The DNA of 15 Million People Is For Sale

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

Hello.

Emmanuel Mayberg.

Hello.

And Jason Kebler.

Happy baseball season, everyone.

Opening day tomorrow.

We're going to become a sports podcast.

I think literally

the least qualified person on the entire planet.

Well, Jason, we're going to start with you.

This is one you wrote.

The headline is

DNA, 15 million people for sale in 23andMe bankruptcy.

I mean, that is a nightmare headline.

I want to step back first a little bit.

And I'm sure many people have heard of 23andMe and

some of these similar companies.

But for those who don't know, what is, or I guess, guess was,

23andMe?

I mean, it was a direct to consumer genetic sequencing company.

Still is.

It's still operational.

I think probably most people know what it is right now because it's become such a popular like Christmas gift for people to do a DNA test and see like what percentage of

like North Ireland you are from.

Like a lot of that.

There was like a period where it was a very hot Christmas gift.

And this is something that I have been railing about for years because

I actually went on a panel at South by Southwest in like 2016, possibly, about

genetic data privacy.

And on that panel, someone from 23andMe was there.

Someone from the FBI was there.

And then a genetic artist was there.

And we're sort of talking about like what.

can happen if your genetic data is in one of these really massive databases.

You know, there's been some like interesting art projects over the years where like

people would make portraits of people based on their on DNA that they had harvested from them.

Like they would take a strand of hair, sequence the DNA, and then make like a portrait of it.

And that started off as like an art project.

But over the years, there have been companies that have made tools for cops, for example, that would make genetic profiles of people like

genetic mugshots, I guess you'd call them.

And then very famously, there was this case where the Golden State killer, who was a serial killer, was identified based on a genetic database.

I believe it's called GDMatch, like Jed Match.

And it wasn't his DNA that was in the database.

It was his family's DNA that was in the database, and they were able to identify him.

And I think that it's one of those things

where

we often talk about really extreme cases when we talk about privacy.

It's like when you talk about Apple and iPhone encryption, the cases where the

FBI says, like, hey, we want access to this encrypted data.

It's like a terrorism case or like a child abuse case, something like that.

And there have been a a series of cases that have been solved using data from genetic databases, broadly speaking.

And these are often like

serial rapists, serial killers, really like awful situations.

And

that is like quite

an interesting development for

law enforcement.

And it's like, it's pretty like an interesting thing,

like an interesting technology,

but it's based on

you and your loved ones and people you know submitting genetic data to these gigantic databases.

And 23andMe is one of the biggest ones.

Ancestry is obviously another huge one.

And basically, you know, there's now 15 million people in the 23andMe database and

the company is bankrupt.

And so all of that is up for sale right now in like a bankruptcy auction, more or less.

Yeah.

And

it's basically the cops are turning to either these tools have been developed, as you say, for law enforcement or ancestry or whatever.

They're basically commercial databases that they can send, then send a legal demand to to be like, hey, turn over this information.

And I mean, it's almost in the same sort of way.

It's just like Google collects all of this data.

And then,

you know, the FBI or whoever are like, we're going to give you a court order, a search warrant, or whatever legal mechanism is appropriate or that we like.

And we're going to demand that data.

It's like that, but for genetic information, basically.

And you can't change your genetic information, really.

It's kind of one and done.

So you can see why it would be so valuable to law enforcement.

I'm just curious.

And maybe you can't remember, but like, what did the FBI person say on that panel?

Like the benefits of it to them?

Yeah.

I mean, so that's a really interesting thing is one yes law enforcement can subpoena this data from a company like twenty three and me or from ancestry which is now owned by blackrock by the way which is like this massive um private equity firm um

but other genetic database companies have started sort of like proactively offering tools to law enforcement where they don't need to subpoena it.

They don't need to get a warrant.

They don't need to go like make a specific legal demand.

They're just making law enforcement tools,

meaning like search, like search features,

but also

these like genetic mugshot things that I mentioned earlier, where they will take a DNA sequence and then they'll run it through essentially like an AI that generates what they believe a person to look like based on their genetic information.

And then they'll be like, oh, we can run this through a facial recognition database or something like that and try to identify someone.

And there's all sorts of problems with this.

One, it's like your genetics don't fully make up what you might look like.

And so there's been cases where

like people are misidentified.

Like there's just like all sorts of potential problems here.

You know, the F, I think that still to this day, even though we've been talking about the potential for this for a long time, it's still pretty early.

Like there's not widespread use of genetic databases to research crimes.

I have filed a bunch of public records requests with a few different states because Florida, for example, has spun up like a genetic database law enforcement division and trying to get documents from them.

Virginia has a very similar thing, but it's like it's pretty early.

on for police to be like actively trying to get this information

except for in the highest profile of cases.

But we know that there's some companies that have begun to develop tools.

And so,

you know, I've written a few articles over the years where I'm like, don't submit your genetic information to these companies because you don't know the chain of command or like what is going to happen to these companies.

And I think that's what this bankruptcy shows.

It's like there was a company called,

I believe, GD Match.

I think it was them.

There's a few different ones.

But yeah, so GD, GED Match was formed as a nonprofit.

Like this one dude started it and it was a nonprofit.

And they're like, oh, you know, submit your information.

We'll do some like genealogy.

We'll do some ancestry.

Maybe you can learn a little bit about your

potential proclivities for like specific genetic diseases and things like that.

Well, one day the person who founded that was like, oh, I don't want to be a nonprofit anymore.

So he sold the company.

Yeah, he sold the company to this other company called Verogen,

which had these contracts with the FBI.

And then Verogen itself sold to a Dutch multinational conglomerate that was like a pharmaceutical company, a surveillance company, like a bunch of different things.

And so.

Like you said, you can't change your genetic information.

And so if you submitted this to this like, oh, small little little nonprofit project like 10 years ago, well, now it's owned by like a Dutch multinational with both pharmaceutical contracts and also law enforcement contracts.

And so that's the thing about 23andMe is that

it's this project that

like started out as, oh, like fun.

You can learn what percent from what country you are.

You can, and then it sort of expanded into, we, we'll be able to tell you if you have markers for specific genetic diseases.

They started offering some personalized medicine stuff.

And then 23andMe launched these partnerships with pharmaceutical companies to do research on their databases and then to develop drugs.

And it's like, that is also kind of interesting if you put the privacy stuff aside, like personalized medicine, there's a lot of potential there.

But this is not necessarily why people initially submitted their DNA to the company.

And then

it's like the company goes through some financial hardships and suddenly now it's bankrupt.

And it's like, oh shit, we're like out of money.

We need a different revenue source.

We need to figure out like a different mechanism for making money.

And now it's for sale.

And who knows who is going to buy it?

Like, it could be an international company.

It could be a company that works with law enforcement.

It could be the, you know, that it's bought out of bankruptcy by, you know, the, the founder of the company, who is Anne Wojiki.

Wojki?

Wojsiki?

How do you say this?

I don't know.

She's the sister of Susan Wojiki, who was the CEO of YouTube.

But

as part of this, she said she stepped down as the CEO and has said that she's going to try to buy back the company.

But there's like any number of potential outcomes here.

And they're all kind of like, well, if you

have your DNA in this database it's like it's all up in the air you don't know what's gonna happen yeah or even as we saw with the recent selling of the Pokemon Go company to a company funded basically by the Saudi state right I'm not saying that's gonna happen here but I don't know there's a chance that could happen right

so you went through the bankruptcy documents.

I'm not sure how detailed they were.

We have some experience going through bankruptcy documents coming from Vice.

They can be very, very interesting.

Was there anything noteworthy in them at this time, or is it more

is going to come out?

Like, what did you learn looking at those actual documents?

Yeah, so we actually haven't talked about why 23andMe filed for bankruptcy, which is really important and goes back to privacy as well, and is all throughout the bankruptcy documents, which is 23andMe got hacked in at the end of 2023.

And it was basically like a credential stuffing hack where 23andMe itself,

like its database wasn't compromised, but there was basically like millions of customers whose passwords were reused.

And

essentially, they like hackers logged into those, downloaded their information, sold it on BreachForms, I believe, which is, is BreachForms dark web or is it just a...

It's clear web now.

They don't even care about the the dark web anymore.

You just Google it and you find it.

That's how it's like nowadays.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So it was basically they were selling people's genetic information and sort of like different connections that were made by 23andMe on this hacker forum.

And specifically, they were selling information about Ashkenazi Jew

users, people who had like that sort of DNA in their profiles, and then also Chinese DNA.

So it was like a kind of fucked up, targeted sale of information.

And this was during the early days of like Israel bombing Palestine.

And so there was like this,

that was like part of the sort of

undercurrent of what was happening there.

And as a result of this, 7 million people had their information leaked.

And now there's been more than 50 class action lawsuits all over the country.

There's also been 35,000 different

like arbitration demands from people who had their information leaked.

And so basically 23andMe is dealing with the legal and potential financial fallout of this hack, where they have like all of these court cases about how they should have kept their customers' data safe.

And essentially the bankruptcy documents say like,

We don't have the money to cover the potential damages from all of this litigation that we're facing.

So we're going to file for bankruptcy to just like

try to start over.

Like we fucked up, we're in dire straits and like we're going to try to start over.

You're right.

We have looked at a lot of bankruptcy documents over the years and they're usually super, super interesting.

There's also like a lot of filings as part of a bankruptcy case.

And by that, I mean there's usually like thousands and thousands of pages of documents and they don't all come out at once.

And so, right now, there's like a lot of information about who they owe money to, which is like a lot of pharmaceutical companies.

There's some AI companies, which is kind of interesting.

There's a lot of like marketing companies, but it doesn't say why they owe money to those companies.

Like it doesn't say how they got into this situation.

But as part of this, they will have to submit some like various narratives about what went wrong and why they were doing all of this sort of thing.

So it's something that we'll keep an eye on for sure.

It is pretty wild that a credential stuffing attack, which is basically

the lowest of the low-hanging fruit you can get,

generally speaking, it's wild that that sort of attack has basically killed a company, you know?

And I understand why, and I understand why people are mad, but to go from basically a shit poster on this hacker forum to killing 23andMe is wild.

Yeah, I mean, theoretically, isn't this something that should have been stopped by like a rate limit sort of thing, one would think?

Yeah, back at Motherboard, where we all used to work, we did a story about ring cameras when they were getting hijacked essentially, and hackers were doing the same sort of attack.

They would break in with a reused password that maybe the victim had somewhere else or something and then they just use it to log into Ring.

And we found that, you know, there was no rate limiting.

limiting.

I can't remember the status of 2FA exactly, but it also didn't block connections from Tor, the anonymity network that a lot of ordinary people use, but a lot of criminals use.

And if you are 23 and me, presumably you should be putting rate limiting in place

to stop multiple logins from IPs and multiple attempts, all that sort of thing.

And you should probably block Tor connections as well.

I don't know whether the attackers in this case use that or not, but there are absolutely ways to protect against credential stuffing, even if

your users have made the unfortunate mistake of reusing a password.

And just for the you know, user advice as well, that is why you use a password manager, which generates a unique password for every site, so you don't have to remember them all, and you don't end up using the same password everywhere.

And then you're one of the seven million people who has their genetic information pushed online, published online.

So, what happens now, Jason?

Do we just follow?

So a couple of things.

One,

you can apparently delete your information from 23andMe.

So you can like log in and delete it.

And that's actually what the Attorney General of California recommended people do.

They sent like an urgent warning to people in California saying like, hey, go delete your information.

If you do live, happen to live in California, California has a privacy law that makes like they have to delete your information.

If you live elsewhere, you can request that it is deleted and hopefully it is deleted, but like who can say for sure?

And then the other thing I'll say is like

just, I personally, it's like I wouldn't submit my information to a company like 23andMe.

And I would hope that my family wouldn't either.

But I do think that this is like a pretty tricky thing because

the uses of genetic databases thus far have been to like catch the worst of the worst criminals.

And I think that that is something where it's like, okay, that's like kind of interesting.

I think that

personalized medicine where you can create pharmaceuticals that are targeted directly to people with specific genetic diseases,

that is

a potential very

good thing for society.

But

what I worry about is that there are not privacy laws that protect from mission creep here?

And so

I just don't think that like Congress has protected people.

They haven't really thought about the potential implications of this.

I think that, you know, right now we're catching serial killers, but there are literally have been apartment complexes that have sequenced like dog shit DNA to identify the owners of dogs who are not picking up like dog poop in their apartment complexes, which is like, pick up, pick it up.

But that is like weird surveillance stuff that

you can easily imagine this being used for non-violent offenders.

You can easily imagine it being used to try to detect like undocumented immigrants, things like that, especially kind of like with this current administration.

And so

I think it's something that we need to just like be very, very thoughtful and cautious about as we roll out this sort of technology more widely.

What happens next is they go through a bankruptcy proceeding.

Usually these are pretty quick.

So it could be only like a couple months before we know who buys 23andMe.

I don't think that the company is going to go fully out of business because this genetic database is very valuable.

So someone will buy it and do something with it.

It's like can just kind of hope that the person that buys it or the company that buys it is not like a weird surveillance company or I don't know.

It's like it could be anyone at this point.

So we'll continue to cover it, but that's sort of like what's going on at the moment.

Yeah.

And it sounds like you're probably not in this data, Jason.

Sam, do you know if anyone in your family signed up to this?

Or

I feel like Jason and I have had like, it's not really an argument, but like every once in a while I'll be like, should I do 23 of me?

And he's like, no, dumbass.

And then I'm like, okay, I guess.

But But my, I know, like, I have

not immediate family, but extended family who's done it.

So I'm kind of like, am I fucked anyway?

You know, I'm already in it.

I'm already in it, probably.

Kind of, yeah.

Kind of.

Yeah.

This also makes me, this whole thing, and this is a little bit of an aside, this makes me think of,

there was a, it was a couple years, it was many years ago.

It's not a couple years ago.

It was 2019.

I did a story for Vice about

it was the headline was, did my, did the FBI seize my vagina cultures?

And I had like, I was like doing some stunt blog about like this culture company and

they were going to like sequence something based on that.

I don't know.

But in the process of doing that story, the FBI raided the office and took all of the data.

So I was kind of like, okay, now does the FBI have this?

And it's just like, you don't really know what's going to happen to this stuff once it's out of your hands.

Once you put it in the mailbox, who knows?

I forgot about that story.

It's one of the best stories you've ever done.

It's so wild.

It's so wild that that happened.

Yeah, it's such a weird turn of events.

Please dig it up because I want to put that in the show notes because I don't think I've ever read that and I would love to read it as well.

I did get the results back from the like microbiome test eventually, but the FBI.

Did you get anything from the FBI?

Did they get back to you?

I don't even remember why the FBI was raiding.

That's a bigger question: is why was the FIA raiding this office?

But

yeah, I should look back into that and see what the progress is on that investigation for sure.

So, I actually am in one of these databases.

I'm not in 23andMe, like hopefully.

I think some of my cousins have done it.

But also, similarly, for a stunt blog, when I was a freelancer at Motherboard many, many years ago, me and my ex-girlfriend did a blog where you could send a spit sample to like some random DNA sequencing startup that would then print a report about how compatible you were.

And

that company existed for like six seconds.

Like

we did it, they sent it back, said we weren't compatible.

We then did break up like several months later.

So very accurate.

And then the company went out of business immediately.

And it's like, I have no idea what happened to that.

Like, I have no clue where it is or what happened to it.

And it's like, my genetic data has not changed.

And so it is somewhere.

And that's like, that's kind of my point.

It's like scary

that

a lot of these companies are very like fly-by-night.

Like 23andMe is huge.

They've been around forever.

But like, there were, there was a period where a lot of like random startups are doing stuff like this.

And it's like, who knows if they were acquired?

Who knows if they sold their data to someone?

Who knows if I'm, I've been getting targeted by advertisements based on my DNA for years.

Like, I have no idea.

And that's concerning.

Yeah, for sure.

All right.

We'll keep an eye on the bankruptcy documents.

And when we come back, we're going to talk about a website that has been doxing Tesla owners across the US.

We'll be right back after this.

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All right, and we are back.

This is one Jason and myself wrote.

DogeQuest site claims to dox Tesla owners across the US.

Jason, we did discuss the Tesla protests in another recent episode, but can you give us a super quick summary to get us up to speed?

These protests are still going on, basically, right?

Yeah, I mean, the Tesla takedown protests have only gotten bigger over time.

The Tesla takedown is like what they're being called and they're being organized online.

And primarily they're happening on weekends, weekends, like the organized ones at Tesla dealerships all over the country.

You know, these have notably, I believe, had quite an impact on Tesla's stock price.

It's like Tesla stock went down a huge amount,

you know, for a variety of reasons.

I would attribute some of it to the protests.

It's since gone up, you know, due to Lord knows what

reason.

Stock market stuff, but also like, I don't know, Trump advertising Teslas at the White House, things like this.

But basically, there's been like concerted efforts to protest Tesla all over the country.

So there's been that.

But then there's also been like acts of vandalism and arson at Tesla dealerships, which the Trump administration and Elon Musk and others have wanted to classify as domestic terrorism or hate crimes or like

a level above your like standard vandalism as a, you know, act of protecting Elon Musk.

Yeah.

And we'll talk about that briefly in a second because we're actually going to talk about two stories here.

But very briefly on this DogeQuest website,

one day I get this signal message saying, hey, check out this website, which is doxing Tesla owners.

And it links to this DogeQuest website.

I say, thank you.

I'm taking a look to whoever this tipster was.

And I open it up.

And

there's this interface,

like a Google Maps style interface for the United States.

And it has all of these little icons.

There's one for Tesla superchargers.

And it's a little image of a supercharger.

There's ones of the Doge dog, the Shibuyino, the meme dog.

And then when you click that, and it has personal information of members of Doge.

I'm even hesitant to say employees, because who really knows what the technical term is?

I'm just going to say members of Doge.

And then there are little Tesla car symbols, and you click on those, and they include the alleged personal information belonging to actual Tesla drivers.

And now it's not every single Tesla owner in the States or

anything like that.

But, you know, there's names, there's email addresses, there's phone numbers.

And it's funny because I've actually just opened the site and now I literally can't see any of the Teslas on here.

So I actually don't know whether they've removed those or not.

There's the superchargers and the Tesla dealerships as well.

But at least at the time, there was Tesla owner data on there.

I went about verifying it.

And initially, this was...

For the ones who had social media accounts, I was going through those and seeing if there was any information that would indicate they're a Tesla owner.

Eventually, I did find some of those.

There were a few that were like fans of Musk Musk or Tesla, seemingly.

And, you know, we got to the point where I felt comfortable enough to publish.

So we did that with that headline.

Then shortly after, people started responding to me.

You know, I obviously reached out to some of these people.

And, you know, one gets back to me and confirms, yes, they're a Tesla owner.

They said they bought it a while ago.

And they say they're not a fan of Musk.

They bought the vehicle before they knew what Musk would become, all of that sort of thing.

But clearly this site sits.

I mean, I think it would be unfair to say it sits with

the Tesla takedown protests because those are non-violent protests where people are gathering.

I don't want to lump it in with that, but it is obviously that broader context of people are very, very mad at Tesla,

the company, and seemingly some of the...

owners of the vehicles as well, at least based on what everybody says on social media.

And Jason, you're earlier reporting about cybertrucks and all of that sort of thing.

I guess I'll just read out

DogeQuest's own

sort of definition on this website.

It says that DogeQuest is the ultimate hub for enthusiasts of the Department of Government Efficiency, Doge.

Our innovative platform allows users to explore an interactive map of Doge landmarks, but that's not all.

We also cater to Tesla Motors owners, providing a comprehensive resource to locate nearby service centers, showrooms, and charging stations, all at their fingertips.

And it goes on.

Obviously, it is a very tongue-in-cheek way of doxing

these

people.

And the cursor is a Molotov

cocktail, which I think would, you know, indicate some of the

intent here, potentially.

Jason, what did you think when I sent you the map?

Because we ended up working on this together.

Yeah, I mean, I think the initial, it was really interesting because

it's not exactly subtle.

It's like, yes, very tongue-in-cheek, but like the intention here, I believe, is clear.

And

like you said, we tried to

verify the information on it.

And a lot of the information was correct, but there were some like mapping issues with some of the Tesla dealerships.

It wasn't super clear

if all of the Tesla owner information was correct.

And I think what was very interesting to me is like when there initially was Tesla owner information on there, there's probably only a couple thousand

to like maybe a thousand like Tesla owners that they were claiming to dox.

And it's like not clear where that information came from because there's

hundreds of thousands, if not probably millions of Teslas sold in the US.

Maybe hundreds of thousands is more accurate.

So it's clear that it wasn't taken from like a massive database of Tesla owners.

It was compiled in some way that we are unclear on.

And so, I mean, we weren't able to verify where the information came from.

speculatively it could have come from people who have been posting positively about Tesla over the years or have like you know done social media posts about owning a Tesla stuff like that um

but then we started talking about it and it's like even if

not all of the information is correct the fact that this website existed at all was very interesting and a newsworthy story because

It clearly was created to like

intimidate Tesla, Tesla owners,

et cetera, during this like incredibly politically fraught time where people are protesting, people are,

you know, vandalizing Teslas and Tesla dealerships and things like that.

And so

even if not every single data point was accurate, although it seems like a lot of them were,

it was like notable.

Yeah, like we wouldn't have covered it if all of the data was wrong.

Like that wouldn't have been correct.

But to me, like it was much more about the acts or even

sort of the gesture or the symbolism of this map at all which was as you say most likely to intimidate um tesla owners and you know the one i spoke to um she said that you know she was worried she remembers Gamergate and people being doxed during that and she compared it to that.

Obviously, I don't think they're one and the same.

But that was, you know, their personal opinion of being worried about what was going to happen next.

Some people did write in with theories about where the data came from, which was like an earlier data breach.

And I'm yet to honestly have the time to go and verify that.

But I agree that it looks more like an aggregation of data rather than a sort of Tesla breach.

And I should say that

after we broke the news of the site, a couple of other outlets like NBC and Business Insider, they went and they spoke to more people in data as well.

And they also verified it.

But you did mention in the earlier segment,

you know, terrorism and

that's how this some of these acts are being framed by the administration.

We wrote another piece, how three alleged Tesla vandals got caught.

There was this announcement from the Attorney General and it wasn't really

new arrests.

They were, you know, some through March, some throughout February, but there was kind of this big announcement putting three or four of them together.

And that gave us the opportunity to look through the court documents and go, oh, these are the sorts of capabilities that law enforcement are using to catch these people.

And, you know, I think there's a public interest in that.

I think there's a public interest in knowing what protests are doing, what violent vandals are doing, and what law enforcement are doing.

I want to know what all of them are doing and then obviously communicate that.

What did we learn from those

court documents, Jason, that we started going through?

Yeah, I found that they were very, very interesting because it combined a lot of technologies and surveillance

strategies that we've written a lot about over the last couple years.

One, there was a lot of like social media surveillance happening.

So

they would identify or potentially identify someone and then they would find their social media handles and see like what they had been posting.

And one of the suspects had posted

like an anti-fascist flag, things like that.

And they used that in the court documents.

They also used social media posts to identify like the fact that someone had recently moved to the town where an arson had taken place,

which I thought to be interesting.

But the most like fascinating thing is that all three of the people that we wrote about were identified using their vehicle in some way.

All of them seemingly drove to the Tesla dealerships that they then vandalized,

according to the court documents.

Or the charging stations, yeah.

Yeah, or a charging station, yeah.

And

so like two, two of the people,

according to, you know, the court documents, but also, there was screen grabs of surveillance footage in each of the court documents that we looked at.

And two of the people were wearing like all black and masks.

And,

you know, you probably wouldn't be able to identify them based solely off of what they were wearing because they were, you know, covering their faces and stuff like that.

But

the cars that they drove there were nearby.

They were able to grab their license plates.

And then they were run through automatic license plate readers.

In one case, it was a Flock device, which we've written about Flock a lot, which is a company that makes these.

And in another, the brand of license plate reader was not set in the court document.

But basically, they were then able to track these suspects like all around the town that they were living in.

And very interestingly, I believe in the Colorado case,

there was a Molotov cocktail situation in Colorado.

They essentially set up an alert for the license plate.

And when the suspect left their home, it triggered an alert in the Flock

system that then alerted the cops that,

like, exactly where that car was traveling.

And they were able to chase the person down and,

you know, arrest them.

So it really does show that these automatic license plate readers that we've been writing about a lot

are widely used in the United States now.

Like these are three random,

like, none of them were even big cities.

They were like smaller towns in three different states.

Uh, one was Oregon, one was South Carolina, and one was Colorado.

Uh,

you know, and license plate information was used in all of them.

One of them was not, uh, I believe the South Carolina case didn't have automatic license plate readers, but they did look up the person in a license plate database and helped identify him that way.

But I found that to be like quite interesting.

Yeah.

And I think that active flock alert shows something that a lot of people may not consider.

And honestly, sometimes I forget it as well, is that automatic license plate readers, which are these cameras, which are typically stationary and they just sit there and they record which vehicles are going in or out, that is ordinarily a very passive.

surveillance technology.

It's creating a record of, well, last week on Tuesday, this white van with this license plate came in.

But with that alert, it can turn much more into an active surveillance system as well.

As you say, where, well, the vehicle's moved now.

So now we can go perform physical surveillance or we can physically trail them or something like that.

And that's just something I'm not sure many people really think about.

when it comes to automatic license plate readers.

And these cameras, they don't just look at the plates, they will look at the color of the vehicle.

They might be able to figure out the brand or the model as well.

So, you know, I don't know, a red Porsche or something like that, or or a red uh hatchback or van or or whatever um so they are more detailed than just the license plate and of course there's those technologies and there was like normal police work as well like comparing a receipt that was found in the search of one person's residence and found finding that it was the same brand of beer that was then used in the molotov cocktail Molotov cocktail and they found the discarded box that was carrying the beer like very very normal stuff.

But then these more interesting technologies like automatic license plate readers.

Just to round it out, Jason, what do you think about,

you know, President Trump and other officials like the Attorney General saying that this sort of activity is going to be prosecuted

potentially as domestic terrorism?

What does that mean for maybe the tools that police are going to use and maybe the sentences that people like this may face as well?

Yeah, I'm not an expert in this, but I know that if you classify something as domestic terrorism, it I believe it means that

perhaps like the CIA can get involved.

It means like that they are allowed to use

like more intense surveillance mechanisms to potentially catch people.

It means that the sentencing is harsher.

It means that

they can request certain data from tech companies

more easily.

I think that's correct.

Yeah, the way I would see it is that

they could,

and when I say they, I mean more like the FBI or somebody like that.

And the agencies involved in, at least some of these cases, was ATF.

But if something's marked as domestic terrorism, you know, that kind of gives permission to use more invasive technologies.

And, you know, maybe that's something like a stingray or an IMSI catcher, which has often been used to track down murderers.

It's been used at protests,

all of that sort of thing.

You can easily see that if some sort of behavior is marked as domestic terrorism, they may feel that they can use more

invasive technologies.

That doesn't mean they necessarily have to.

In this case, it was just normal police work and then sort of the automatic license plate readers.

I wouldn't say it's normal police work because regardless of the terrorism designation,

what we're clearly seeing is that law enforcement is motivated and is being motivated to chase these people down, which

is not the case for every crime.

You can try to daisy chain security cameras and license plate readers for many types of crime that take place every day.

And that doesn't happen because there's a question of resources and motivation to solve particular crimes,

other forms of vandalism.

But clearly, law enforcement is very motivated to catch these people.

And that is the entire point of the designation and of these cases is to like make an example and scare people into not doing this.

Yeah, totally fair.

All right.

Let's leave that there.

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