The New Jersey Drone Panic

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

What's up?

Emmanuel Mayberg.

Hello.

And Jason Kebler.

Hello.

Good morning.

Good afternoon.

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All right, let's get going.

This is going to be a fun one, an interesting one.

Jason wrote about the drones all over New Jersey.

The headline is,

WTF is going on with the New Jersey Mystery Drones.

Maybe mass panic over nothing.

Let me just lay out sort of the backstory just a little bit.

So, more than a week ago at this point, around a week ago at this point, residents of New Jersey started reporting seeing drones in the night sky.

Sometimes they were small, sometimes they were large, lots of different lights.

They'd move very quick before darting away, sort of a very

traditional, stereotypical UAP sighting.

There have been lawmakers demanding answers from U.S.

law enforcement.

I think,

you know,

even in Congress or something, right?

Like grilling the head of agencies or senior officials for answers.

More and more people are posting videos to social media of these apparent sightings.

But it's become clear, and we'll go into this in a bit more detail, but it's become clear that many of these sightings are actually normal planes.

People are even shining lasers at them.

And the FBI has warned people, please do not shine a laser at a commercial jetliner.

That's a really, really stupid idea.

Jason, you wrote an article that put this panic into context.

And to be clear, we're not here to debunk every single video that's been put on TikTok.

That is almost a fool's errand at this point.

And I think your article actually demonstrates that as well.

So to go back, you bring up this recent historical example, which put this all into context.

What happened in Colorado in 2019?

Yeah, so I just finished writing and filing, but we haven't published it yet.

By the time this is up, we'll have published another story about this.

And my whole reaction to this is just like,

I

cannot believe this is happening.

It's so, it's so frustrating as just like someone who has covered, I've covered drones since before they were allowed in U.S.

airspace, like since the very, very early days.

Like

that was my first beat as a tech reporter.

And people have always been really crazy about drones.

They've just been really,

no one is ever normal about these things.

They're never, ever, ever normal about them.

And there's definitely things that we should worry about with drones.

It's like cops doing persistent surveillance, like Department of Homeland Security flying predator drones over the border, which they do.

You know, things like this are concerning people using them to spy on others, people flying them unsafely.

This sort of thing happens, but they've been in our airspace for a very long time.

And in December of 2019, in Colorado, there was a series of mystery drone sightings.

that was very similar to what we're seeing in New Jersey now.

It was like a few local

reports,

and then there were more local reports, and then the news covered it, and then it became national news, and then there were many, many, many, many reports.

And then what happened was the military got involved, the Federal Aviation Administration got involved, the Department of Homeland Security got involved.

There was like a cross-state task force where all of these local police and sheriffs got involved and started doing an investigation.

And what they found was nothing.

They found nothing,

which is to say that the drones that they found, the quote-unquote drones, they were able to track many of them to being

commercial planes or other passenger planes.

Others of the drones were legal hobby drones being flown by random people.

Other of the drones were being flown by farmers.

And then in some cases, the quote-unquote drone sightings were stars or they were SpaceX satellites or they were other things in the sky.

I live in Los Angeles, talked about this a lot.

On Friday, I went outside, random time, looked to the sky, and I saw so many blinking lights in the sky, things moving around, looked exactly like every video that I've seen on Twitter and TikTok.

Just these blinking lights.

And it's like, oh, what is that?

And you can take a video of it, and on your shitty cell phone, it's going to look like a drone.

And it's like, this is what a lot of people are seeing.

And that has been like here in New Jersey, the Department of Homeland Security, the Pentagon, the FAA,

and one other group, I don't have it up right now, did a joint press release saying, most of these things, we've gotten 5,000 reports, almost all of them.

are confirmed passenger planes of some sort.

Please stop shooting at them.

Please stop shining lasers at them.

I'm flying into New Jersey tomorrow when you're listening to this.

Please don't shoot at my plane.

It's like, it's crazy.

It's absolutely crazy.

And I know that I sound like

distraught.

And I actually, I find all this to be quite fun and funny and fun to write about and follow, but it's also

bad.

It's not good.

Oh, yeah.

It could get really, really scary.

When the FBI and authorities put out that message saying, please stop shining shining lasers at planes.

I'm like, holy shit, this is real now.

This isn't either people, you know, believing one thing on TikTok when it's something else, or, you know, and I think we'll get into this into your piece hasn't been published yet.

I haven't read the copy.

I just saw the headline, I think, but potentially grifters as well, just trying to latch onto it.

Right.

So you mentioned that you are a longtime drone reporter.

You did that years and years ago.

I remember that at Motherboard as well.

But interestingly, this is like a perfect intersection for two of your interests because you've actually also covered UFOs and UAPs and all of that sort of world

a shit ton, right?

So you worked on a documentary for Netflix called Encounters.

Just briefly, what was that

documentary and sort of how does that apply?

here.

Yeah, so the documentary was called Encounters.

We worked on it for several years at Vice and it came out in 2023.

And it follows four mass UFO sightings, one in Texas, one in Wales, one in Zimbabwe, and one in Japan.

And it tried to sort of like answer this question of one, why do humans look for aliens?

How do they try to explain things in the sky?

What are scientific explanations for this?

And then also, like, what is the psychology of mass psychosis, like a mass delusion, more or less?

Which is not to say that people aren't seeing anything.

It's just that, like, what causes these sorts of mass sightings?

And I'll be very honest.

It's like, I find the topic of UFOs and unidentified aerial phenomena to be quite interesting.

And I think that there are people who are approaching it in a way that is interesting.

And I think that

there are definitely like U.S.

military, like classified U.S.

military projects where they're flying things in the sky and they're not telling you you what they are.

Other governments have similar programs.

There's no evidence that anything that's happening in New Jersey is that.

And the Pentagon said it was not U.S.

military craft.

Now, as you get saying your piece, they don't have the best history when it comes to being transparent, but hey, they said that.

Yeah, I mean, the Pentagon has the latitude to lie about classified programs in particular.

And some of these programs are classified.

And some of them have been declassified.

And one of my former bosses, Garrett Graff, wrote a book about this and how that like a really well-reported book about how the Department of Defense has lied about some of these things.

So I find like the U.S.

government's sort of like research into UFOs and UAPs to be interesting.

I think that in the last few years, there's been a lot of congressional hearings about this.

There's been Pentagon reports about UFOs.

A lot of the actual reports that have been given to Congress have been sort of pleas by the Department of Defense for more funding to study UFOs, which is quite interesting.

But you're right.

It's like there's this crossover between drones and UFOs.

And Fane Greenwood, who is a really good drone reporter, and I also wrote a similar story like several years ago, like separately, covering separate things.

But a lot of things that are reported as UFOs end up being explainable drones and then a lot of things that are reported as drones are just passenger airplanes things in the sky people don't usually look at the sky like it's it's just

there's been studies about this and

People are quite oblivious until there is a situation like this.

And then everyone is looking at the sky and looking for something, some sort of explanation for what is going on so i understand that i've been like railing about this for a little while and it is entirely possible that some of the things in new jersey are

i don't know like pentagon projects or or not easily explained but the vast majority of the things that people have been freaking out about have been explained can be explained.

Many of them have been debunked by like random people on Twitter or Blue Sky, where you'll have a politician or someone tweet a video and it goes viral.

And then they'll cross-reference it with the flight tracking software and the taillights that are on this, you know, aircraft.

And they'll be like, no, this is actually just a passenger flight, or this is a helicopter, or this is something else that is easily explained.

But it's really hard to debunk each and every one of these.

You also have like,

you have things like local police saying it's a car-sized drone that was 100 feet over or whatever.

And there's also been studies that people can't tell how far away things are at night or how big they are in the sky because it's really far away and human eye depth perception like doesn't work very well at night, especially.

So there's like a lot of this happening.

And then

the story that I'm publishing now is that every political grifter has come out of the woodwork to talk about about this in some way.

It's like Marjorie Taylor Greene is threatening to shoot these drones down herself.

Donald Trump is doing AI photos of Chris Christie with McDonald's and DJI Phantom drones.

I don't know if y'all saw that.

Yes.

I think you did.

Larry Hogan, who was the former governor of Maryland, tweeted a photo that got millions and millions of views, turned out to be a stars in Orion's belt.

Like things like this are happening.

And then you have the sort of like

slightly more serious people in New Jersey who are like,

this is a threat.

Like, I'm going to try to get the government on it and so on and so forth.

But, like, all of these people are sort of stoking the fear of people.

And then they're leveraging this into high-profile appearances on Fox News, on CNN, on News Nation, on all these cable news networks.

And this isn't going to go away until there's some other

news story to distract people um you and you think that's the case because even if a video gets debunked or a sighting gets debunked and it's like well no that was this playing or whatever there's just gonna be another sighting another sighting until people basically get bored or there's something else to distract them.

Is that what you mean?

Yeah, so here's a sentence that I wrote that I thought was pretty good, which is, all of this has become a no-win cluster fuck for everyone except the attention-seeking grifters within the government who are themselves railing against the government to focus attention on themselves.

To these people, government inaction is unacceptable, and government actions and explanations cannot be trusted.

So, it's like the Pentagon not shooting these drones down is unacceptable to them.

The Pentagon saying there's nothing to worry about means that the Pentagon is gaslighting and lying to you.

Like

the it there's no there's like a no-win situation here.

And what happened in Colorado, I mean, this is crazy, but what happened in Colorado was the coronavirus pandemic started and all the news attention went to that.

And then suddenly no more drone sightings.

No one saw any drones.

Right.

And crucially, I know they're kind of linked, but crucially, you don't necessarily mean there was just no more media coverage about it because, oh, the media had to go cover COVID or whatever.

You mean there were fewer drone sightings, there were fewer people reporting sighting the drones in the first place.

Yes, because

there was less media attention.

So there were less people looking at the sky.

So there's less people reporting the drones.

And because there are less people reporting the drones, there was less media coverage.

So on and so forth, cycle, cycle.

And it was over.

I guess just sort of the last thing I wanted to touch on that is sort of the flip of it is that with this New Jersey example today,

is it something of like a self-fulfilling prophecy where you have, I don't even know what the patient zero of this sighting is.

I'm sure you do, Jason.

I'm sure you've seen it.

But like there was one initial sighting or some initial sightings and everybody jumps on that and it keeps going and going and going.

Does it even get to the point?

And I think you mentioned this that happened in Colorado.

where sometimes it's the sightings are even people flying their drones to try to look at the other drones that they think they're perceiving.

It just becomes a send the cycle, basically.

Yeah, that did happen in Colorado where the police were investigating drones, drone sightings, and to investigate them, they were flying their own drones, looking for the drones that may or may not have existed.

And then the drones that they were flying were being reported as sightings and so on and so forth.

And it's really good.

It's really good.

I don't know.

I don't know.

I know I just like ranted for a long time, but I'm curious what

Emmanuel and Sam think of this because I don't know if anyone else even finds it interesting, but it's been blowing up like every group text that I have for like two weeks.

And I feel like such a buzzkill being like, sorry, they're nothing.

Everyone's like, oh, it's aliens.

And I'm like, it's nothing.

It's nothing.

It's not even a thing to talk about.

I would say I would consider it progress that the idea that it's aliens has not been the dominant thing I've seen in the news, which is good because it's slightly less fantastical.

As you were talking, I just checked out the UFO subreddit, R UFO.

And as I'm sure you know, it's like every post, it's hundreds of posts, and it's all about this.

So they certainly think it's UFOs, but I haven't seen that in the mainstream as much, which seems good, right?

Like people imagining drones, not great, but at least they're saying it's Iranian mothership.

Yeah, at one point, I believe a lawmaker said it was an Iranian mothership that was firing out the drones, and then they go back to the mothership, and the

big mothership is off the east coast.

Even when I'm saying it out loud, I sound like a plot of like men in black or something.

Right.

I sound like Independence Day.

A little baby doing like a stream of consciousness Hollywood script.

And then the boat was off the east coast and then the drones came out.

And then they were like, okay, mate, it's not that.

Relax.

I would rather it be, I would rather people speculate about aliens, though.

Like, that's so much more whimsical and fun and, like, humankind versus aliens.

It's a much nicer conspiracy theory to have than like

it's China or something, you know?

I don't know.

I find that, I find, like, the, the politicians, politicization of this to be a really interesting turn

that people are using it as this way to kind of stoke fears about your own government, other governments.

Yeah.

I'd rather it be aliens.

I really do like talking about it.

Like, I think it's fun to talk about, but then, but then you had see people like shining these powerful lasers at passenger planes.

And like,

I have family members texting me literally scared.

And I'm just like, okay,

maybe not so good.

Dude, people need to stop looking up.

Keep your eyes down.

Yeah.

Keep your eyes on the road.

Keep your eyes on the road.

Look at your beautiful family.

Get back to work.

You know what I mean?

More people walking around looking at the sky.

A lot of people reference this tweet, but there's the really good one that I've just brought up a screenshot, a screenshot of.

And it's like, pigs can't look up, but I could pick up a pig one night and show them the sky.

And that's all.

I'm not saying anyone's a pig.

I'm just saying it's a pretty good tweet that people are referencing in regards to this instant.

Which, yeah, people don't really look up.

I don't really look up.

What's going on up there?

That needs to worry me.

Dude, at night time, you should be inside.

Let's be real.

That's phone scrolling, TV watching time.

Right, exactly.

You need to be consuming media at that point.

You need to move from the bad screen to the good screen.

All right, let's leave that there.

When we come back, we're going to talk about a story I published about Celebrite being used to unlock phones and then the cops putting malware on them.

Very nice.

We'll be right back after

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Okay, so Joseph, we're going to talk about one of your stories.

Celebrite unlocked this journalist's phone.

Cops then infected it with malware.

For people who don't know, what is Celebrite?

Yeah, it's funny because when I wrote this piece and you edited it, you were like, you need to tell people what Celebrate is.

And Sam's brought up that issue before, and I'm definitely guilty of it where you just assume people know stuff.

And you shouldn't do that.

But anyway,

this is what it is.

Celebrate is...

probably the most famous company that breaks into mobile phones for law enforcement agencies.

They have a little tool called the, I mean, I pronounce it UFED, U-F-E-D.

And that comes as a tablet or it's software on a PC.

And you will plug the phone in, you know, an Android or an iPhone,

and then it will either bypass the passcode if it needs to, or maybe it will brute force it.

Or if there isn't a passcode, it will just grab the data.

But it will not only gain access to that phone and then, you know, basically open it up and you do whatever you want.

It then grabs the data and archives it in a very nice way for law enforcement.

It's like a tool that is used every single day by agencies all over the world.

And I don't think in and of itself it's controversial at all.

Like I think it's a very, very normal tool.

But back at Motherboard, we did a series called Phone, I think it was called The Phone Crackers or something.

And that was because Celebrate got hacked of 500 gigabytes of data and that was given to me.

And it was just some very interesting stuff in there.

Like banks also use Celebrate and it's not just cops necessarily.

Right, right.

So

traditionally, I mean, you just said other people use it, but I know it most in the context of cops use it to unlock people's phones when they have, you know, seized it as evidence.

But what Amnesty International found was cops not using it just to

like find out the contents of a phone, but actually to do something much more malicious.

What was that?

Yeah, so Amnesty found multiple cases.

One was a journalist who I'll speak about in a minute.

And I think they were activists as well.

And basically, what the Serbian authorities were doing was

getting the phone.

And I'll go into more details about what happened with the journalist in a second, but they get the phone.

They then use Celebrate to unlock it because they don't have the passcode.

And then rather than just extract the data, which I think they did in some cases, they then use that unlocked phone, which had been broken into with Celebrate, to then install very powerful

malware.

And when I say powerful, I don't mean it's like super sophisticated in the sense that Pegasus by NSO Group is, which is malware that a lot of people have probably heard of, and that can remotely infect your phone.

This is

physical access malware.

They need to be holding the phone.

But once they install it, it can turn on the microphone on the device.

It can start taking screenshots, including of private social media posts or signal messages as well.

And And there's actually a screenshot in there showing some of the signal messages that were due to be collected.

Of course, that does not mean signal is compromised in any way.

It is that one of the ends on the end-to-end encryption, the phone has been hacked and there's been malware installed in this case.

Joseph, tell me about Slavisa Milanov.

Yeah, Milanov is a journalist in Serbia who works for FAR FAR.

It's a Serbian outlet.

They cover lots of local issues, but then also, you know, public corruption and that sort of thing.

And Amnesty spoke to them for the report.

And then I wanted to speak to Milanov directly as well.

So, you know, we exchanged some messages.

And what they said was that one day in February,

they were driving to a particular part of the country with a colleague who was the editor-in-chief of FAR.

And they were stopped by traffic police.

And they said, Look, you have to be tested for drugs and you need to come to the police station.

He complies.

I don't really know what else you're going to do in that context.

He gets there and they say, Okay, now you need to give up your belongings before you go in here and do the tests.

And we speak to you.

So he gives up his tobacco, his wallet, his keys, and crucially, his Android phone.

He doesn't give them the passcode.

He then goes in, he does these tests.

He says, obviously, the drug tests come back

negative.

And then he's asking the Serbian police, okay, well, what's going on?

Can I go?

Am I able to leave now?

And then one of the officials says, we're just waiting to hear back from the boss or the chief or something like that.

He then steps out.

And then Milanov claims that he heard this officer phoning somebody up and saying,

look, the tests are negative.

I can't hold him for any longer, suggesting there has been some sort of other reason or pretense for the traffic stopping.

Like they were looking for some reason to hold him, possibly.

Basically, yeah, at least that's the implication, right?

And the Serbian, a lot of other outlets covered this.

covered this story because it was under embargo to a lot of people.

I don't think everybody necessarily got all the detail we got from Milanov, but outlets like Reuters at least got like a no comment out of Serbian authorities.

So we have to read between the lines, obviously, and that's just how it is.

But eventually, Milanov is taken to another building with two officials in plain clothes, and they start asking him questions basically about his journalistic work, about his organization, and that sort of thing,

which is...

you know, that wasn't the reason he was stopped, allegedly.

He was to do some drug tests or whatever, a traffic stop.

Anyway, that passes.

He then gets his belongings back and he's allowed to leave and he gets his phone back.

He

very quickly is suspicious of the phone.

It looks like a lot of battery is being used up,

I think he said, but he absolutely said that

he installed an application, I think, called Stay Free.

I hadn't heard of it personally, but I looked it up.

And then it showed that apps were some apps were being used

when the phone was in the hands of the authorities, meaning that the police have been doing something with his device, right?

So he gets that and he's suspicious.

He then contacts Amnesty International because he doesn't trust the Serbian authorities.

They then investigate and they find

this malware, which is what Amnesty

dubs novi spy.

Novi, I hope I'm pronouncing it right, the Serbian word for new.

And

beyond what I just said about taking screenshots and turning on the camera and that sort of thing, all of those sorts of normal things malware would do, it comes as two apps and it kind of hides itself as like a legitimate service.

Like it calls itself an app like com.services.something.

So if you were scrolling through your Android phone, it may not jump out as suspicious.

And Amnesty thinks

that the Serbian authorities either bought or developed this malware internally.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So I want to talk a little bit about the implications of this because Celebrite sells to a lot of people, as you mentioned, and it's usually looked at as a forensics tool where you can get evidence off of a phone.

And often

the...

Like ideally, the cops have some sort of legal authority to look at a specific phone.

It's like in the United States, it's the phones of people who have been arrested, but they sell to a lot of authoritarian governments.

They sell to a lot of places where the rule of law might not be the same as it is in

the United States or elsewhere.

So, I mean, in this case, they're essentially like helping cops hack phones to install malware, even if Celebrite itself is not involved in the actual like

installing of malware.

It's like it's their product being used.

So, how is Celebrite responding to all of this?

How has sort of like the international community responded to all of this?

And how has Google responded to this?

Because I know Google is also involved.

Yeah, Celebrite was crucial to getting this malware on the phone.

Even if it wasn't the case that, oh, you have the Celebrite tablet or whatever, you push a button and that loads malware onto the phone.

From all appearances, it would not have been possible for the Serbian authorities to get this malware onto the device

without the Celebrite tool to bypass or brute force the passcode.

So it is crucial there.

And I know this, and I'm pretty sure listeners will know this as well.

Celebrite is not an active surveillance technology.

I mean, you could argue it's a surveillance technology in a way, but I don't really want to break down semantics like that far.

It's not an active surveillance technology.

It's not something you install to then monitor.

But here it is being used to facilitate that, absolutely.

And

Celebrate's response is interesting.

Often these sorts of reports come out, not about sort of the interesting malware, but oh, Celebrite was being used by

XYZ authoritarian governments, as you say.

In this case,

Celebrite told me in an email, and then they sort of double down in a statement, they are investigating it.

And if they found that what Amnesty says is true, that will mean the Serbian authorities have violated their sort of terms of use of Celebrate, and they will reassess,

well, Celebrate will reassess whether it works with the Serbian authorities.

Now, is that going to happen or not?

I don't know.

Is the investigation from Celebrate actually any good or not?

I really don't know.

I can't imagine that Serbia provides that much business in the grand scheme of things for Celebrate when they have countries all over the world.

Maybe it's worth, from a cold PR perspective, dropping Serbia or whatever.

I really, really don't know.

And obviously,

we'll keep an eye on it.

But I thought that response was interesting at least.

When it comes to Google,

this is interesting for a couple of reasons.

So, Amnesty gets this information.

It provides some of it and shares some of it with Google.

Amnesty and Google also discovered one of the zero-day vulnerabilities and exploits that Celebrate was using to break into phones that got patched by Qualcomm, which is the chip manufacturer, right?

And that's sort of separate.

I don't really get into that.

But

what Google also did after getting information from Amnesty was that it searched, it seems, Android devices for this Novi spy malware for these malicious apps and then remotely removed them.

I think that's obviously a pretty good thing.

You know, people in Serbia who may have been targeted by this, and it's probably way more than a handful of people based on some forensic evidence in the report that I don't really get into.

It's probably a ton of people.

But Google removed that.

Okay, that's all well and good.

I think it's also just an interesting reminder that Google has the ability to go and just remove stuff from people's phones.

Again, I'm not saying that's a bad thing.

Huh, that's interesting.

I don't know if people know that, you know?

I did not know that.

I didn't know they could do that.

Right.

They can detect what apps are installed on what phone, at least in some way, you know, they would probably call it telemetry.

And then they can be like, we are going to remotely scrap this basically yeah

um so that's news to you is what you're saying

dude i had no idea that was possible actually um via android i don't is it possible on ios and

so so i'm sorry this is like a kind of a dumb

like version of it but for a while like flappy bird was pulled from the app store on ios for example uh because the creator took it down.

But if you already had it installed, then you already had it installed and it was there were people like selling ios devices with flappy bird installed on it for like a lot of money during this a very dumb period of like the 2017s 2018s um

i don't know it's like it's well it's like it's like tick tock is getting banned in the us potentially uh and there has been some theorizing like oh well maybe Maybe it will just continue to work on phones that have it installed on already.

This also came up with Fortnite on iOS, where

you could continue playing Fortnite on iOS during the Apple versus Epic Games Beef

lawsuit over app store royalty fees for a while until the app got updated so much that it was like, okay, this is no longer operable.

So the thought would be with something like TikTok that maybe it will continue working until the app gets gets so updated that, like, whatever version you have installed in your phone won't work anymore.

And I don't know if Apple has this capability either, but I've never, I didn't know that they could remotely uninstall.

They, meaning any phone manufacturer or operating system manufacturer, could uninstall a piece of software from your phone.

Yeah, it's interesting, and I would like to know more about it.

So if anybody does know more about it, do ask me.

But,

you know, I don't,

could you be legally compelled to do that?

I don't know.

I haven't seen a case like that.

It would be more does Google or the third-party manual or the some the person sorry the company providing services like Apple or whatever do they see that as malware and do they want to remove it?

I guess it's the usual bar for it, but it's interesting.

Yeah, and they would like to know more for sure

All right, we'll leave that there if you're listening to the free version of the podcast I'll now play us out.

But if you are a paying 404 media subscriber, we're going to talk about how someone made a pretty interesting project to show show the surveillance cameras all around New York City.

I think Sam tried it out,

and sort of their protest when they got a lot of issues about it.

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