Customs and Border Protection (CBP) plans to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to expand its fleet of high-powered surveillance drones, and other parts of the Department of the Homeland Security (DHS) may buy their own Predator-style drones, according to recently published procurement records.

The news shows DHS’s continued investment in drone surveillance technology, and how use of large scale drones could expand to other parts of the umbrella agency.

The procurement records reviewed by 404 Media say the contract is worth more than $265 million. The records specifically point to the recently passed One Big Beautiful Bill Act, adding that CBP is “utilizing new Congressional funding to support procurement and sustainment” for a fleet of MQ-9 drones. The exact number of drones is redacted. CBP did not say how many additional drones it plans to acquire in response to a question from 404 Media. CBP previously had a fleet of around 10 drones, according to a CBP presentation available online. 

  “Unmanned Aircraft Systems [UAS] are a critical component of U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s layered border security strategy, providing advanced surveillance and detection capabilities across land and maritime environments. These systems enhance CBP Air and Marine Operations’ ability to detect, track, and respond to illicit activity, as well as support disaster response and search and rescue operations,” a CBP spokesperson told 404 Media in an email. “CBP is expanding its existing UAS fleet with additional MQ-9B unmanned aircraft currently on order. MQ-9 fleet end strength remains under evaluation.”

The MQ-9B drone is made by General Atomics Aeronautical and is also known as the SkyGuardian. “SkyGuardian is designed to fly over the horizon via satellite for up to 40+ hours in all types of weather and safely integrate into civil airspace, enabling joint forces and civil authorities to deliver real-time situational awareness anywhere in the world—day or night,” General Atomics’ website says.

At the moment, CBP appears to be the only component of DHS with a fleet of MQ-9 drones. It regularly flies these drones to assist other agencies, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), according to data obtained by 404 Media. CBP flew Predator drones over the June 2025 anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles. 

But other components may acquire their own fleet of the high-powered surveillance drones. The procurement documents say, “Other DHS components that are looking to establish an MQ-9 program, [redacted], may procure an additional [redacted] MQ-9 UAS utilizing the CBP contract vehicle.” CBP did not answer which agency that was when 404 Media asked. 

Last week Apple fixed an issue that let the FBI forensically extract copies of incoming Signal messages from a defendant’s iPhone, even after the app had been deleted, because copies of those messages were stored in the iPhone’s notification database. The move comes directly in response to 404 Media’s coverage of a case in which the FBI was able to extract a suspect’s deleted Signal messages. Apple’s fix means iPhones should no longer save copies of deleted messages from Signal or other apps, and Apple said the patch also purges already saved and related notifications.

While Apple described the issue as a bug, it is one that the FBI has leveraged multiple times to recover the content of Signal messages, according to court records. 

“We are very happy that today Apple issued a patch and a security advisory. This comes following 404 Media reporting that the FBI accessed Signal message notification content via iOS despite the app being deleted,” Signal posted on social media on April 22. 

Apple’s advisory, which the company sent to 404 Media on the same day, is focused solely on the saved messages issue. It says, “A logging issue was addressed with improved data redaction.” In a follow-up email, Apple said it identified a bug that could cause iPhones to unexpectedly save notifications that were marked for deletion, and that the new patch also retroactively purges any of those saved notifications. Apple said it is the company’s policy to remove any associated notifications when a user has deleted an app.

The case 404 Media covered was related to the ICE Prairieland Detention Facility in Alvarado, Texas, in which a group of people set off fireworks and vandalized property, and one person shot a police officer in the neck. It was the first time authorities charged people for alleged “Antifa” activities after President Trump designated the umbrella term a domestic terrorist organization in September.

404 Media spoke to two people who were present for the testimony of FBI Special Agent Clark Wiethorn during a related trial. They both said the FBI was able to recover incoming Signal messages; that was even though the user had deleted the Signal app from her phone. Harmony Schuerman, an attorney representing defendant Elizabeth Soto, shared notes she took with 404 Media. “They were able to capture these chats bc [because] of the way she had notifications set up on her phone—anytime a notification pops up on the lock screen, Apple stores it in the internal memory of the device,” she wrote in those notes. 

A supporter of the defendants said, “We learned that specifically on iPhones, if one’s settings in the Signal app allow for message notifications and previews to show up on the lock screen, [then] the iPhone will internally store those notifications/message previews in the internal memory of the device.” 404 Media granted this person anonymity to protect them from retaliation.

404 Media also highlighted another case in which the FBI was able to recover incoming Signal messages saved in an iPhone’s notification database. A court record in that case included a long list of Signal messages, and said, “Phone notifications that captured incoming Signal messaging.” Some of those messages were several lines long, indicating that the iPhone’s notification database captured not just a small preview of incoming messages, but their entire content.

Signal’s social media post added: “Note that no action is needed for this fix to protect Signal users on iOS. Once you install the patch, all inadvertently-preserved notifications will be deleted and no forthcoming notifications will be preserved for deleted applications.”

“We’re grateful to Apple for the quick action here, and for understanding and acting on the stakes of this kind of issue. It takes an ecosystem to preserve the fundamental human right to private communication,” it concluded.

If you’ve ever visited a haunted house or a paranormal hotspot, you may have experienced a weird sense of unease that you couldn’t quite explain. While it’s tempting to imagine that these feelings signal the presence of ghosts or other supernatural entities, they may actually be caused by acoustic frequencies below 20 hertz, known as infrasound, according to a study published on Monday in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience.

The human ear is not tuned to pick up infrasound, yet a growing body of research has shown that exposure to these frequencies nonetheless causes negative feelings in humans and many other animals. Now, scientists have probed this mysterious link with a new experimental approach involving 36 volunteers who self-reported their moods while listening to various musical styles that sometimes included infrasound. 

In addition, the volunteers provided saliva samples for measuring their cortisol levels, which provided empirical evidence that they were more stressed when exposed to infrasound. The results clearly demonstrate that “infrasound may be aversive to humans, acting as a potential environmental irritant and contributing to more negative subjective experience,” according to the study.

“A lot of the literature seemed to tackle either one side of the conversation or the other, where people are looking at surveys and doing interviews with people, or they're looking into the physiology,” said Kale Scatterty, a PhD student at the Neuroscience and Mental Health Institute at the University of Alberta who led the study, in a call with 404 Media. “We wanted to use this as a first step in combining those approaches to get a whole picture of exactly what was happening with this effect.”

“It was surprising and exciting to see a significant difference in cortisol when the infrasound was turned on,” added Trevor Hamilton, a professor of psychology at MacEwan University who co-authored the study, in the same call.

For decades, scientists have linked infrasound to negative effects on humans and many other animals, though it is still not known how humans pick up on these sounds, or why we might have evolved an aversion to this frequency range. Given that natural sources of infrasound include dangerous events like volcanic eruptions, landslides, avalanches, intense storms, or stampeding animals, researchers speculate that humans and other species may have learned to interpret infrasound as a warning sign for incoming disaster.

But, you may be asking yourself, where do the ghosts come in? Infrasound is also produced by a wide range of human-caused noise pollution, such as industrial machinery, wind farms, air conditioning units, busy roads and railways, or military activity in war zones. For this reason, many scientists have wondered if locations that are considered haunted or cursed in some way may sometimes be polluted by infrasound.

Rodney Schmaltz, a co-author of the study and a professor of psychology at MacEwan University, even organizes classes around taking his students to paranormal hotspots, such as the haunted house Deadmonton, to search for scientifically-grounded explanations of their spooky allure. These fun field experiments revealed that playing infrasound at Deadmonton motivates visitors to move more rapidly through the house.

In the new study, the interdisciplinary team combined their expertise by recruiting 36 undergraduate psychology students at MacEwan University (27 women and nine men). Each participant sat in a room alone while calming or unsettling music was played, and gave saliva samples before and after their session. Half of the participants were exposed to infrasound at 18 hertz while listening to both types of music. The participants were asked to report their feelings, their emotional rating of the music, and whether they thought infrasound had been played in their session.

The participants couldn’t consciously tell whether infrasound was played, but the elevated cortisol levels in the exposed group suggests that some part of their brain picked up on the frequencies, regardless of the type of music that accompanied it. Unlike many past studies, this research didn’t link infrasound exposure to heightened anxiety, though the exposed group reported more irritability, less interest in the music, and a sense that the music was sadder with infrasound.  

The sample size of 36 is relatively small due to budget constraints—salivary cortisol tests are not cheap—but Scatterty’s team hopes their study offers a roadmap toward similar experiments that aim to pinpoint the mechanisms that cause infrasound to raise our hackles.

“We get very excited when we find something really positive like this, but for every single question we answer, we tend to have five more questions come up,” Scatterty said. “It's really hard to give any definitive answers. But for those who have curious minds, it's exciting to see where this kind of work could go. People who are interested in haunted houses and the paranormal might be having something to chew into here. People who are looking at the ecological side of things might interpret it as a noise pollutant for either humans or animals in nature.” 

“It's really exciting for the potential it offers for future research,” he concluded.

An AI-powered tool designed to target trademark violations on social media was used to silence critics of SXSW, the massive annual tech, music and film conference in Austin, Texas.

Each year in March, SXSW takes over Austin. This year, thanks to the demolition of the city’s aging convention center, events sprawled to more locations than usual, from hotel ballrooms to vacant lots. But the character of SXSW has changed, growing more corporate and less accessible since its relatively humble origins in 1987, and today it has numerous detractors. This year some of those dissenting voices found themselves targeted by BrandShield, a “digital risk protection” service that claims to use artificial intelligence to automate the process of identifying and removing social posts that misuse trademarks. 

Among the groups to receive a social media takedown notice was Vocal Texas, a nonprofit dedicated to ending homelessness, HIV, poverty and the war on drugs. On March 12, members of the group set up a mock encampment in downtown Austin, to draw attention to the possessions that unhoused people can lose during “sweeps,” when police and city officials clear out and destroy or confiscate their tents and other lifesaving supplies. 

An Instagram post by Vocal Texas read, “SXSW means unhoused Austinites in downtown face encampment sweeps, tickets and arrests while the City makes room for billionaires and corporations to rake in profits.” The accompanying image promised an art installation called “Sweep the Billionaires,” and does not use SXSW’s logos. 

Even so, the mere mention of SXSW was apparently enough to flag BrandShield’s trademark detection service, resulting in the post’s fully automated removal from Instagram. Cara Gagliano, a senior staff attorney who specializes in trademark and intellectual property law at the Electronic Frontier Foundation said that posts like these do not violate SXSW’s trademark.

“You’re allowed to use a company’s name to talk about the company, right?” Gagliano told 404 Media. “How else are you going to do it?”

Gagliano noted that trademark law has specific carveouts for exactly this kind of critical speech. “Examples like that, where it's not (for example) advertising a concert with a name similar to South by Southwest ... are pretty clearly over-enforcement,” she said.

EFF interceded in March 2024 when the Austin for Palestine coalition received a cease and desist letter from SXSW, accusing them of infringing on the conference’s trademark and copyright. The coalition, which was involved with organizing successful protests against the festival’s sponsorship by the U.S. military, had made social media posts featuring SXSW’s trademarked arrow logo reimagined with bloodstains, fighter jets, and other warlike imagery. The EFF wrote a letter on the coalition’s behalf, and the group never heard from SXSW again. 

But Gagliano explained that this situation is different from the takedown notices sent by BrandShield. “When it's a threat sent to ... the person who made the allegedly infringing use, them going away is a victory for the client because nothing bad happens to them, but when you have these takedowns ... [while] it's good that they didn't go even further and file a lawsuit, they also don't have any incentive to retract the complaint, and so the content stays down.”

This year, many of the protests and “counter events” were organized by a very loosely associated coalition of groups called Smash By Smash West, which included Vocal Texas along with many others, from musicians and independent movie directors to event venues. 

404 Media reached a representative of Smash By Smash West via Signal who used the name  “Burnice.” We agreed to protect their anonymity, but verified that they were involved with the organizing of Smash By events. Operating since 2024, Smash By has no leaders and essentially anyone can organize an event under its umbrella. This year, there were over 100 events, according to Burnice. “It is a decentralized call to action and a platform that enables promotion and connecting together all of these different events.”

Smash By Smash West provided us with dozens of screenshots of Instagram takedown notices as well as many of the posts which had been removed.

BrandShield’s software enables mass reporting of potentially infringing content, with reports in turn evaluated by Instagram’s automated moderation systems. Despite their obviously automated nature, BrandShield claims to use a “dedicated enforcement team of IP lawyers” to ensure that takedowns are “timely, targeted and fully compliant.” 

The BrandShield website reads, “Whether it's a distorted logo, a counterfeit image, or a cloned storefront, our proprietary image recognition technology scans marketplaces, social media, paid media, and mobile environments to catch threats at the source.” 

However, despite these assurances, it seems clear that BrandShield’s trademark targets with a very broad brush, and seems incapable of distinguishing between trademark violations and protected free speech. Although BrandShield initially connected us with their public relations department, they did not respond to repeated requests for comment including an emailed list of inquiries. 

Instagram’s automatically generated takedown notices include the sentence, “If you think this content shouldn’t have been removed from Instagram, you can contact the complaining party directly to resolve your issue.” However, there is a link allowing the recipient to appeal the takedown, which then leaves it up to Instagram moderators’ discretion if it returns.

Gagliano explained that this is a crucial area where trademark differs from copyright law. Thanks to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA), there’s a clear (though often arduous) path to contesting false claims of copyright violations which allows content creators to get their posts put back. There’s no similar, mandatory pathway written into trademark law. “There's no counter notice process where they say, ‘Okay, you told us this is fair use, so we'll put it back up.’ And that's a really frustrating thing,” Gagliano said.

Mathew Zuniga, who does most of the booking for Tiny Sounds Collective, an organization that throws free DIY music shows and publishes zines, said he struggled with the process offered by Instagram after a post about a Tiny Sounds’ Smash By concert was taken down. 

“I tried to do it,” he said. “It didn't really go through.“

When he reposted the same image and text, but without tagging Smash By Smash West’s Instagram account as a collaborator, the post remained online. 

“I think it’s silly, as if these DIY shows in a bookstore are pulling anyone away from South By,” Zuniga said. “I think it was more of a deliberate attempt to take down anti-South By Southwest rhetoric online.”

When reached for comment, SXSW’s PR team sent back a prepared statement, noting that the law requires them to “take reasonable steps” to enforce their trademarks.

“SXSW’s efforts are not intended to limit commentary, criticism, or independent reporting, and we respect the importance of free expression,” the spokesperson’s statement continued. “We use third-party services, including BrandShield, to help identify potential issues at scale, and we recognize that errors can occur." 

By contrast, Burnice explained that, rather than trying to steal SXSW’s trademark, Smash By Smash West makes it a condition that participants can’t describe their events as free or alternative SXSW events. “Smash By  ... was an attempt to politicize the DIY scene,  the ‘unofficial’ South By shows, and make them explicitly anti-South By.” 

Smash By provides alternative logos, some of which are wholly unique but others based on parodying or “detournements” of the SXSW logo, similar to what the Austin for Palestine coalition did in 2024. Burnice expressed their frustration with the automated nature of the quashing of dissent this year. 

“All of that is actually just happening by robots talking to robots,” they said. “It's an AI system that mass reports these accounts, and then, you know, probably an AI system at Instagram that just sorts through, and approves or rejects.”

For her part, Gagliano expressed skepticism over whether artificial intelligence plays a major or important role at companies like BrandShield beyond just its current popularity as a tech buzzword. ”I haven't seen any kind of change in the volume of requests for help that we're getting, and this is one thing where I'm a little skeptical that it's really made much difference, because they were already using automated tools before, and I think in any instance, the tools are not going to be able to reliably determine what's actually infringement.”

Introduction from Jon Haidt and Zach Rausch:

A year and a half ago, we teamed up with Lennon Torres, senior campaign manager at The Heat Initiative and LGBTQ+ advocate, to write an article for The Atlantic, “Social-Media Companies’ Worst Argument” (reposted here with no paywall). Together, we refuted the social media companies’ claims that using these platforms is net-positive for teens in historically disadvantaged communities and that regulation would do more harm than good for adolescents in these groups.

Since then, however, these claims have continued to surface as an argument against regulation. In the below piece, originally published by The Hill, Lennon draws on her own experience as a trans woman who grew up sharing her life on social media. She argues that the social media companies use LGBTQ+ kids as an excuse to avoid accountability and reminds the public that despite what the companies claim, “queer people are the ones these platforms fail first and protect last.”

Thank you to Lennon and The Hill for allowing us to share this piece directly with After Babel’s readers. We hope you’ll read it and share it widely.

– Jon & Zach

Don’t Let Big Tech Hide Behind a Rainbow Flag

With Big Tech companies recently losing two key lawsuits over the harm they do to youth — both in rulings they have promised to appeal — a false narrative has begun to re-circulate. The claim is that requirements making digital communities safer for young people will somehow undermine queer expression.

Here is my message, coming from a transgender woman who grew up with and was badly harmed by exploitative social media: Do not let Big Tech hide itself behind a rainbow flag. The truth is, queer people are the ones these platforms fail first and protect last.

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Many gay, transgender and queer kids lack supportive families and affirming schools. To them, digital spaces may seem like a lifeline — a place where they can be themselves. Unfortunately, those digital spaces are often built on the same logic that once targeted kids with cigarettes: Maximize use, minimize accountability and monetize vulnerability. These platforms were designed not to empower us but to get and keep us hooked.

In the social media addiction trial that recently wrapped up in Los Angeles, plaintiff attorney Mark Lanier asked Meta whistleblower Arturo Béjar how Facebook’s leadership dealt with the issue of “addiction.” Béjar replied: “They changed the name of it” — specifically, they stopped calling it “addiction” and called it “problematic use” instead. He added, “You couldn’t talk about it.”

I joined social media at age 13, just as the iPhone became the center of adolescent life. I was attending a performing arts school after five years at a public school where I was teased for being too feminine. I turned to Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, and YouTube — platforms that gave me access to a community I had never had. But this came with life‑threatening side effects I couldn’t yet see clearly.

Online, I found attention — first from classmates, then from strangers. When I started working professionally as a dancer, hundreds of thousands of followers watched my every move. What felt at first like affirmation quickly became the only place I thought I had value. I got so consumed with how I was being perceived that authenticity didn’t stand a chance.

At some point, it stopped mattering whether the comments were praise or cruelty — what mattered was the hit. I began refreshing comments in bathroom stalls between classes and rehearsals, scrolling before bed and learning how to curate myself for algorithms I didn’t understand. The behavior was compulsive. I didn’t know to call it “addictive design” — I just knew I couldn’t stop scrolling.

Chasing the algorithm for validation wasn’t the only risk. The real danger often arrived in my private messages. Adults I didn’t know approached me with explicit messages and nude images. I was only 13, and I did not yet understand what grooming was. I did not have the language for it — I only knew that the attention I could not find offline seemed to appear online.

I know now that the platforms and their algorithms were delivering me up to these predatory strangers, serving them my profile as engagement bait.

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The Los Angeles lawsuit pointed to Internal Meta documents showing that Instagram’s “Accounts You May Follow” feature1 actively connects predatory adults to minors: “In 2023, this tool recommended to adult groomers ‘nearly 2 million minors in the last 3 months’ — and ‘22 percent of those recommendations resulted in a follow request.’”

Employees warned leadership. Leadership rejected fixing the system, maintaining a 17-strike policy for predators — including sex-traffickers — before suspending the offenders’ accounts.

The architecture of these platforms placed me in the path of adults who saw opportunity in a lonely queer kid. Because queer kids come to online spaces for identity and survival, we are the ideal product: highly engaged, highly vulnerable and highly profitable.

Big Tech claims to defend queer kids’ rights by opposing regulations like requiring age-appropriate design and limits on addictive features. In reality, they are using us as a shield to avoid accountability. They weaponize our dependence on online connection to argue that any safety guardrail is “anti‑LGBTQ.” They warn lawmakers that protecting kids will erase queer expression. This is a lie, and a strategic one.

In reality, features that harm young people — endless scroll, autoplay, compulsive engagement loops, recommendation pipelines driven by surveillance data, settings that expose kids to ill-intentioned adult strangers — do not create queer communities. They create dependency. They bury our identity in algorithms optimized for outrage, objectification and profit.

Queer kids do not need online platforms that claim to celebrate us in Pride campaigns while exploiting and exposing us to harassment at disproportionate rates. We need them to prioritize our safety and mental health.

I know this because I lived it. Only after a decade of anxiety, addictive patterns, algorithmic harm, grooming, and harassment could I finally withdraw from exploitative social media. Even then, the choice felt impossible. Most of my childhood had unfolded online. The most intimate parts of my life — my gender transition, top surgery, and coming out — became content opportunities to me. That is the cruelty of these platforms: They teach you to equate visibility with safety, engagement with belonging, and exploitation with connection.

Regulation is not a threat to queer expression but a prerequisite for queer safety. It won’t solve every problem, but it will do the first and most important thing: force the companies profiting from our attention to finally take responsibility for the harm they have caused.

Reprinted with permission from The Hill.