the local or the regional law enforcement market.

Joseph: 53:45

You know, they gave a demo to the NYPD, or they had conversations with them, and then they also gave a demo to the DEA we reported, so they tried to expand there. But then, you know, there were the Pegasus papers from The Guardian and all of these other outlets as well. I think that was a little bit later. But basically, everybody's heard of NSO Group. It's almost like a household name at this point, weirdly.

Joseph: 54:07

Like, even nontechnical people I meet, like, have heard of NSO Group. So Apple responds rather than just patching the zero day exploits or other issues that NSO uses to break into phones, you're always going be trying to fix the next vulnerability. It's going to be never ending. These companies are never going to stop. They make this more fundamental solution or mitigation, which is lockdown mode.

Joseph: 54:39

Basically, what that is is it puts your phone to a special state where it does all sorts of things that may make the phone a bit of a pain in the ass to use, although I don't think it's that much different at all, to be perfectly honest, but it will turn off a bunch of stuff. So for example, I'm looking at the page now. Some messages, it won't, like, auto load attachments, certain images are blocked, that sort of thing. These companies will often try to deliver their exploits through attachments. You know, there was this wasn't an NSO group.

Joseph: 55:12

This was Paragon, the company that sold to ICE, and we're suing ICE over that for information. They had a PDF exploit where the phone would automatically render the PDF and that would contain the attack. So lockdown mode blocks that sort of thing. Web browsing, it blocks a bunch of stuff there. The FaceTime one is interesting.

Joseph: 55:31

All FaceTime calls are blocked in coming to you unless you've previously called that person or you've been in contact with them in the past thirty days. That was an NSO group one, I think, where they delivered it via, like, a silent FaceTime call, and I think some iMessage stuff as well. So that stuff is blocked, and then a bunch of other stuff as well. The way Apple markets it is for that. It's like we're stopping mercenary spyware.

Joseph: 55:59

They don't say NSO Group, obviously. They don't say Paragon either, but that is how they phrase it. They use the term mercenary spyware. So whenever I thought of it, it's always I've always thought of it as the as for people who try and stop those sorts of attacks. But as we now know from this court record, it can also help with physical access, which is very, very different to NSO Group.

Joseph: 56:21

Right? NSO is remotely tapping into the phone often with no user interaction. This is taking a phone that the authorities have seized or, you know, somebody's stolen from you on on the streets, plugging into a device, and unlocking it that way. But with this court record, I then went back to lockdown mode, and there's a really interesting bit that says device connections. To connect your iPhone or iPad to an accessory or another computer, the device needs to be unlocked.

Joseph: 56:51

Okay. So that means to connect to something like a Gracie, which is this device copse used to unlock phones, or Celebrite, which I think a lot of people have heard of, the device needs to be unlocked. That's a pretty crazy protection, which I didn't really fully realize until this story, and I think a lot of people probably overlooked it as well. But this is really the first concrete case I think we've seen of lockdown mode really stopping a pretty sophisticated adversary. I think Apple has said the lockdown mode has stopped hacks, but, you know, that's the company.

Joseph: 57:30

Of of course, they're gonna say that. Right? Here we have kind of like an independent case where it seems the lockdown mode was pretty successful.

Sam: 57:40

Yeah. I guess Apple can't say in its marketing of it, lockdown mode keeps the cops out of your phone because

Jason: 57:46

No. It's probably not something

Sam: 57:47

they wanna say. If you're raided by the FBI, you can't get in using lockdown mode. That's probably not in their in their marketing. So they weren't able to get into the phone, which is great. They were able to get into a silver MacBook Pro.

Sam: 58:06

And I thought the details of this were also really interesting because initially the court records say that initially, she was like, I don't use biometrics on any of my devices. And then they were like, well, put your finger on the the reader.

Joseph: 58:18

Put my finger on Yeah. That's what they showed

Sam: 58:19

on my finger. And then it unlocked, which I'm sure was a moment that I can imagine being very tense and kind of like, oh, they got me. So I don't know. I mean, obviously, we weren't there, so we don't really know the studies were just relying on the court records. Can you talk more about that?

Sam: 58:39

Like, why I mean, this is kinda what we talked about just now is, you know, the biometrics aspect of it is something that they can enforce. But, yeah, what's the significance of that there?

Joseph: 58:50

Yeah. And as you say, this is the this is the prosecutor's series of events and, you know, don't have any reason to say it's incorrect at the moment, but, yeah, it's it's totally worth keeping that in mind. So they get this MacBook. The reporter says, don't use biometrics. The FBI says, try anyway, and it unlocks laptop.

Joseph: 59:10

I think that shows, if that series of events is accurate, that frankly, we have so many devices in our lives that we may not keep track. You know? Like, people forget passwords all the time. It's really hard to remember those. We might not remember if we have touch ID or face ID enabled.

Joseph: 59:30

I remember there was a case where, again, Tom from Forbes interviewed and suspected NSO group victim and Tom asked the target, so you keep your phone updated, right? And they proudly said, yes, of course, I always update my OS device. They then got it out and it wasn't updated and it couldn't update to the latest version, meaning there was probably NSO Group Pegasus malware on that phone at the very moment, meaning that that doesn't mean the person is foolish or dumb or anything like that. It's just that it is so hard to keep track of how we have secured these devices. It's really, really difficult.

Joseph: 01:00:07

So there's that FBI get into the laptop, and because the reporter had signal desktop setup, which basically syncs between your phone or your iPad or whatever and has a copy of messages there, right, so you can use Signal on your desktop computer, they were then able to get a bunch of messages. Now, there's no evidence that they forensically extracted deleted messages. Like, says some were set to auto delete, very normal for signal, obviously. What the FBI did according to the records was they then scrolled through a bunch of these messages one by one and took photos of them. They, I think, filmed video as well, and they also filmed to get the audio of voice notes or audio recordings as well.

Joseph: 01:00:56

So they had to go through manually and do that sort of process. As I should I don't know if it's common, but it's happened before, you know, when the FBI gets the phone of a suspected drug trafficker, the messages are going to delete rather than do a sort of painful extraction process, which maybe we can do it, maybe we don't. They just start taking photos, and that's how they do it. So beyond the actually knowing whether you have biometrics enabled or not, the other thing is that, I mean, when they get in the device, they're gonna see everything that's there. That could be really, really bad for you and your sources, obviously.

Joseph: 01:01:32

Yeah.

Sam: 01:01:33

It's made me, like, do an audit of my devices for sure. Go through and see what my actual settings are on everything because I'm it's just something you do automatically every day, multiple multiple times a day. So, yeah, like you said, it's just, like, I don't know what is locked which way anymore. So just kind of going through. And even, like, old computers, things like that, you don't know what's connected.

Sam: 01:01:51

It's, like, old computers might still be connected to, like, WhatsApp or whatever. You just Yep. Open it and stuff

Joseph: 01:01:56

there. ID. Yeah.

Sam: 01:01:58

I don't know anything about that. But yeah.

Jason: 01:01:59

Right. Just change all my passwords to password.

Joseph: 01:02:02

So it's pretty safe. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's good.

Joseph: 01:02:05

HunterHunter2 or whatever it is. No. The what was I gonna say? That so I mean, for me so usually, you know, I won't get super specific, I I I do like various things to be like, okay. If the phone is taken, they shouldn't be able to get into the phone, whatever, or if the iPad is taken, that sort of thing.

Joseph: 01:02:25

That said, you know, I'm now enabling lockdown mode because before, I don't think it I didn't think it applied to me because it was much more for, like, remote access stuff. And now that we've seen it there, it's like, oh, I'm absolutely enabling that. And just from a user perspective, yeah. As I said, I don't think I've had any issues. I think maybe I had one app that didn't quite work.

Joseph: 01:02:47

Oh, that was it. Somebody tried to send me a funny video on Fred's, and it would not load the video. So I then had to, like, turn turn off lockdown mode to watch this meme and then turn it back on.

Sam: 01:03:00

And that's the moment you get, like, swatted.

Emanuel: 01:03:01

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Joseph: 01:03:02

Well, the message was from the FBI, and they were waiting at Sam. And they were like, we got it.

Sam: 01:03:06

Yeah. Yeah.

Joseph: 01:03:08

But, no, I think there's a lot to learn here, and, you know, people should definitely go read the court record for themselves, and we'll keep an eye on it. Should I play us out, Sam, with your permission?

Sam: 01:03:19

Play us out.

Joseph: 01:03:20

Okay. Let me get the script. Okay. Here we go. As a reminder, four zero four Media is journalist founded and supported by subscribers.

Joseph: 01:03:29

If you do wish to subscribe to four zero four Media and directly support our work, please go to 404media.co. You'll get unlimited access to our articles and an ad free version of this podcast. You also get to listen to the subscribers only section where we talk about a bonus story each week. This podcast is made in partnership with Kaleidoscope and Alyssa Midcalf. Another way to support us is by leaving a five star rating and review for the podcast.

Joseph: 01:03:53

That stuff really helps us out. This has been four zero four Media. We'll see you again next week.