How to Fight Back Against AI Bot Scrapers

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I'm your host Joseph and with me are 404 media co-founders Sam Cole.

Hello.

And Emmanuel Mayberg.

Hello.

Jason's not here.

He's still on vacation.

As listeners will know, we all took last week off, which is only possible due to our paying subscribers.

We have never done that since we we launched in August 2023.

At this point, it was rejuvenating and ready to get back into it.

A ton of stories all ready to go through now.

And then we're going to have a bunch more for next week as well.

So let's get straight into it.

This first one is one that Emmanuel published, I think today or yesterday.

The open source software saving the internet from AI bot scrapers.

So we spoke about the problem a little bit on an earlier episode of the podcast.

Can you just lay out that problem first of all before we talk about this solution?

So what is happening with AI scrapers and who is it impacting exactly?

I think one of the funny things about taking a vacation after not doing it for so long is it warps your perception of time.

And I'm like, when did we have that podcast?

Was that two weeks ago or the early 90s?

I don't remember.

But yeah, it was like, I think it was two weeks ago.

I wrote this story about the first good study that I've seen about how AI

training data scrapers are really messing with libraries, museums, and any other form of

resource or archive that's open to the public.

So you have all these AI companies, they need

all the training data they can get in order to train their AI models.

So, they send these bots to crawl the entire web and hoover up all that data.

And there are so many companies doing this now, and they're doing it so rapidly that if you're just a university or even a big university with an online library, all these bots suddenly hit your website.

They're doing it millions of times a day, and they crash the websites eventually,

making them unavailable for the human users that they were initially made for.

So that's kind of largely the problem.

Yeah, they're being bombarded basically in these maybe not intentional, but essentially DDoS attacks where there's all of this traffic coming and it's knocking these systems offline.

So nobody can really enjoy or read them or get anything from them.

So that's the problem.

You need some sort of solution, some sort of mitigation.

I mean, hopefully the mitigation isn't take them offline, which some people have unfortunately had to do.

So enter this tool you've just written about called Anubis.

What is it?

And, you know, how does it work?

How does it try to address this problem?

So I wrote that story that I just talked about, and a bunch of people reached out and said, hey, you should really check out Anubis.

There are several solutions that people are trying in order to prevent these AI bots.

One that we've talked about and that historically has worked is robots.txt,

which is a file you can put in front of your website that tells

bots not to crawl it.

Just like no automated tools should crawl this website.

That used to work.

That was pre the generative AI boom and this data mining gold rush.

Suddenly, people just don't give a fuck and they're like scraping the sites anyway.

So yeah, go ahead.

Is that the reason it doesn't work?

Because again, you're totally right, and plenty of people have brought this up that it used to work pretty effectively.

You, you, you have that file on your website, and it tells people, please don't scrape this.

Uh, is it just that people don't care now, or there's like way more people doing scraping, or a combination of both?

Like, why doesn't robots work anymore?

Because it's not a rule, you know what I mean?

It's not like if you ignore robots.txt, the internet police is going to come to your house and arrest you.

It just

what?

Not yet, you know, not yet.

Once they give us badges, maybe we will do it, but uh, no,

it's just a norm that used to be respected.

And I don't know, we should probably talk about this at some point.

But the internet used to, there's protocols and there's norms.

And the internet used to run on a lot of norms.

And these are just being ignored entirely now because

it's going to be very profitable for you to build a successful AI tool.

So if you need to jump over the robots.txt fence in order to get that training data, you're going to do it.

Who cares?

So that no longer works.

You have some other big companies that are trying things, Cloudflare.

I think they announced a new method that they're trying today where they're blocking AI bots by default.

I'm not sure how exactly that works.

They've also done this kind of mischievous thing where Jason wrote about this.

Some other people are doing this, but

once an AI bot comes to your site, you kind of send it down a rabbit hole of never-ending links to garbage websites, and you kind of trap it in this infinite loop.

So that's one solution.

Anubis

is the reason people, I think, reached out to me and are very happy with it, and it's getting widely adopted, is it's lightweight, it's open source, and it's fairly effective

in a less expensive way that we can get into later.

Yeah.

And I think the Cloudflare one as well, I mean, hate to hand it to Cloudflare, a company that enables a lot of bad stuff and it's kind of all over the place when it comes to

his ideology and his decisions around content moderation or whatever.

Oh, okay.

Dash did something pretty interesting.

I'll give them that.

But there's also a way that publishers may be able to get funds potentially through that Cloudflare mechanism as well.

It will direct people to, well, do you want to pay this publisher to scrape this material?

Right.

Yeah.

So

you asked me how it works, which I lightly dodge because it's complicated and I don't want to get it wrong.

But basically,

these bots, the scrapers that are trolling the entire internet, they don't look or behave like a normal internet user.

When that traffic comes to a website, it doesn't look

like a human user who is using a browser in order to access the website because there's no browser involved.

It's just like a very lightweight, automated tool that is accessing the site and taking the data.

What Anubis does is basically

put a check before you can access the site where it is looking for a type of

cryptography that JavaScript does and has been doing and all web browsers have been doing since around 2022.

Maybe you could talk about this a little bit.

A lot of people really hate JavaScript, and there are browsers that don't use it, and there are people who kind of disable JavaScript across the board.

So, if you're one of those people, you're not going to be able to access sites that use Anubis.

But the vast majority of people are using Chrome or some other type of browser that is constantly going through this cryptographic check to make sure that the user is there and that they're they're using a browser.

And basically all Anubis does is look for that once it verifies

that it's a browser, that it's probably a human, and it lets you through.

The reason that is clever is because

there's a cat and mouse game that's happening between

admins and people that are trying to protect their websites from scrapers and the AI companies.

So, the reason that the creator of Anubis, Shiyaso, was willing to tell me how this check works is because she knows that the AI companies can't really implement the solution.

It would be too computationally expensive for all these AI scrapers to pretend to run Chrome before they access a website.

And that's why it's kind of like a simple, lightweight, clever clever solution.

Yeah, it is really smart.

And I don't want to oversimplify it, but maybe it's just a way for people to understand.

But like, you know, it's a more sophisticated capture in a way where a capture is, you know, you're, you're doing proof that you're not a robot, you're solving a little puzzle.

Of course, there are entire

companies of people in various countries who will get commissioned.

I think commissioned is putting it very charitably.

They will be paid very, very low wages to click through captures and then provide the solution to that.

And of course, plenty of AIs can actually bypass captures now.

This is like a much smarter way of going about it,

it seems.

And you mentioned JavaScript, and I'll just say briefly, it seems like a really good trade-off to me that you have this JavaScript running in your browser, you're using an ordinary web browser, it lets you through.

You're right in that some people don't like to use it.

For example, when you download the Tor browser, there is a very easy to flick on and off setting to disable or enable JavaScript and the reason for that is you know you can leak some personal data about your device to websites are running certain pieces of code and you know it's I guess it's a little bit less now but you go even five six seven years ago malvertising was just a massive thing where JavaScript was constantly used to deliver malware to people's devices simply for loading a web page.

So it it doesn't have the best wrap, but I don't know, you're an ordinary user with a fully up-to-date

web browser and you're accessing a website, seems like a pretty good trade-off to filter out all the AI bots, really.

So you mentioned you spoke to the creator.

What did they tell you about why they decided to make this?

Like, what makes somebody wake up and then just go, I'm going to make Anubis?

The scrapers came for her.

That's why she did it.

Like all the other libraries and archives that were in this previous story that I wrote about how AI scrapers are messing up their infrastructure, she has a Git server where she keeps some of her work.

She keeps it open so other people can access it.

And one day she was trying to access it.

It didn't.

It didn't work.

And she looked at what was going on.

And some kind of Amazon AI scraper was hitting it hundreds and hundreds of times and forcing it to reset and then eventually go offline.

And that's when she set out to make Anubis.

That's amazing.

So she makes it.

It sounds like for personal use initially.

Did she

upload it publicly at the same time?

And then people, I'm just trying to get from how she makes it to apparently a ton of people are now using this.

Like, what's the, what happens in between those two points?

Yeah, I think it just word of mouth.

She did make it available.

It was on GitHub, and I think people started to use it.

And it seems like what really made it take off is that I know that you're previously a Linux user, so maybe you're familiar with this, but GNOME, which is a popular open source implementation of Linux, started to use it to kind of protect its libraries and all of its publicly available data.

They picked it up and it kind of went from there.

And then a bunch of people in the open source community, honestly, started to use it because it is open source, I think, was part of the attraction.

And then, yeah, it's been downloaded.

When I wrote the story, it was 200,000 times.

I imagine it's a lot higher now because the story got some pickup and people were really excited about it.

UNESCO's website and infrastructure uses it.

Some universities use it.

You sent me a story after I published where Duke had a case study about them dealing with scrapers, and they also came to Anubis for the solution.

I think that's what they ended up doing.

Yeah, I'm trying to find it right now, Barchers Member, off the top of my head, in that it wasn't even just that they were using it, they were like almost reviewing it and being like, this is how effective this was

for

protecting our property and protecting us from scrapers.

And it seems like it worked

pretty well.

Yeah.

And I guess, like, just to stress, like, 200,000 people downloading something, okay, not the biggest number in the world, but like, they're not random normal users.

They're probably web administrators or something, you know, like that.

and 200,000 web admins or sysadmins is a lot of people, I would say.

Yeah, yeah,

right.

It's it's not 200,000 individual users and their little blogs.

It's 200,000 users,

many of which are

the admins of incredibly valuable

online resources that are accessed by millions and millions of people.

Yeah.

so I guess just the last thing is: what do you think happens now?

Is it just that more and more people use Anubis, or is it also?

I mean, obviously, both can be true.

Maybe more and more solutions start cropping up like Cloudflare's as well.

And there's just sort of this ecosystem of all of these, hey, screw you, stop scraping us solutions.

Yeah, I think it's hard to imagine that Cloudflare is not going to provide some sort of workable solution

to its customer base and other internet infrastructure companies are probably going to do the same.

I think the question is how popular this open source alternative gets.

And

I don't know the answer to that, but I know that it has a lot of momentum.

I know that a lot of people are

using it.

A lot of notable organizations are using it.

The developer says that she's not yet at a place where it can be her full-time job, but she wants it to be.

And I don't know, I can definitely imagine that happening.

I can imagine

her getting enough donations to make this a full-time job, hire a contributor, and have it be like an open source protocol that is very popular and is used more and more as this problem persists.

Yeah, the problem isn't going away and it's probably not even getting smaller or plateauing.

It's going to get worse, if anything.

And the other thing I forgot to mention is that not everyone

can or wants to use Cloudflare or another

kind of solution from a big company.

A lot of people, on principle or for practical reasons, want an open source, free solution.

Yeah, that's fair.

And I guess the last thing I'll say is:

of course, we try to block AI scrapers as well.

This is

a big reason why we require email address sign-ups on the site.

You know, an article will go out there and we'll pull it behind the free wall where you have to provide the email.

And, you know, and then stuff is obviously paywalled as well.

But this,

it seems that it has stopped.

some scraping and the way that we can see that is a fewer AI generated rip-offs of our articles, essentially, which is not the best metric in the world, but it's a pretty good one.

And I'm sure we'll look deeper into it as well: of how much we're being scraped and whether it's going down or plateauing or whatever.

But that's what we do.

All right, we'll leave that there.

And when we come back,

we're going to talk about another story of mine, which is about ICE and its new facial recognition app.

We'll be right back after this.

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All right,

we are back with one of Joe's stories.

The headline is,

ICE is using a new facial recognition app to identify people leaked emails show.

So, Joe, you've been doing a ton of really good reporting about ICE and about facial recognition separately and sometimes combined.

This to me is something that was not even on my radar yet as far as what police were doing in the field.

And then realizing that they were sticking phones in people's faces, and then also using that as a facial recognition app was just like a one-two, like, oh my God, this is insane and horrible.

Um, so yeah, why don't you just explain maybe for a second before we dive into the app itself?

Um, for people who might not be familiar, what exactly are police doing or ICE agents or officers or whoever doing in the field that people were like, oh shit,

what are they doing?

What are they doing with their phones?

Before we get into the app, even.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's fair.

So,

as many listeners will know, ICE is conducting operations all around the United States, but especially in Los Angeles.

And of course, there were protests in response to that, and Trump deployed the National Guard, and then later the Marines.

Those protests have kind of petered out for the moment, but there are all of these sort of individual flashpoints where ICE will raid a Home Depot or a 7-Eleven or somewhere else, and then the community will get around it.

ICE will be wearing masks, they'll be heavily armed, they may not identify what agency they're from, their badge number, or anything like that.

And there's a few videos coming out around that time of ICE officers repeatedly taking their mobile phones and sort of

not shining, almost shoving them into people's faces, very deliberately and clearly filming or taking a photo of people.

And there was one very stark example where a protester was following ICE in his vehicle.

From the video that was published, it didn't look like he was interfering with the operation.

It didn't look like he was getting in the way of federal law enforcement or anything like that, but he was following them.

These apparent ICE officers stop, they get out of their vehicle, they crowd around his car, and this is like, it seems on a busy road.

They then start asking him, what are you doing?

Why are you following us?

And then

two, maybe three of them, get out their phones and keep pointing it at his face.

Like it looks like they're taking photos of his face.

And that's why I thought it was at the time.

And it might still be.

And we'll get into the nuances of what exactly we know and what we don't know.

But people saw that and they were asking on social media and and elsewhere why is ice

why do they keep taking photos um of us which i know a fair question to to ask but then i got these leaked emails from inside ice

revealing the agency has a new facial recognition app so maybe they're using that we don't know if in all of these videos um they're doing that but it absolutely adds new context to that and the fact is that ice ICE does have this app now, as you know, I'm sure we'll get into.

Yeah, so what is this app?

Like you said, might or might not be what is in the videos.

We don't know, but we know that it's being used, or at least ICE has it.

What's it called, and what does it promise to do?

Yeah, so it's called Mobile Fortify, and it promises to allow ICE agents to identify people in the field by simply pointing their mobile phone

at at them, which

obviously is the point of facial recognition.

That's obviously the entire purpose of the technology.

But it's one thing to have facial recognition, I don't know, on the camera outside a military base to make sure who's coming in, or, you know, facial recognition at a retail store, which is still very controversial, but it's different to have it immediately and accessible in the hands of federal law enforcement who are grabbing people

without due process and putting them into this black box system and giving them a capability right into the palm of their hands that can identify people

on the street.

We've, of course, ICE has facial recognition from other companies as well.

We don't know who made this one, whether it's in-house or made by somebody else and other law enforcement do as well.

but it's it's the immediacy and it's definitely the context of Trump's mass deportations that makes this interesting and of course these emails um that I got ICE was announcing the existence and the availability of this app to all of the personnel in enforcement and removal operations, ERO.

And that's the part of ICE that, you know, that deals with deportations.

This isn't HSI, which does child abuse investigations.

This is ERO, the deportation part of ICE.

Okay, gotcha.

So you found this through FOIA documents, or how did you figure out the details of this app?

I was leaked emails from inside

from inside ICE, and these emails were sent to all personnel inside

ERO.

So that's a very widespread of people, which I think is interesting because that's a very widespread of people that

may or may not be using this tool.

It's at least been advertised to them inside the agency.

And of course, with this new budget that

US lawmakers have just passed and then Trump's signed into law, ICE just got another 6 billion.

for surveillance capabilities and I think 150 overall, 45 for

more

facilities to store people that's deporting, all of that sort of thing.

So it's clear they're ramping up their surveillance

tech.

And I think this is just one part of it.

Yeah, okay, gotcha.

Yeah, sending it to everyone in ERO is very, very crazy.

So we know that like Clearview, as you've mentioned before,

uses facial recognition tech.

But how is this similar?

How is it different?

Is it different?

What are we working with with here in comparison?

Since we already have that as kind of like an example.

Yeah.

So the way that facial recognition tech works really broadly, and obviously there'll be some differences between different companies and that sort of thing, but broadly, is that it has this massive database of images of people's faces.

Or maybe it has a massive database of the hashes of people's faces, like the cryptographic representation of it.

But a lot of the time, it's just going to be literal photos.

That's the case with Clearview AI, which is a company that Kashmir Hill and New York Times revealed several years ago at this point.

And they had, as she described in that coverage, and there's the person who provided the public records to her, they had sort of crossed the Rubicon of facial recognition, where

to build that database of faces, Clearview scraped social media, it scraped the web, so people's Venmo accounts, social media accounts, web pages, all of this sort of thing, and created this massive database of billions upon billions of faces.

That's what makes Clearview apparently pretty powerful and apparently very popular with law enforcement at a local, state, and federal level.

So that's how it usually works, and that's how you usually get this sort of data.

With this new ICE app,

Mobile Fortify, it's not using images scraped from social media.

Well, it appears to be using, and again,

there are still questions we don't have all of the answers to, but it's the emails I've got said

this ICE app is using the system from Customs and Border Protection that takes a photo of somebody every time they enter or leave the United States.

You imagine you go to the border and that could be,

you know, LA airport or whatever, or it could be crossing via car from Mexico or wherever.

You're probably almost certainly going to have your photo taken, especially if you're, you know, on a travel visa or a work visa or something like that.

Your photo will be taken.

Now,

the emails, again, aren't particularly,

they don't answer all of the questions, but here's one quote which I thought was very, very telling.

The app uses CBP's traveler verification service and the seizure and apprehension workflow that contains the biometric gallery of individual for individuals for whom CBP maintains derogatory information for facial recognition.

There's a lot of buzzwords in there.

Derogatory comes up, and that's sometimes hard to tell what they mean.

But they say they have a biometric gallery of individuals, which comes from when people enter or leave

the United States.

That appears to be, based on these emails, how they got those images and what ICE is now using in the field.

You get a photo taken when you arrive at an airport, and now you're getting pulled over in LA, and an agent is putting a camera in your face, and they know who you are based on the biometrics taken at the border.

Okay, gotcha.

Yeah, I think I expect when I'm traveling, and I'm sure most people do, that at this point, like you're getting your picture taken in a thousand different ways by a hundred different cameras, which

is exhausting to think about and sucks in its own way.

But then

having ICE agents have access to this app like on their phones seems like just a whole other invasion of your privacy, invasion of your personal space,

invasion of much worse than that, if they decide to

harass you or God forbid, kidnap you.

So yeah, I think this the situation with this app is really, it's really shocking and crazy.

What do you think this kind of says about where we're at with surveillance tech in general in this country?

Yeah, I think it's one main thing.

And I have another ICE story coming that will touch on this as well.

But we're absolutely in the age of

all of this existing data that maybe has been collected by private companies and then it's stored in databases and then ICE gains access to it Or, in this case, collected by customs and border protection for one purpose, which is verify who is coming and who is leaving the country.

And it's then being completely retextualized and repurposed for, well, now we can instantaneously identify people in the field.

And potentially,

again, we don't know the full parameters of this tool, but if it's getting data from that, that is presumably linked to immigration status as well.

Like that isn't in a tool like Clearview AI, which scraped a bunch of people's photos from Venmo.

Venmo doesn't have your immigration status or anything like that, or it doesn't come with the photos.

This

could be a much, much more powerful tool for that and much more applicable for what ICE wants to do.

So I just think it shows that all of those

surveillance capabilities, biometric capabilities that have been built, I honestly think all bets are off for basically how they can be used now.

And, you know, when I spoke to the ACLU about this system and I asked them for comment, they said, I mean, DHS was never authorized by Congress to use facial recognition tech in this way.

And they should stop this immediately.

Of course, I have no expectation that ICE or DHS would, but I really think that all of these hairbrain schemed hairbrain schemes you can think about, oh, maybe the data could be used for this or used for that.

Basically, all of them are possible at this point.

I'm constantly surprised every time I write a story about DHS and how they're using data.

And I just get shocked every time.

And that's going to keep happening with these other stories that are coming as well.

Awesome.

I'm giving two thumbs up for people who are listening.

It's just, yeah, I mean, I don't blame anyone at this point for having a conspiratorial mindset.

We try not to here, but it's like, if you can think of it, it might probably actually be happening.

Um,

and it is happening with technology that the cops have their hands on because cops love toys.

Um,

all right, well, I think that's very good.

Yeah, I think that's why I'm so shocked because, or, or consistently shocked, because I don't have a cons,

I strive.

Obviously, we all do.

I'm not saying you have this.

We all strive to not be conspiratorial.

And that's why whenever I get one of these stories or another one, I'm still shocked every single time, even though I'm sure people will be like, oh, what did you expect?

Well, we're doing journalism, not, you know, palm reading here at this point.

And I'm surprised every single time.

All right.

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I'll now play us out.

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