The 404 Media Podcast The ICE Tool That Tracks Entire Neighborhoods
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Jan 14, 2026 A deep dive into Webloc reveals ICE's troubling ability to monitor entire neighborhoods through smartphones. Features like daytime/nighttime tracking and route tracing showcase the chilling potential for surveillance. The conversation shifts to Grok, with insights on a Telegram channel exploiting loopholes for non-consensual AI image generation. Hosts critique companies for their inadequate moderation and question their motives amid rising concerns for user safety. The podcast artfully weaves together urgent issues of technology, ethics, and privacy.
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How WebLock Maps Phones And Neighborhoods
- WebLock lets users visualize phones' overnight and daytime locations to infer homes and workplaces.
- It also maps routes and lets investigators draw shapes to monitor all phones in areas, enabling broad neighborhood surveillance.
HSI Purchase Broadens Potential Uses
- ICE's HSI purchased WebLock but HSI's role now overlaps deportation work, widening potential use cases.
- That makes using this surveillance for protest or workplace investigations more plausible under current priorities.
Vendors Pitch Tools For Protest Tracking
- Vendors market location tools for protest monitoring, explicitly suggesting Black Lives Matter use cases.
- That marketing shows the surveillance capability was designed with crowd and activist tracking in mind.