00:00:11
Speaker 1: There is now an Apple learning people when ICE agents are operating in their area.
00:00:16
Speaker 2: It's called ice Block, which allowed users to track and report any public sightings that immigration agents deployed or detaining people.
00:00:23
Speaker 3: Apple says they have pulled an app that allows users to track ICE agents after getting pressure from the Department of Justice.
00:00:29
Speaker 4: So ice Block was an iPhone app that helps people anonymously report ice sightings that are in their neighborhood, that are nearby within a five miler adias, and you've got notifications when other people are report ice sightings near you.
00:00:46
Speaker 1: Michael Lee is an independent security researcher and journalist. He's talking about an ice reporting app called ice Block. The tagline was quote see something, tap something. A lot of people were looking for ways to deal with the Trump administration's immigration policies, and in June, ice block went viral.
00:01:03
Speaker 4: And I think the thing that makes it different than other various products is that it went viral. CNN did some reporting on ice block, like early on, they had like on TV all day one day, and then the right wing Twitter or x blew up and started attacking it, and so then it ended up getting like a million users.
00:01:23
Speaker 1: Despite the popularity Micah was skeptical of ice block, so he did some digging.
00:01:29
Speaker 4: I called it active as in theater because it seemed like it wasn't actually like aimed at helping people. It was just aimed at, like, you know, making his app that was going viral, get more users and stuff like that.
00:01:48
Speaker 1: I'm afraid with a kaleidoscope and iHeart podcasts. This is kill switch. I'm dextrats, I'm sing.
00:02:27
Speaker 2: I'm goodbye.
00:02:43
Speaker 1: When did you first hear about ice block?
00:02:47
Speaker 4: I heard ice black after I was on the and then I heard about the right wing backlash.
00:02:51
Speaker 1: The backlash that MICA's referring to is the White House Press Secretary saying.
00:02:56
Speaker 2: Sounds like this would be an incitement of further violence against our ice The.
00:03:00
Speaker 1: White House boarders are saying THEO Jane's look at this and see if they're crossing that line. And United States Attorney General Pam Bondi.
00:03:08
Speaker 2: Saying we are looking at it, we are looking at him, and he better watch out because that's not a protected speech.
00:03:15
Speaker 1: And the United States Secretary of Homeland Security Christy Nome posted on Twitter or x calling it an obstruction of justice and said quote, if you obstruct or assault or law enforcement. We will hunt you down and you will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law end quote.
00:03:33
Speaker 4: I thought it was very interesting, but at the same time, I have been doing some local work in my own community in northern California, and I was very skeptical about how useful it was just from my own experiences.
00:03:48
Speaker 1: If you were to describe how ice block works in terms of the reporting function, is there anything you would use to compare it to.
00:03:58
Speaker 4: I mean, it's super similar to just on typical map apps where warns you have a speed trap right like you're driving, and then it says cops have been reported up ahead, and then you know, people all get that on their phones and they start slowing down. That's basically what it is. It's just like a location based app where people can report here's an ice sighting, and then other people who are nearby get the notification and then they're like, oh, there's an ice sighting there. It's actually overall pretty simple.
00:04:26
Speaker 1: Ice Block was created by a solo developer named Joshua Aaron back in April, just a few months into President Trump's second term. He told CNN that he made the app because he wanted to do something to fight back against what was happening in the US. He made ice Block only available on iPhone because he said that making it available on Android could require collecting information that could put users at risk. Maybe that's annoyed Android users, but there is some merit to this, at least in the way that the app was doing things.
00:04:54
Speaker 4: From my understanding is it uses the Apple Cloud cat. So normally what you'd have as an app running on phones and then you'd have a server, and so when you report something, it would communicate with the server and save stuff in the database. So he's saying he's not collecting any data, but instead he's essentially outsourcing this to Apples. He doesn't need to like collect the location of users who have this app installed. Instead, Apple's already collecting everyone's location who has location services on and so it's just relying on that. So that's that's like roughly the technical way that he's keeping it completely anonymous, although it's really not completely anonymous because you know, Apple can see everything.
00:05:32
Speaker 5: If ice Block.
00:05:32
Speaker 4: Gets data requests from you know, the FBI or DHS or something, maybe they won't be able to comply because they don't have data. But if Apple gets data requests from the FBI or DHS, Apple actually has a lot of data that they can turn over, including you know, everyone who's installed the.
00:05:48
Speaker 1: App, right because relatively speaking, Apple does have a fairly good reputation or good record in not just turning stuff over willingly to the authorities. Like somebody comes and asks for it, and they generally say no, right.
00:06:04
Speaker 4: When it's a valid law enforcement request. They like don't really have much of the option to say no. They can fight it with lawyers, but if they lose, then they have to turn it over. And so what Apple has a good reputation for is building in extra security to make it so that it's harder for them to turn stuff over. They have something called the Advanced Data Production and anyone that wants to can turn it on in their iCloud account, and it means that all that data in your iCloud account is encrypted. So if Apple's forced to turn it over, they can still turn it over. It's just that it'll be encrypted data they're turning over, and you, the user, will have a key that can decrypt it. So they're doing work to make it harder to turnover data, but they still are you know they're a US company.
00:06:47
Speaker 5: They give data to the BLISS.
00:06:50
Speaker 1: There were some researchers who initially were a little skeptical of how ice block worked. A colleague of MICA has looked into it and confirmed that it did seem to legitimately be working how it promised.
00:07:00
Speaker 4: I didn't spend much time digging and stuff until a Hope conference Hackers on Planet Earth that now happens every year. It's in New York, and Joshua Aaron, the developer of ice block, was giving a talk about ice block at Hope. And as he was talking and then especially throughout the Q and A, the audience was getting more and more visibly frustrated because it was very clear that this guy just doesn't know what he's talking about, and he kept like making these big promises. He kept talking about how he runs a server and he's like, believe me, my server is highly secure, no one could hack it. I built it myself, and I think of everything, and like this is like an audience full of hackers and people are like scanning his server and being like there's various problems already.
00:07:46
Speaker 5: Just starting the.
00:07:47
Speaker 1: Talk, maybe a little late here, but it's probably worth mentioning here that Micah isn't just some hobbyist programmer. In twenty thirteen, he helped Edward Snowden league government spying documents. So if Micah says that he's concerned about security, that's going to hold some weight for people. And one big issue that he and some other researchers had at this conference was the fact that the developer didn't want to make the apps code open source, which raised a big red flag from Mica.
00:08:14
Speaker 4: In computer security, if you're making security products or privacy products and you want people to trust you, the way of doing this is to show your work to like make your software open source, to invite outside researchers to like look into it to try and find flaws. Anyone can look at the code, anyone can use the code. Anyone can, you know, take a copy of the code and change it and release their own version. The big benefit from a privacy and security perspective of open source is it means that you're not like hiding how you do stuff.
00:08:47
Speaker 5: You're being transparent about it.
00:08:48
Speaker 4: And for something like this where people are very concerned that it's collecting their data, the basic stuff that a developer can do is make it open source, and then this way they can just like be like, look, you don't have to trust us as much because maybe you don't read code, but like someone else who does readcode can like look through the code and confirm that it's done what I say it's done. It has other benefits too, like other people can actually help you fix bugs. Other people can help you find vulnerabilities. Other people can add features to it, and this is like common for security software and privacy software.
00:09:23
Speaker 1: When he was asked in the Q and A if you would accept help programming the app, Joshua Aaron said, no.
00:09:28
Speaker 2: Believe me when I say I would love help. Okay, I'm supporting over a million users myself. There's not some giant company behind this, but it's really really hard for me to put my trust in somebody and share the source code and share the access to this. So I got to just say, so far, the answer is I'm just not the trusting person. So no, I haven't entertained having anybody else involved with it.
00:09:52
Speaker 1: Joshua Aaron was adamant that his ice block app is secure, but he wouldn't budge on this open source issue. So I could decided to ask a different question.
00:10:02
Speaker 4: I actually went and said another question, which was basically, would you be open to publishing like a white paper that explains how it works, so that you know, researchers could like look at this and give feedback and make it better, and also like security audits, Like you don't need to open the source code to everyone, but there are all of these security firms that will do a like a penetration test of your code. They try to hack it, and then if they find any problems, they give you a report and then you fix them all. And we were even like we could raise money for a security audit. These are things that you can do without making an open source it'll still make people trust it more. But he was just like, Nope, I'm not doing any of this stuff.
00:10:42
Speaker 1: All right, let's just leave aside the cybersecurity talk for a second. Micah had another concern what would happen if someone falsely reported in ice sighting or if they just made a mistake. Mike has been volunteering with an organization in his area called Norkel Resist. This group does a lot of things, from fixing your car's break lights were free, to distributing food to families who need it. But recently they've been doing a lot of work supporting immigrants and because of this, Micah has seen firsthand how a false eye sighting can really cause panic.
00:11:12
Speaker 4: And a big thing is that lots of people are like, oh my god, there's ice in this neighborhood, and they like post that online and then a lot of people like boost it, and most of the time that's not actually true. One that I checked out there was this overpass bridge looked like there was like a bunch of people in uniforms on the bridge what looked kind of like police vehicles, and like multiple people reported this bridge and I went and confirmed that it was like a fireman funeral service then, so.
00:11:39
Speaker 5: It wasn't ice at all.
00:11:40
Speaker 4: Sometimes it's actually just like a local police action, and it just causes people to panic because the problem is that there's like millions of people who are undocumented, and then there's even more millions of people who are friends and loves ones with people who are undocumented. There's all of these teenagers whose parents are undocumented in their citizens and stuff, and they're like scared out of their minds, like constantly, and so if you're sitting there scrolling on social media, and you're just seeing like, oh my god, there's ice everywhere. It's really scary. And so it's like very important to not cause panic and instead to just spread the news about real things that are happening and not just a bunch of big things that aren't happening.
00:12:17
Speaker 1: So at this Hacker's Conference talk, Micah asked Joshua Aaron about this directly, and I.
00:12:22
Speaker 4: Guess my question is, how do you know that ice block isn't just full of false positives? And have you done any like user research or work with local immigration groups to like figure out, you know, how reliable this is, how much it's actually helping people versus causing panic.
00:12:41
Speaker 2: I'm not going to tell you there's no false sightings in ice Block.
00:12:44
Speaker 5: Of course there are. That's what nefarious users do.
00:12:47
Speaker 2: They think it's really funny to scare people and hurt people. But there are safeguards in the app.
00:12:54
Speaker 4: He eventually said that, like in the off chance that someone posts something that's not real, then people will just stay away from that area for a little.
00:13:01
Speaker 5: Bit, and that's not that bad.
00:13:03
Speaker 2: So, in an effort for user anonymity, the decision was made that if there are false sightings, the worst case scenario is that those people simply stay away from that location for a few hours, much better than having user identifiable data that could come under government subpoena. So I hope that answers your question and kind of alleviates those concerns.
00:13:28
Speaker 1: That does sound kind of bad, though.
00:13:31
Speaker 4: I do think it's kind of bad because it's causing people to like panic and to worry that there's way more ice activity than there actually is. There was this one other person who who also asked about you know, there's all of these immigrant communities across the country that have these pretty strong support networks and they're already doing stuff in their own ways. As she asked, have you planned on working with any of these groups? And basically his answer was, I've talked to some community organizers and they all do things their own way, and I wouldn't be able to like make ice block work for this group and then for this group and then for this group, so he's just going to ignore their advice.
00:14:10
Speaker 1: After the conference, Micah did some more digging around and he tried to ask the developers some questions via DMS. That's when things started to get weird. More on that after the.
00:14:20
Speaker 4: Break, After this Hope Talk. A group of us started a signal group and we were basically like, Okay, this app has promise. We think that the developer is like not malicious, we think his heart is in the right place. Maybe we can affect us to make it so that it's actually a useful app for people, and then especially like that will be so much better because there's already like a million users. So we spent a bunch of energy trying to figure out how to improve the app. We wrote him a letter and then he just like immediately rejected the letter and rejected our offer of various support. Then I was like, okay, I'm going to write basically about the Hope Talk. So I just started a blog post about the Hope Talk and with like little clips from the most frustrating parts. And then at the end of my blog post.
00:15:15
Speaker 1: Michael wrote about all this in a post on his blog. The title was Unfortunately the ice Block app is activism Theater. But before we published it, he gave Joshua Aaron heads up and he also flagged a potential security problem that he'd found.
00:15:31
Speaker 4: So I messaged him on Blue Sky being like, I'm that published this blog post about the hope talk. It's not very flattering, but I also wanted to like privately tell you that I discovered a problem with your server.
00:15:46
Speaker 5: I basically did a n MAP scan real quick.
00:15:49
Speaker 1: Aside here in map or a network mapper is basically a tool that lets you find devices on a network and also potentially detect vulnerabilities.
00:15:58
Speaker 4: So I didn't en map scan to see what ports were a and then I also use this one feature that just does version detection, so like, if it sees that this server runs a web server, it tells you what software is running on that web server. And this was like the step zero before you start like trying to hack something, you do basic reconnaissance. So this was a very basic reconnaissance.
00:16:20
Speaker 1: Right, just see what software they running?
00:16:22
Speaker 5: Yeah, exactly.
00:16:23
Speaker 4: And I saw that he was running Apache, which is a common web server software. But the version of Apache that was running was like eight months old or something. And the thing about this is it's always important to install updates, and the reason is because updates fixed security problems. And so I like looked up that version and there were all of these known vulnerabilities in that version of apatching I just told him, hey, your version of Apache has all these known vulnerabilities and some of them are marked critical. You should probably update and he blocked me. So that was the response, and then he uh sent me a message on his other blue Sky account and his personal account and was like, stop telling lies about me and ice block. This is my last communication. And I was like, hey, let me know if I got anything wrong in the blog post, I'm happy to post a correction. But then a few days later I checked and his server was still running the vulnerable version of Apache. So I sent him another message and I was like, hey, you should really update this. I'll give you a deadline. I'll give you a week to fix it. And it's like really really really easy to fix. It's just running the update command. That's it. That will fix the problem. And so then he blocked me there too, And this is just basically like really bad way to handle a vulnerability report. I would imagine that at the very least he will walk his server to not get hacked. I waited until the week was up, and then I just like wrote a short blog post being like here's what I found. I hope this encourages them to actually install updates, and then like within two hours he installed updates after I published the blog post, so it worked.
00:18:00
Speaker 1: I mean, you publicly bullied my man into updating the Apache server. Yeah, we'll talk. You can come off is kind of being just like a hater, Like, what's this dude doing? Why is this guy being being on the internet about this really well intentioned software, right?
00:18:18
Speaker 4: I mean, so I don't want to come off as a hater. And the entire time I've tried to help make his app useful, but it was just so frustrating. He's just saying all these things with such confidence that aren't true. And honestly, like, I think that the problems that we're facing with mass deportation, they're not solved by an app. They're much bigger than an app, And so I think the apps can be maybe a helpful component, but there's a much bigger situation. And I think that maybe if ice block was like working directly with a network of local groups around the country and had betting built in, that would actually make it really usefulat for people to get like verified information. But like you know, and if he's not doing any of that, then like what's the point?
00:19:03
Speaker 1: To some people, it might sound weird that computer programmers would publicly have an argument over an app, but trust me, this stuff is very normal. Entire operating systems have been written because someone couldn't agree on something as minor as how the computer should boot up. The stakes just feel a lot higher here because both of these people really care about the cause of helping immigrants, and applying technology to civil rights issues is way harder than most people think. Just as an example, I have a friend who is working on a totally different national campaign to help undocumented immigrants. The project wasn't an app, but they created basically this downloadable infocard. The idea was that if you get stopped by ice, you could pull out your phone and you could pull up this card from a digital wallet and would have all this information on it, like your rights stay silent, your right to a lawyer, people to contact, things like that. And it looked really slick, and they had all these social media influencers who are excited about it, and they wanted to help them promote it, and things were looking great. But then they showed their project to some local groups who actually work with assisting undocumented immigrants, and the group said, no, this is not a good idea. You do not want people opening up their phone around ice because they might take it or they might coerce them into showing personal information. They said, look, here's what actually works in this community. Paper cards with your rights printed on it. If you want to help us, help us print those up and distribute them in a bunch of different languages. No digital nonsense, just paper. Now. The activists who worked on this other digital wallet thing were pretty humiliated, but they ended up taking the local group's advice and said, you know what, this is what's called being a good ally, and you know, maybe so. In software development, though there's a simpler term for it, we just call it user research, putting aside all the cool things that you want the user to do with your software and figuring out what the people who would actually use your software actually need.
00:21:00
Speaker 4: I think that if you're actually like doing user research, trying to figure out what do we need, there's a lot of undocumented people who work in like the service industry or who work in farming, and actually talking to those people, I think that what will be really helpful is to make it so that a bunch of people who like work in the kitchen at restaurants they know how to report an ICE sighting, because what happens when like ice comes into the restaurant, like someone should report it? Like, I don't know if you're going to get like the people who really need this, most of them don't have iPhones right to begin with. What you really need is like how do you get this person working in the kitchen to be able to report, oh, God, ice is here. And then at that point, what do you actually want? Do you just want to like tell people that ice is at this restaurant and then that's it, or do you want to actually like have community come out and support of the people there, start documenting stuff, start providing legal support. I think it's kind of shortsighted, Like none of this has been really like thought through. It's more just like, ooh, location based apps are cool. It's a really hard problem. We can't use technology to solve this problem. It's a political problem. We need your restore democracy, and an app is not gonna help us restore democracy.
00:22:12
Speaker 1: So after all this, you've written about this, you've kind of gone back and forth, but then just recently the app gets taken out of the app store m H. And then the day after that there's a similar app that gets pulled off the Google Play Store.
00:22:29
Speaker 3: Apple says it took it down due to safety risks, and they're not the only ones. Google says they removed similar apps from the app store for Android devices, and all of it coming as Ice is ramping upraids across the country.
00:22:43
Speaker 1: Apple removed ice Block from their app store and Google removed a similar app called red Dot. Considering that Micah had been criticizing ice Block, you might think that he'd be happy about this. Well, no, he's not, and he says that this is a sign of a bigger problem. That's after the break in early October, Apple removed ice Block from the app store, no warning, just gone. But it wasn't just ice Block. Other apps also disappeared, like, for example, an app called eyes Up. This app was different from ice Block. It wasn't about real time location reporting. It was just about preserving evidence of encounters with Ice and maintaining a public record that couldn't be hidden or censored.
00:23:35
Speaker 4: And so it's like people keep posting videos to like TikTok, to Instagram, to cts of Ice arresting people and being violent with people, and this is just an app that archives them.
00:23:47
Speaker 5: That's it. It's a map, and.
00:23:49
Speaker 4: You can browse the map, and you can click on an area, and you click on a video and watch the video. It's just archiving ice abuse with the goal of preserving evidence in case the materials ever needed in court. On the Fitch and Apple just took this down as well. And I think that both Apple and Google they got a bunch of pressure from Paanbandi from the Department of Justice, and they both basically did this like absolutely mind boggling thing where they're basically saying that, like masked ice stones are a protected class.
00:24:19
Speaker 1: Now that phrasing might sound weird, but it's not something that Mike had just made up. Google told four or four Media that they had, and I'm reading four or Four's article on this, removed apps because they shared the location of what it describes as a vulnerable group that recently faced a violent act connected to those sorts of ice spotting apps. I won't editorialize here, but I'll just point out that Google calling ICE, which again is a government agency, a vulnerable group, is unusual for a tech company. Before this, the only people using this sort of language was the Trump administration.
00:24:54
Speaker 4: I think that the bigger picture for me is that we have like a duopoly smartphones. We have iPhones and we have Android phones. That's it, and both of them are now just like arms of the US government. I think that they've both had like various histories of removing apps from the app stores. But I feel like this is actually really dangerous, not just for apps that like activists might rely on in the United States, but like around the world, all of the phones that everyone in the world uses.
00:25:25
Speaker 5: Are essentially like what software they're allowed to run.
00:25:27
Speaker 4: On those are controlled by the Trump administration, And that's like a really bad situation to be in for the world. This experience is showing that, like in the United States, if you're trying to like fight ice abuses, or if you're trying to do anything that like the trauma administration doesn't like.
00:25:44
Speaker 5: I think that we need to.
00:25:45
Speaker 4: Stop relying on apps, start relying on websites, stop relying on US companies because we can't trust them, right.
00:25:52
Speaker 5: I think that this is not a good sign for things to come.
00:25:57
Speaker 1: When you say something like the what we're allowed to put on our phones is basically controlled by the Trump and administration sounds kind of nuts, But you know, maybe it's not an overstatement, given that ice Block was repeatedly called out by the Trump administration as being something that they did not want available, and then it becomes not available, and then a similar app becomes not available anymore on both the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store.
00:26:24
Speaker 4: Tam Bondi has given interviews being like, oh, yeah, we went to Apple and Google. We told them to like, you know, they need to do more to protect ice Yeah. And in fact, actually, just like last week, tam Bondi testified in front of Congress where she said that, like they asked them to remove ice Block, and she said that ice block was posting the home addresses of ice officers and it was dosing them and that's not what ice block was doing. But that was just just like a little example of lying under oath that Lottie's just dead.
00:26:53
Speaker 5: Last week.
00:26:54
Speaker 1: Let me ask you this, the ice Block got removed from the Apple App Store. Do you think it should be rein stated? Do you think it should be back up? Oh?
00:27:02
Speaker 4: Yeah, absolutely. I don't think it's that useful. But I feel like this is like a bigger issue regardless of what the problems are with this one app, Like anyone that wants to make an app that whatever their idea is, that they should be able to make those apps. It's fundamentally it's like a free speech essuo. It's not very good for democracy that these two major corporations that are basically like just like bending the knee to authoritarianism control the gates.
00:27:31
Speaker 1: Free speech might not be something you would think applies to computer code, but actually it does. In nineteen ninety nine, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled the code was considered speech. A grad student had written an encryption program and wanted to publish the code online, but under US law, encryption was basically treated like a weapon. If this student wanted to share his code, he would have had to register as an arms dealer and get government approval. The student sued, and the court eventually ruled that those restrictions had violated his First Amendment rights. He could publish his code, and now if you got code, you want to publish, so can you.
00:28:08
Speaker 4: The Core ruled that, hey, this is this person's speech. This code that they wrote is their speech. We can't restrict their speech because of the First Amendment. That's what made encryption legal in the United SAIDs.
00:28:21
Speaker 1: But true free speech in this context becomes kind of irrelevant when Apple has made it so that basically nothing can be installed on their iPhone without going through the official app store first. So what about Google. Well, Android, historically you've basically been able to treat it like any other computer. Most people just use the Google Play Store, but if you wanted to, you could do something called sideloading and pretty easily install whatever you want on your phone. But starting next year, Google's going to require that all apps, whether downloaded from the Google Play Store or not, be verified by them.
00:28:53
Speaker 4: The change that Google is making is basically preventing any app that's not digitally signed by Google Key from getting installed on your phone. It basically is like essentially getting rid of sideloading and making it so that you can't run anything on your phone if it's not approved by Google.
00:29:10
Speaker 1: Which is kind of nuts, right because I mean, if you told somebody you know, you're not allowed to have certain programs on your Windows machine. I mean, first off, Napster never would have happened. Ever, that that entire saga never would have happened, which maybe you think it shouldn't. But the idea that if there's an app that the app store doesn't want you to have, or that a certain company doesn't want you to have, and they don't want you to have it because a government doesn't want you to have it. I mean, these are the things that freak people out about other countries, and this is now something that we deal with the United States.
00:29:43
Speaker 5: We in the United States have been very privileged.
00:29:46
Speaker 4: It's like we're not used to getting everything like spied on as much as we as other countries are. We're used to being in this privileged situation where all of this technological dystopia stuff happens to other people. I think that's over. I think it's gonna start happening to us now too.
00:30:05
Speaker 1: For you looking at ice Block and looking that everything's happened since it was banned and all that, what are you thinking about now and what do you think other people should be thinking about.
00:30:18
Speaker 4: I'm thinking that we can't rely on apps anymore. Like I rely so much on the Signal app. That's the number one app that I use a whole lot. And I think that for the moment, signal safe, especially because if Trump people all use it. But I could totally foresee a future soon where basically the Trump administration is like, no, we want a back to around a signal because Antifa uses it. And then I think that there might be some sort of signal might not be allowed to be installed on iPhones or Android phones.
00:30:48
Speaker 1: So this really isn't about ice block or any app in particular for Micah, the solution might not be in an app.
00:30:55
Speaker 4: I think that what you need to do is find like trusted local grips. So there are people all over the country locally that are organizing. And if you live in a town where there are a bunch of immigrants and there isn't like a support network that already exists, then maybe you should start like talking to people there and start one. If you care about this stuff and you want to get involved, you should actually talk to people and not just play on your phone.
00:31:20
Speaker 1: As complicated as this might be, ice Block did serve a purpose for people. It's gone now and it's only getting harder to find out what Ice is doing. But Ice is expanding their ability to find out what we're doing. Ice recently signed a deal with a facial recognition company, Clearview AI. They've bought spyware that's supposed to be able to hack into lock smartphones and extract data. And they've also announced that they're planning to launch a social media monitoring team that's aimed at tracking people based on the posts that they make online. The Department of Homeland Security has claimed that their officials are now facing a quote more than one thousand percent increase and assault against them, and their families are being doxed and threatened online.
00:32:03
Speaker 5: Quote.
00:32:04
Speaker 1: They haven't explained where they're getting that thousand percent figure from. And I don't think you can call an app that reports sightings as dosing. But after those apps were taken down, a group of hackers have posted the names and some personal information of hundreds of government officials, including people working for DHS and ICE. But bringing it back to ice block for just a minute, for real computer programmers arguing in public is very normal. I mean, there could be a whole Netflix series of just computer beef. I mean, episode one, WordPress versus WP Engine, Episode two, GPL versus BSD, Episode three, whatever the hell they're doing over at Ruby Central right now. Maybe this stuff sounds weird to you, but just going back to how computer code was defined legally as free speech and follow me here. If we think of speech as expression and as art. I think it makes sense. I mean, you pour hours of your life into creating things, gonna care about the craft and the product, and add on top of that the stakes. If people can disagree over a bootloader, of course they're going to disagree on the best way to help people that they care about. A lot of times activist groups agree with each other on like ninety nine percent of things. They just disagree with each other on how something should be done. Software is no different from that, and that is gonna be it for this one. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of kill Switch. If you want to email us, we're at kill Switch at Kaleidoscope dot NYC or on Instagram we're at kill switchpods. And also we got some good news. Kill Switch just won gold in the Technology category with the Signal Awards. So shout out and thank you to everyone who's been with us. As you know, we keep trying to figure out how to navigate living in the future. And if you like our show and help us win some more awards, you know, why not leave us a review. It helps other people find the show, which in turn helps us keep doing our thing. And in case you didn't know, kill Switch is on YouTube, so if you've ever been wondering what the Fisker cars or the anime VTuber avatars look like, there you go. The link for that and everything else is in the show notes. Killswitch is hosted by Me Dexter Thomas. It's produced by Sena Ozaki, Darluk Potts, and Julia Nutter. Our theme song is by me and Kyle Murdoch, and Kyle also mixes the show. From Kaleidoscope. Our executive producers are Ozma lashin On, Gesh Hadi Kadur, and Kate Osborne. From iHeart, our executive producers are Katrina Norvil and Nikki E. Tor
Speaker 1: There is now an Apple learning people when ICE agents are operating in their area.
00:00:16
Speaker 2: It's called ice Block, which allowed users to track and report any public sightings that immigration agents deployed or detaining people.
00:00:23
Speaker 3: Apple says they have pulled an app that allows users to track ICE agents after getting pressure from the Department of Justice.
00:00:29
Speaker 4: So ice Block was an iPhone app that helps people anonymously report ice sightings that are in their neighborhood, that are nearby within a five miler adias, and you've got notifications when other people are report ice sightings near you.
00:00:46
Speaker 1: Michael Lee is an independent security researcher and journalist. He's talking about an ice reporting app called ice Block. The tagline was quote see something, tap something. A lot of people were looking for ways to deal with the Trump administration's immigration policies, and in June, ice block went viral.
00:01:03
Speaker 4: And I think the thing that makes it different than other various products is that it went viral. CNN did some reporting on ice block, like early on, they had like on TV all day one day, and then the right wing Twitter or x blew up and started attacking it, and so then it ended up getting like a million users.
00:01:23
Speaker 1: Despite the popularity Micah was skeptical of ice block, so he did some digging.
00:01:29
Speaker 4: I called it active as in theater because it seemed like it wasn't actually like aimed at helping people. It was just aimed at, like, you know, making his app that was going viral, get more users and stuff like that.
00:01:48
Speaker 1: I'm afraid with a kaleidoscope and iHeart podcasts. This is kill switch. I'm dextrats, I'm sing.
00:02:27
Speaker 2: I'm goodbye.
00:02:43
Speaker 1: When did you first hear about ice block?
00:02:47
Speaker 4: I heard ice black after I was on the and then I heard about the right wing backlash.
00:02:51
Speaker 1: The backlash that MICA's referring to is the White House Press Secretary saying.
00:02:56
Speaker 2: Sounds like this would be an incitement of further violence against our ice The.
00:03:00
Speaker 1: White House boarders are saying THEO Jane's look at this and see if they're crossing that line. And United States Attorney General Pam Bondi.
00:03:08
Speaker 2: Saying we are looking at it, we are looking at him, and he better watch out because that's not a protected speech.
00:03:15
Speaker 1: And the United States Secretary of Homeland Security Christy Nome posted on Twitter or x calling it an obstruction of justice and said quote, if you obstruct or assault or law enforcement. We will hunt you down and you will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law end quote.
00:03:33
Speaker 4: I thought it was very interesting, but at the same time, I have been doing some local work in my own community in northern California, and I was very skeptical about how useful it was just from my own experiences.
00:03:48
Speaker 1: If you were to describe how ice block works in terms of the reporting function, is there anything you would use to compare it to.
00:03:58
Speaker 4: I mean, it's super similar to just on typical map apps where warns you have a speed trap right like you're driving, and then it says cops have been reported up ahead, and then you know, people all get that on their phones and they start slowing down. That's basically what it is. It's just like a location based app where people can report here's an ice sighting, and then other people who are nearby get the notification and then they're like, oh, there's an ice sighting there. It's actually overall pretty simple.
00:04:26
Speaker 1: Ice Block was created by a solo developer named Joshua Aaron back in April, just a few months into President Trump's second term. He told CNN that he made the app because he wanted to do something to fight back against what was happening in the US. He made ice Block only available on iPhone because he said that making it available on Android could require collecting information that could put users at risk. Maybe that's annoyed Android users, but there is some merit to this, at least in the way that the app was doing things.
00:04:54
Speaker 4: From my understanding is it uses the Apple Cloud cat. So normally what you'd have as an app running on phones and then you'd have a server, and so when you report something, it would communicate with the server and save stuff in the database. So he's saying he's not collecting any data, but instead he's essentially outsourcing this to Apples. He doesn't need to like collect the location of users who have this app installed. Instead, Apple's already collecting everyone's location who has location services on and so it's just relying on that. So that's that's like roughly the technical way that he's keeping it completely anonymous, although it's really not completely anonymous because you know, Apple can see everything.
00:05:32
Speaker 5: If ice Block.
00:05:32
Speaker 4: Gets data requests from you know, the FBI or DHS or something, maybe they won't be able to comply because they don't have data. But if Apple gets data requests from the FBI or DHS, Apple actually has a lot of data that they can turn over, including you know, everyone who's installed the.
00:05:48
Speaker 1: App, right because relatively speaking, Apple does have a fairly good reputation or good record in not just turning stuff over willingly to the authorities. Like somebody comes and asks for it, and they generally say no, right.
00:06:04
Speaker 4: When it's a valid law enforcement request. They like don't really have much of the option to say no. They can fight it with lawyers, but if they lose, then they have to turn it over. And so what Apple has a good reputation for is building in extra security to make it so that it's harder for them to turn stuff over. They have something called the Advanced Data Production and anyone that wants to can turn it on in their iCloud account, and it means that all that data in your iCloud account is encrypted. So if Apple's forced to turn it over, they can still turn it over. It's just that it'll be encrypted data they're turning over, and you, the user, will have a key that can decrypt it. So they're doing work to make it harder to turnover data, but they still are you know they're a US company.
00:06:47
Speaker 5: They give data to the BLISS.
00:06:50
Speaker 1: There were some researchers who initially were a little skeptical of how ice block worked. A colleague of MICA has looked into it and confirmed that it did seem to legitimately be working how it promised.
00:07:00
Speaker 4: I didn't spend much time digging and stuff until a Hope conference Hackers on Planet Earth that now happens every year. It's in New York, and Joshua Aaron, the developer of ice block, was giving a talk about ice block at Hope. And as he was talking and then especially throughout the Q and A, the audience was getting more and more visibly frustrated because it was very clear that this guy just doesn't know what he's talking about, and he kept like making these big promises. He kept talking about how he runs a server and he's like, believe me, my server is highly secure, no one could hack it. I built it myself, and I think of everything, and like this is like an audience full of hackers and people are like scanning his server and being like there's various problems already.
00:07:46
Speaker 5: Just starting the.
00:07:47
Speaker 1: Talk, maybe a little late here, but it's probably worth mentioning here that Micah isn't just some hobbyist programmer. In twenty thirteen, he helped Edward Snowden league government spying documents. So if Micah says that he's concerned about security, that's going to hold some weight for people. And one big issue that he and some other researchers had at this conference was the fact that the developer didn't want to make the apps code open source, which raised a big red flag from Mica.
00:08:14
Speaker 4: In computer security, if you're making security products or privacy products and you want people to trust you, the way of doing this is to show your work to like make your software open source, to invite outside researchers to like look into it to try and find flaws. Anyone can look at the code, anyone can use the code. Anyone can, you know, take a copy of the code and change it and release their own version. The big benefit from a privacy and security perspective of open source is it means that you're not like hiding how you do stuff.
00:08:47
Speaker 5: You're being transparent about it.
00:08:48
Speaker 4: And for something like this where people are very concerned that it's collecting their data, the basic stuff that a developer can do is make it open source, and then this way they can just like be like, look, you don't have to trust us as much because maybe you don't read code, but like someone else who does readcode can like look through the code and confirm that it's done what I say it's done. It has other benefits too, like other people can actually help you fix bugs. Other people can help you find vulnerabilities. Other people can add features to it, and this is like common for security software and privacy software.
00:09:23
Speaker 1: When he was asked in the Q and A if you would accept help programming the app, Joshua Aaron said, no.
00:09:28
Speaker 2: Believe me when I say I would love help. Okay, I'm supporting over a million users myself. There's not some giant company behind this, but it's really really hard for me to put my trust in somebody and share the source code and share the access to this. So I got to just say, so far, the answer is I'm just not the trusting person. So no, I haven't entertained having anybody else involved with it.
00:09:52
Speaker 1: Joshua Aaron was adamant that his ice block app is secure, but he wouldn't budge on this open source issue. So I could decided to ask a different question.
00:10:02
Speaker 4: I actually went and said another question, which was basically, would you be open to publishing like a white paper that explains how it works, so that you know, researchers could like look at this and give feedback and make it better, and also like security audits, Like you don't need to open the source code to everyone, but there are all of these security firms that will do a like a penetration test of your code. They try to hack it, and then if they find any problems, they give you a report and then you fix them all. And we were even like we could raise money for a security audit. These are things that you can do without making an open source it'll still make people trust it more. But he was just like, Nope, I'm not doing any of this stuff.
00:10:42
Speaker 1: All right, let's just leave aside the cybersecurity talk for a second. Micah had another concern what would happen if someone falsely reported in ice sighting or if they just made a mistake. Mike has been volunteering with an organization in his area called Norkel Resist. This group does a lot of things, from fixing your car's break lights were free, to distributing food to families who need it. But recently they've been doing a lot of work supporting immigrants and because of this, Micah has seen firsthand how a false eye sighting can really cause panic.
00:11:12
Speaker 4: And a big thing is that lots of people are like, oh my god, there's ice in this neighborhood, and they like post that online and then a lot of people like boost it, and most of the time that's not actually true. One that I checked out there was this overpass bridge looked like there was like a bunch of people in uniforms on the bridge what looked kind of like police vehicles, and like multiple people reported this bridge and I went and confirmed that it was like a fireman funeral service then, so.
00:11:39
Speaker 5: It wasn't ice at all.
00:11:40
Speaker 4: Sometimes it's actually just like a local police action, and it just causes people to panic because the problem is that there's like millions of people who are undocumented, and then there's even more millions of people who are friends and loves ones with people who are undocumented. There's all of these teenagers whose parents are undocumented in their citizens and stuff, and they're like scared out of their minds, like constantly, and so if you're sitting there scrolling on social media, and you're just seeing like, oh my god, there's ice everywhere. It's really scary. And so it's like very important to not cause panic and instead to just spread the news about real things that are happening and not just a bunch of big things that aren't happening.
00:12:17
Speaker 1: So at this Hacker's Conference talk, Micah asked Joshua Aaron about this directly, and I.
00:12:22
Speaker 4: Guess my question is, how do you know that ice block isn't just full of false positives? And have you done any like user research or work with local immigration groups to like figure out, you know, how reliable this is, how much it's actually helping people versus causing panic.
00:12:41
Speaker 2: I'm not going to tell you there's no false sightings in ice Block.
00:12:44
Speaker 5: Of course there are. That's what nefarious users do.
00:12:47
Speaker 2: They think it's really funny to scare people and hurt people. But there are safeguards in the app.
00:12:54
Speaker 4: He eventually said that, like in the off chance that someone posts something that's not real, then people will just stay away from that area for a little.
00:13:01
Speaker 5: Bit, and that's not that bad.
00:13:03
Speaker 2: So, in an effort for user anonymity, the decision was made that if there are false sightings, the worst case scenario is that those people simply stay away from that location for a few hours, much better than having user identifiable data that could come under government subpoena. So I hope that answers your question and kind of alleviates those concerns.
00:13:28
Speaker 1: That does sound kind of bad, though.
00:13:31
Speaker 4: I do think it's kind of bad because it's causing people to like panic and to worry that there's way more ice activity than there actually is. There was this one other person who who also asked about you know, there's all of these immigrant communities across the country that have these pretty strong support networks and they're already doing stuff in their own ways. As she asked, have you planned on working with any of these groups? And basically his answer was, I've talked to some community organizers and they all do things their own way, and I wouldn't be able to like make ice block work for this group and then for this group and then for this group, so he's just going to ignore their advice.
00:14:10
Speaker 1: After the conference, Micah did some more digging around and he tried to ask the developers some questions via DMS. That's when things started to get weird. More on that after the.
00:14:20
Speaker 4: Break, After this Hope Talk. A group of us started a signal group and we were basically like, Okay, this app has promise. We think that the developer is like not malicious, we think his heart is in the right place. Maybe we can affect us to make it so that it's actually a useful app for people, and then especially like that will be so much better because there's already like a million users. So we spent a bunch of energy trying to figure out how to improve the app. We wrote him a letter and then he just like immediately rejected the letter and rejected our offer of various support. Then I was like, okay, I'm going to write basically about the Hope Talk. So I just started a blog post about the Hope Talk and with like little clips from the most frustrating parts. And then at the end of my blog post.
00:15:15
Speaker 1: Michael wrote about all this in a post on his blog. The title was Unfortunately the ice Block app is activism Theater. But before we published it, he gave Joshua Aaron heads up and he also flagged a potential security problem that he'd found.
00:15:31
Speaker 4: So I messaged him on Blue Sky being like, I'm that published this blog post about the hope talk. It's not very flattering, but I also wanted to like privately tell you that I discovered a problem with your server.
00:15:46
Speaker 5: I basically did a n MAP scan real quick.
00:15:49
Speaker 1: Aside here in map or a network mapper is basically a tool that lets you find devices on a network and also potentially detect vulnerabilities.
00:15:58
Speaker 4: So I didn't en map scan to see what ports were a and then I also use this one feature that just does version detection, so like, if it sees that this server runs a web server, it tells you what software is running on that web server. And this was like the step zero before you start like trying to hack something, you do basic reconnaissance. So this was a very basic reconnaissance.
00:16:20
Speaker 1: Right, just see what software they running?
00:16:22
Speaker 5: Yeah, exactly.
00:16:23
Speaker 4: And I saw that he was running Apache, which is a common web server software. But the version of Apache that was running was like eight months old or something. And the thing about this is it's always important to install updates, and the reason is because updates fixed security problems. And so I like looked up that version and there were all of these known vulnerabilities in that version of apatching I just told him, hey, your version of Apache has all these known vulnerabilities and some of them are marked critical. You should probably update and he blocked me. So that was the response, and then he uh sent me a message on his other blue Sky account and his personal account and was like, stop telling lies about me and ice block. This is my last communication. And I was like, hey, let me know if I got anything wrong in the blog post, I'm happy to post a correction. But then a few days later I checked and his server was still running the vulnerable version of Apache. So I sent him another message and I was like, hey, you should really update this. I'll give you a deadline. I'll give you a week to fix it. And it's like really really really easy to fix. It's just running the update command. That's it. That will fix the problem. And so then he blocked me there too, And this is just basically like really bad way to handle a vulnerability report. I would imagine that at the very least he will walk his server to not get hacked. I waited until the week was up, and then I just like wrote a short blog post being like here's what I found. I hope this encourages them to actually install updates, and then like within two hours he installed updates after I published the blog post, so it worked.
00:18:00
Speaker 1: I mean, you publicly bullied my man into updating the Apache server. Yeah, we'll talk. You can come off is kind of being just like a hater, Like, what's this dude doing? Why is this guy being being on the internet about this really well intentioned software, right?
00:18:18
Speaker 4: I mean, so I don't want to come off as a hater. And the entire time I've tried to help make his app useful, but it was just so frustrating. He's just saying all these things with such confidence that aren't true. And honestly, like, I think that the problems that we're facing with mass deportation, they're not solved by an app. They're much bigger than an app, And so I think the apps can be maybe a helpful component, but there's a much bigger situation. And I think that maybe if ice block was like working directly with a network of local groups around the country and had betting built in, that would actually make it really usefulat for people to get like verified information. But like you know, and if he's not doing any of that, then like what's the point?
00:19:03
Speaker 1: To some people, it might sound weird that computer programmers would publicly have an argument over an app, but trust me, this stuff is very normal. Entire operating systems have been written because someone couldn't agree on something as minor as how the computer should boot up. The stakes just feel a lot higher here because both of these people really care about the cause of helping immigrants, and applying technology to civil rights issues is way harder than most people think. Just as an example, I have a friend who is working on a totally different national campaign to help undocumented immigrants. The project wasn't an app, but they created basically this downloadable infocard. The idea was that if you get stopped by ice, you could pull out your phone and you could pull up this card from a digital wallet and would have all this information on it, like your rights stay silent, your right to a lawyer, people to contact, things like that. And it looked really slick, and they had all these social media influencers who are excited about it, and they wanted to help them promote it, and things were looking great. But then they showed their project to some local groups who actually work with assisting undocumented immigrants, and the group said, no, this is not a good idea. You do not want people opening up their phone around ice because they might take it or they might coerce them into showing personal information. They said, look, here's what actually works in this community. Paper cards with your rights printed on it. If you want to help us, help us print those up and distribute them in a bunch of different languages. No digital nonsense, just paper. Now. The activists who worked on this other digital wallet thing were pretty humiliated, but they ended up taking the local group's advice and said, you know what, this is what's called being a good ally, and you know, maybe so. In software development, though there's a simpler term for it, we just call it user research, putting aside all the cool things that you want the user to do with your software and figuring out what the people who would actually use your software actually need.
00:21:00
Speaker 4: I think that if you're actually like doing user research, trying to figure out what do we need, there's a lot of undocumented people who work in like the service industry or who work in farming, and actually talking to those people, I think that what will be really helpful is to make it so that a bunch of people who like work in the kitchen at restaurants they know how to report an ICE sighting, because what happens when like ice comes into the restaurant, like someone should report it? Like, I don't know if you're going to get like the people who really need this, most of them don't have iPhones right to begin with. What you really need is like how do you get this person working in the kitchen to be able to report, oh, God, ice is here. And then at that point, what do you actually want? Do you just want to like tell people that ice is at this restaurant and then that's it, or do you want to actually like have community come out and support of the people there, start documenting stuff, start providing legal support. I think it's kind of shortsighted, Like none of this has been really like thought through. It's more just like, ooh, location based apps are cool. It's a really hard problem. We can't use technology to solve this problem. It's a political problem. We need your restore democracy, and an app is not gonna help us restore democracy.
00:22:12
Speaker 1: So after all this, you've written about this, you've kind of gone back and forth, but then just recently the app gets taken out of the app store m H. And then the day after that there's a similar app that gets pulled off the Google Play Store.
00:22:29
Speaker 3: Apple says it took it down due to safety risks, and they're not the only ones. Google says they removed similar apps from the app store for Android devices, and all of it coming as Ice is ramping upraids across the country.
00:22:43
Speaker 1: Apple removed ice Block from their app store and Google removed a similar app called red Dot. Considering that Micah had been criticizing ice Block, you might think that he'd be happy about this. Well, no, he's not, and he says that this is a sign of a bigger problem. That's after the break in early October, Apple removed ice Block from the app store, no warning, just gone. But it wasn't just ice Block. Other apps also disappeared, like, for example, an app called eyes Up. This app was different from ice Block. It wasn't about real time location reporting. It was just about preserving evidence of encounters with Ice and maintaining a public record that couldn't be hidden or censored.
00:23:35
Speaker 4: And so it's like people keep posting videos to like TikTok, to Instagram, to cts of Ice arresting people and being violent with people, and this is just an app that archives them.
00:23:47
Speaker 5: That's it. It's a map, and.
00:23:49
Speaker 4: You can browse the map, and you can click on an area, and you click on a video and watch the video. It's just archiving ice abuse with the goal of preserving evidence in case the materials ever needed in court. On the Fitch and Apple just took this down as well. And I think that both Apple and Google they got a bunch of pressure from Paanbandi from the Department of Justice, and they both basically did this like absolutely mind boggling thing where they're basically saying that, like masked ice stones are a protected class.
00:24:19
Speaker 1: Now that phrasing might sound weird, but it's not something that Mike had just made up. Google told four or four Media that they had, and I'm reading four or Four's article on this, removed apps because they shared the location of what it describes as a vulnerable group that recently faced a violent act connected to those sorts of ice spotting apps. I won't editorialize here, but I'll just point out that Google calling ICE, which again is a government agency, a vulnerable group, is unusual for a tech company. Before this, the only people using this sort of language was the Trump administration.
00:24:54
Speaker 4: I think that the bigger picture for me is that we have like a duopoly smartphones. We have iPhones and we have Android phones. That's it, and both of them are now just like arms of the US government. I think that they've both had like various histories of removing apps from the app stores. But I feel like this is actually really dangerous, not just for apps that like activists might rely on in the United States, but like around the world, all of the phones that everyone in the world uses.
00:25:25
Speaker 5: Are essentially like what software they're allowed to run.
00:25:27
Speaker 4: On those are controlled by the Trump administration, And that's like a really bad situation to be in for the world. This experience is showing that, like in the United States, if you're trying to like fight ice abuses, or if you're trying to do anything that like the trauma administration doesn't like.
00:25:44
Speaker 5: I think that we need to.
00:25:45
Speaker 4: Stop relying on apps, start relying on websites, stop relying on US companies because we can't trust them, right.
00:25:52
Speaker 5: I think that this is not a good sign for things to come.
00:25:57
Speaker 1: When you say something like the what we're allowed to put on our phones is basically controlled by the Trump and administration sounds kind of nuts, But you know, maybe it's not an overstatement, given that ice Block was repeatedly called out by the Trump administration as being something that they did not want available, and then it becomes not available, and then a similar app becomes not available anymore on both the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store.
00:26:24
Speaker 4: Tam Bondi has given interviews being like, oh, yeah, we went to Apple and Google. We told them to like, you know, they need to do more to protect ice Yeah. And in fact, actually, just like last week, tam Bondi testified in front of Congress where she said that, like they asked them to remove ice Block, and she said that ice block was posting the home addresses of ice officers and it was dosing them and that's not what ice block was doing. But that was just just like a little example of lying under oath that Lottie's just dead.
00:26:53
Speaker 5: Last week.
00:26:54
Speaker 1: Let me ask you this, the ice Block got removed from the Apple App Store. Do you think it should be rein stated? Do you think it should be back up? Oh?
00:27:02
Speaker 4: Yeah, absolutely. I don't think it's that useful. But I feel like this is like a bigger issue regardless of what the problems are with this one app, Like anyone that wants to make an app that whatever their idea is, that they should be able to make those apps. It's fundamentally it's like a free speech essuo. It's not very good for democracy that these two major corporations that are basically like just like bending the knee to authoritarianism control the gates.
00:27:31
Speaker 1: Free speech might not be something you would think applies to computer code, but actually it does. In nineteen ninety nine, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled the code was considered speech. A grad student had written an encryption program and wanted to publish the code online, but under US law, encryption was basically treated like a weapon. If this student wanted to share his code, he would have had to register as an arms dealer and get government approval. The student sued, and the court eventually ruled that those restrictions had violated his First Amendment rights. He could publish his code, and now if you got code, you want to publish, so can you.
00:28:08
Speaker 4: The Core ruled that, hey, this is this person's speech. This code that they wrote is their speech. We can't restrict their speech because of the First Amendment. That's what made encryption legal in the United SAIDs.
00:28:21
Speaker 1: But true free speech in this context becomes kind of irrelevant when Apple has made it so that basically nothing can be installed on their iPhone without going through the official app store first. So what about Google. Well, Android, historically you've basically been able to treat it like any other computer. Most people just use the Google Play Store, but if you wanted to, you could do something called sideloading and pretty easily install whatever you want on your phone. But starting next year, Google's going to require that all apps, whether downloaded from the Google Play Store or not, be verified by them.
00:28:53
Speaker 4: The change that Google is making is basically preventing any app that's not digitally signed by Google Key from getting installed on your phone. It basically is like essentially getting rid of sideloading and making it so that you can't run anything on your phone if it's not approved by Google.
00:29:10
Speaker 1: Which is kind of nuts, right because I mean, if you told somebody you know, you're not allowed to have certain programs on your Windows machine. I mean, first off, Napster never would have happened. Ever, that that entire saga never would have happened, which maybe you think it shouldn't. But the idea that if there's an app that the app store doesn't want you to have, or that a certain company doesn't want you to have, and they don't want you to have it because a government doesn't want you to have it. I mean, these are the things that freak people out about other countries, and this is now something that we deal with the United States.
00:29:43
Speaker 5: We in the United States have been very privileged.
00:29:46
Speaker 4: It's like we're not used to getting everything like spied on as much as we as other countries are. We're used to being in this privileged situation where all of this technological dystopia stuff happens to other people. I think that's over. I think it's gonna start happening to us now too.
00:30:05
Speaker 1: For you looking at ice Block and looking that everything's happened since it was banned and all that, what are you thinking about now and what do you think other people should be thinking about.
00:30:18
Speaker 4: I'm thinking that we can't rely on apps anymore. Like I rely so much on the Signal app. That's the number one app that I use a whole lot. And I think that for the moment, signal safe, especially because if Trump people all use it. But I could totally foresee a future soon where basically the Trump administration is like, no, we want a back to around a signal because Antifa uses it. And then I think that there might be some sort of signal might not be allowed to be installed on iPhones or Android phones.
00:30:48
Speaker 1: So this really isn't about ice block or any app in particular for Micah, the solution might not be in an app.
00:30:55
Speaker 4: I think that what you need to do is find like trusted local grips. So there are people all over the country locally that are organizing. And if you live in a town where there are a bunch of immigrants and there isn't like a support network that already exists, then maybe you should start like talking to people there and start one. If you care about this stuff and you want to get involved, you should actually talk to people and not just play on your phone.
00:31:20
Speaker 1: As complicated as this might be, ice Block did serve a purpose for people. It's gone now and it's only getting harder to find out what Ice is doing. But Ice is expanding their ability to find out what we're doing. Ice recently signed a deal with a facial recognition company, Clearview AI. They've bought spyware that's supposed to be able to hack into lock smartphones and extract data. And they've also announced that they're planning to launch a social media monitoring team that's aimed at tracking people based on the posts that they make online. The Department of Homeland Security has claimed that their officials are now facing a quote more than one thousand percent increase and assault against them, and their families are being doxed and threatened online.
00:32:03
Speaker 5: Quote.
00:32:04
Speaker 1: They haven't explained where they're getting that thousand percent figure from. And I don't think you can call an app that reports sightings as dosing. But after those apps were taken down, a group of hackers have posted the names and some personal information of hundreds of government officials, including people working for DHS and ICE. But bringing it back to ice block for just a minute, for real computer programmers arguing in public is very normal. I mean, there could be a whole Netflix series of just computer beef. I mean, episode one, WordPress versus WP Engine, Episode two, GPL versus BSD, Episode three, whatever the hell they're doing over at Ruby Central right now. Maybe this stuff sounds weird to you, but just going back to how computer code was defined legally as free speech and follow me here. If we think of speech as expression and as art. I think it makes sense. I mean, you pour hours of your life into creating things, gonna care about the craft and the product, and add on top of that the stakes. If people can disagree over a bootloader, of course they're going to disagree on the best way to help people that they care about. A lot of times activist groups agree with each other on like ninety nine percent of things. They just disagree with each other on how something should be done. Software is no different from that, and that is gonna be it for this one. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of kill Switch. If you want to email us, we're at kill Switch at Kaleidoscope dot NYC or on Instagram we're at kill switchpods. And also we got some good news. Kill Switch just won gold in the Technology category with the Signal Awards. So shout out and thank you to everyone who's been with us. As you know, we keep trying to figure out how to navigate living in the future. And if you like our show and help us win some more awards, you know, why not leave us a review. It helps other people find the show, which in turn helps us keep doing our thing. And in case you didn't know, kill Switch is on YouTube, so if you've ever been wondering what the Fisker cars or the anime VTuber avatars look like, there you go. The link for that and everything else is in the show notes. Killswitch is hosted by Me Dexter Thomas. It's produced by Sena Ozaki, Darluk Potts, and Julia Nutter. Our theme song is by me and Kyle Murdoch, and Kyle also mixes the show. From Kaleidoscope. Our executive producers are Ozma lashin On, Gesh Hadi Kadur, and Kate Osborne. From iHeart, our executive producers are Katrina Norvil and Nikki E. Tor
