How the Pentagon Learned to Use Targeted Ads to Find Its Targets—and Vladimir Putin

In an excerpt adapted from his book, Means of Control: How the Hidden Alliance of Tech and Government Is Creating a New American Surveillance State, Byron Tau reveals how advertising data collected from mobile phones has been used to track the movements of members of the military and even those closest to Vladimir Putin. What’s most troubling is that this advertising data can be purchased by nearly anyone—even bad actors.

If you ever granted a weather app permission to know where you are, there is a good chance a log of your precise movements has been saved in some data bank that tens of thousands of total strangers have access to. That includes intelligence agencies.

While Locomotive was a closely held project meant for government use, UberMedia’s data was available for purchase by anyone who could come up with a plausible excuse. It wouldn’t be difficult for the Chinese or Russian government to get this kind of data by setting up a shell company with a cover story, just as Mike Yeagley had done.

They realized they could track world leaders through Locomotive, too. After acquiring a data set on Russia, the team realized they could track phones in the Russian president Vladimir Putin’s entourage. The phones moved everywhere that Putin did. They concluded the devices in question did not actually belong to Putin himself; Russian state security and counterintelligence were better than that. Instead, they believed the devices belonged to the drivers, the security personnel, the political aides, and other support staff around the Russian president; those people’s phones were trackable in the advertising data. As a result, PlanetRisk knew where Putin was going and who was in his entourage.

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‘Between the Hammer and the Anvil’

In December, The New York Times published a front-page story alleging that Hamas had committed systematic sexualized violence on October 7. The piece, which was written by a Pulitzer Prize-winner and two Israeli freelancers with very little journalism experience, has since come under scrutiny. The Times’ flagship podcast, The Daily, even shelved an episode about the story because of serious questions about the reporting. In this damning dissection, Intercept journalists lay bare the decisions that led to the story’s publication in the first place, some of which one of the freelancers, Anat Schwartz, articulated in an interview with Israel’s Channel 12 news:

Schwartz began her work on the violence of October 7 where one would expect, by calling around to the designated “Room 4” facilities in 11 Israeli hospitals that examine and treat potential victims of sexual violence, including rape. “First thing I called them all, and they told me, ‘No, no complaint of sexual assault was received,’” she recalled in the podcast interview. “I had a lot of interviews which didn’t lead anywhere. Like, I would go to all kinds of psychiatric hospitals, sit in front of the staff, all of them are fully committed to the mission and no one had met a victim of sexual assault.”

The next step was to call the manager of the sexual assault hotline in Israel’s south, which proved equally fruitless. The manager told her they had no reports of sexual violence. She described the call as a “crazy in-depth conversation” where she pressed for specific cases. “Did anyone call you? Did you hear anything?” she recalled asking. “How could it be that you didn’t?”

As Schwartz began her own efforts to find evidence of sexual assault, the first specific allegations of rape began to emerge. A person identified in anonymous media interviews as a paramedic from the Israeli Air Force medical unit 669 claimed he saw evidence that two teenage girls at Kibbutz Nahal Oz had been raped and murdered in their bedroom. The man made other outrageous claims, however, that called his report into question. He claimed another rescuer “pulled out of the garbage” a baby who’d been stabbed multiple times. He also said he had seen “Arabic sentences that were written on entrances to houses … with the blood of the people that were living in the houses.” No such messages exist, and the story of the baby in the trashcan has been debunked. The bigger problem was that no two girls at the kibbutz fit the source’s description. In future interviews, he changed the location to Kibbutz Be’eri. But no victims killed there matched the description either, as Mondoweiss reported.

After seeing these interviews, Schwartz started calling people at Kibbutz Be’eri and other kibbutzim that were targeted on October 7 in an effort to track down the story. “Nothing. There was nothing,” she said. “No one saw or heard anything.” She then reached the unit 669 paramedic who relayed to Schwartz the same story he had told other media outlets, which she says convinced her there was a systematic nature to the sexual violence. “I say, ‘OK, so it happened, one person saw it happen in Be’eri, so it can’t be just one person, because it’s two girls. It’s sisters. It’s in the room. Something about it is systematic, something about it feels to me that it’s not random,” Schwartz concluded on the podcast.

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Tripping on LSD at the Dolphin Research Lab

Two anthropologists looking to reshape the world via consciousness expansion. Dosing dolphins at a research institute in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Lab visits from a not-yet-famous 29-year-old Carl Sagan. A psychedelic subculture among crews of TV shows in the ’60s, including Flipper. Benjamin Breen’s piece—an excerpt from his book, Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science—recounts an interesting period in the history of psychedelics and leaves you wanting to read more. (Signup required.)

The recordings were grist for Lilly’s mill. By 1963, he was absolutely convinced that his dolphins were uttering coherent words in English — but at a speed so rapid and a pitch so high that only computerized manipulation could make them understandable. The payoff was vague, but in his mind immense. After all, if he could bridge the barrier in communication between these two radically different species, how could Americans and Soviets continue to claim that communication between their own camps was impossible?

In 1961, Sagan helped plan one of the first conferences on extraterrestrial life. The organizers had sought not just scientists interested in first-contact scenarios but also someone who already spoke to “aliens” — or at least the closest parallel that Earth afforded. Lilly was the obvious choice. Afterward, Sagan founded a whimsical scientific fraternal organization, the Order of the Dolphin, that was partially inspired by Lilly’s work. Now, three years later, Sagan was finally visiting Lilly’s “aliens” in person.

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‘What Can I Even Say Without Having to Go to Jail?’

The overturning of Roe v Wade has left domestic violence advocates in many states wondering what to do when they encounter a pregnant DV survivor. What advice and resources can they offer without risking legal consequences? Julianne McShane reports:

Advocates aren’t the only ones caught in the middle: Administrators at both the agencies that employ them and the state-level coalitions that are supposed to act as leaders and resource hubs are often unsure of what’s legal and what’s not, and worry that issuing clear guidance to their service providers could put their funding at risk. “We’re hearing a lot of anger from people who have gone into this work because they care deeply about supporting survivors and their lives and making sure people have dignity and access to care,” said Quinn, from Provide. “They feel that their hands are tied.” 

Williams, the advocate in Tulsa, is a 47-year-old former cop who wore her hair pulled back tight and her face makeup-free when we met a few weeks before Christmas; on her days off, she said, she indulges in Botox and salon visits to decompress from the intensity of work. She likens herself to a “bulldog”: “I will fight for my victims like there’s no tomorrow,” she told me. But when she’s working with survivors with unwanted pregnancies, she’s become more cautious. “I think it’s just so new to us that we’re all so afraid to even touch it,” she said of discussing abortion in light of the state’s ban. Agency administrators said that Williams speaks only for herself and not for the organization as a whole, and that advocates can always seek guidance from, or refer their client to, another team member. 

But for Williams, the uncertainty can feel overwhelming: “I ain’t trying to lose my whole livelihood because I’ve given someone this advice.”

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The Butterfly Redemption

Dedicated conservationists in the US and Canada—including some incarcerated women—are breeding Taylor’s checkspot butterflies in captivity and taming the invasive plant species that threaten the insect’s natural habitat, all in a bit to increase the wild populations of a beautiful pollinator that lives for 14 days.

They are ravenous and roving. Newly emerged from a six-month state of suspended animation, over a dozen larvae scale the crumpled paper towel inside a plastic cup. One determined individual undulates past the others to the top of the paper peak. There, it anchors its hind prolegs, raises its head and abdomen, and begins a kind of dance. About the length of a paper clip, the caterpillar sways its black and bristly body back and forth. It reaches toward the light streaming in through the greenhouse glass and the face of the woman beaming down.

Working alongside Heather is a fellow butterfly tech we’ll call Brooke. She’s dressed in a matching red DOC sweater, khaki pants, and rubber boots, but wears her long hair down. She, too, feels fortunate to be working just beyond the prison’s fence, where she regularly hears birdsong and the gurgling croak of ravens. The work includes monitoring greenhouse temperatures and humidity, growing and picking food for the caterpillars each day, and early in the year, watching for when the caterpillars awake from diapause. To ensure diverse and resilient populations, the women carefully document genetic lineages and track data to avoid breeding siblings. They also give them names. This year’s crop of males includes a lot of Georges—George Michael, George Foreman, and Boy George among them.

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The Last Stand of the Call Centre Worker

Meet Gary, the human call center worker whom AI might replace. Brimming with character, Gary is larger than life and the epitome of the personality AI can’t replicate. Sophie Elmhirst brings her custom humor to this lovely piece exploring the fate of the call center as the AI takeover begins.

The room, at this point, went quiet. Sure, he wasn’t proposing replacing the agent, but he was proposing that each agent would have a sort of inexhaustible, automated co-worker and spy-manager, monitoring every conversation, every decision and then relentlessly suggesting improvements. Yes, calls have always been recorded for training purposes – words we know like a previous generation knew the Lord’s Prayer – but this surveillance lived, inescapably, on your desktop, and was focused entirely on you. It did not need to sleep or eat. It never went for coffee, or asked you what film you watched last night. It had no marital problems that you could chew over on a break. It just indefatigably and dispassionately existed to watch you and make you better.

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The Black Women of Gee’s Bend Work Hard and Easy

The quilters of Gee’s Bend, Alabama, have skyrocketed to fashion- and art-world fame. Jeannette Cooperman traveled to their home turf to learn how they work and how they feel about all the acclaim:

Can what is useful be art? Those who burn to be seen as Artists wallow in self-pity when their work is not recognized; they have tied themselves up in knots trying to Make Art. I look at these ladies, piecing together scraps of paper on broad knees, then stitching quilts that will be warm and loved and beautiful no matter what.

“We weren’t trying to make art,” Mary Ann says, easing into a low chuckle. “Still don’t know nothing about art.” Yet to begin a quilt, she says, “I go by my colors. Quilting is just like designing a dress.” People around here can recognize her quilting rows even on an unsigned quilt. She eyeballs them an inch apart, and they are perfectly parallel, as evenly spaced as rows of cotton, but never on a grid. “I stay away from curves, but when they show up, I just follow them,” she says. “And I love triangles. For some reason, a triangle does something to a quilt.”

Adds tension and dynamic energy, an art teacher might say—but “does something” is what you need to know. Curious, I ask if she has ever seen the famous Amish or Shaker quilts.

“No,” she says, not the least bit interested. “I don’t like patterns. I do my own designs.”

In Gee’s Bend, inspiration comes from prayers, dreams, experiences.

“It’s dependent on how you are feelin’ that day,” Doris Pettway Mosley told me earlier. “All your feelings, you put in that quilt.”

Then you refine. “If it didn’t look too sweet to me,” Mary Lee Bendolph once said, “I’d take it back off.”

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