Introducing Levittown, new podcast from Kaleidescope and Bloomberg

Have you ever been deepfaked? Or maybe this is just a new fear – that photos of you end up online that are you – but not really you? What would you do? For an increasing number of people – especially women – this is becoming a reality. So much so that a recent bill in Congress called the “Take It Down” Act has found some incredibly rare bipartisan support. The bill is sponsored by republican Senator Ted Cruz and democrat Senator Amy Klobuchar – making it illegal to post explicit deepfakes – First Lady Melania Trump has also been a vocal supporter. But the thing is, it isn't law yet and… it might not be enough. A new podcast called Levittown, from Bloomberg and Kaleidoscope Podcasts, takes listeners on a sort of cyber thriller for the AI age. It's the story of a bunch of young women in the suburbs of Long Island who find naked fakes of themselves online and when told there’s nothing they can do about it – set out to catch the perpetrator. This ends up connecting them to a web of online vigilantes – and cyber criminals taking advantage of a justice system not ready for the reality of AI. Endless Thread brings you the first episode in this series. If you like what you hear – find Levittown wherever you like to get your podcasts to listen to the full series.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Support for WBUR comes from the Quiet Tension Podcast. When Joe Missoula got the Celtics job, Steve Paliuka sat up until 1:00 in the morning, typing him 25 things about leadership. Dr. Sharon Turbin asks what came first on the list. Listen closely wherever you get your podcasts.

• 0:19Speaker 01

  Support for Endless Thread comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink software to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at mathworks.com.

• 0:34Speaker 02

  Welcome to the 50th Hunger Games. Witness the beginning of the revolution.

• 0:38Speaker 03

  Hey Mitch, you've been trying to take down these games from the start.

• 0:41Speaker 02

  Film for IMAX.

• 0:43Speaker 03

  Make them remember you.

• 0:45Speaker 02

  The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping, November 20th, rated PG-13.

• 0:50Ben Brock Johnson?

  Hey friends. If you're a regular Endless Thread listener, you know from deepfakes. We've had deepfake episodes about audio, about video, about cheerleaders, about the law. And what we've learned over time while reporting on this topic is that over time, being deepfaked has become a threat for an increasing number of people, especially women. We want to introduce you to a new show we think our listeners would enjoy. It's called Levittown. It's from Bloomberg and Kaleidoscope, and it's a kind of cyber thriller for the age of AI. Levittown follows a bunch of young women in the suburbs of Long Island who find naked fakes of themselves online. And when told there's nothing they can do about it,

• 1:34Ben Brock Johnson?

  set out to catch the perpetrator. This ends up connecting them to a web of online vigilantes and cybercriminals taking advantage of a justice system not ready for the reality of artificial intelligence. We're bringing you the first episode in the series. And if you like what you hear, you can find Levittown wherever you get your podcasts to listen to the full series.

• 2:08Speaker 05

  This series explores sexualized imagery involving minors and violence. Please take care when listening.

• 2:26Speaker 05

  Can we start from the beginning? How did this all start for you?

• 2:32Speaker 06

  So, I can like go back into it. I remember somehow all these pictures from my Instagram, my Visco, were all on this website.

• 2:47Speaker 06

  There was one picture of me in a bathing suit. Well, it was me in a bathing suit in one of my friend's backyards. And I didn't have a bathing suit on anymore.

• 3:08Speaker 06

  And it was just me naked.

• 3:11Speaker 06

  Well, not me, but me with someone else's body parts on my body parts.

• 3:21Speaker 06

  It was just boobs and body parts. Um, completely nude. That looked so much like my own body.

• 3:35Speaker 06

  There were so many different pictures from my social media on essentially a porn website.

• 3:46Speaker 06

  I was just trying to figure out exactly like, where is this coming from? Like, how are they finding my stuff? I didn't let people follow me that I didn't know. So it was always in the back of my head like, oh, it's someone that I know. But how do you find out who that someone is when you know so many people from school, soccer, all these things?

• 4:14Speaker 05

  Did you ever have any suspicions as to who it was back then?

• 4:19Speaker 06

  No, not at all. It was always like, why is this happening? Who is this?

• 4:46Speaker 05

  Kayla was 20 years old and living at home with her parents in a town that was once the picture of the American dream. A Long Island suburb called Levittown. We're driving around Levittown. A lot of white picket fences, a lot of American flags. It has the feel of going back in time.

• 5:10Speaker 07

  This is Levittown, one of the most remarkable housing developments ever conceived.

• 5:15Speaker 05

  It's the kind of America that makes you think of the 1950s. Cookie cutter, single-family houses. Like someone hit Ctrl+C on the ideal suburban house and then pasted it over and over on street after street.

• 5:34Speaker 07

  The idea that came to a man named Bill Levitt was this. Why not apply to the building of houses the same principles that have brought other American industries to their unexcelled peaks of efficiency and service?

• 5:44Speaker 05

  Levittown was built for veterans returning from World War II as the picture of white suburbia. Perfect houses, manicured lawns.

• 5:55Speaker 07

  Dotted here and there throughout the huge area are shopping centres where every type of product or service is readily available. Shoe stores, five-and-dimes, department stores.

• 6:10Speaker 05

  Today, we often talk about the future as digital. Algorithms and codes as the architecture of our lives. But back then, Levittown was the imagined future. It just feels like quite suburban and safe. You know, it feels like the kind of place that nothing really happens around here. And yet, underneath the facade of perfect order, it's here I found a story unfolding of a group of women faced with a new reality none of them wanted. A technological reality spinning out of control.

• 6:57Speaker 05

  It's like this is not the setting for a horror movie. And that's exactly what played out. But this isn't your average horror story. The kind where a group of teens are hunted down until there's only one left standing. In this story, they flip the script. Band together and fight back alongside some unexpected global allies. Forcing law enforcement and tech companies to sit up and take notice.

• 7:40Speaker 05

  From iHeart Podcasts, Bloomberg and Kaleidoscope, this is Lever Town. I'm Olivia Carville.

• 7:57Speaker 05

  Over the summer, our producer, Julia Nuttner, and I made the drive out to Long Island to meet Kayla at her family home.

• 8:08Speaker 05

  I can hear music.

• 8:12Speaker 05

  Hey Kayla, how are you?

• 8:14Speaker 06

  It's so nice to see you again.

• 8:15Speaker 05

  It's good news to see you too. How are you feeling?

• 8:17Speaker 06

  I'm good. Let me just do a quick levels check. Oh, do you want me to put the bird in another room? I didn't even hear the bird. Oh my God, the bird.

• 8:26Speaker 05

  Kayla's like a firecracker. She's small but loud with brightly coloured hair. Every time I've seen her, her hair is a different colour. She's covered in tattoos and piercings.

• 8:38Speaker 06

  What kind of bird is that?

• 8:40Speaker 05

  A parakeet. So he likes to talk to himself a lot.

• 8:47Speaker 05

  Do you feel comfortable showing us where you were when you discovered the website, when you were showing it? Yeah. It's a little messy. Kayla's 24 now. When we visited her, she was living in the same house she grew up in.

• 9:03Speaker 06

  And it is great. This is, as you can tell, I love my books.

• 9:08Speaker 05

  In high school, Kayla was an elite athlete and a girl who moved easily between friend groups.

• 9:15Speaker 06

  People make it seem like there's either the popular group or, you know, so-called nerds. I would like to say I was in the middle of it because I hung out with a lot of the sports people who were considered popular. But I had my friends who, we would just sit around and play video games, hang out, do funny things and make videos of us doing stupid little things.

• 9:45Speaker 06

  I say this to my friends, actually, all the time. I may not dress like it, but my inner person is kind of emo. I listen to a lot of dark music now. I have the tattoos all over, I have piercings all over. And I truly just like, it's not like I like the colour black. I just like, I changed a lot. I have a really big book tattoo on my leg. I have a big wraparound plants because my whole leg is going to be things I love and plants is another thing for me. This one is one of my favourites. It's "Tell Me About Tomorrow".

• 10:27Speaker 06

  "Tell Me About Tomorrow" is one of my favourite songs because whenever I'm in a depressive state or just not doing good mentally, I play that song and it tells you to tell me about tomorrow. Tell me about the next day that's going to go on in your life. When I was going through this situation, I was not mentally doing good at all. And it told me you will have tomorrow and you can have tomorrow.

• 10:57Speaker 05

  It sounds like a lot of the tattoos are important to you because they represent you moving forward or healing or getting over the situation, as you described it. Do you feel comfortable getting into that now? Yes.

• 11:16Speaker 06

  I remember being in my bed, just laying down. It was late at night.

• 11:21Speaker 05

  This was in March 2020, at the onset of the Covid pandemic. She'd recently graduated from high school and was stuck at home with her parents.

• 11:31Speaker 06

  I was in that corner. My bed was up against the wall.

• 11:37Speaker 06

  I was just laying in the bed. I'm pretty sure I was on my phone, just scrolling through Instagram or something, or on Snapchat.

• 11:45Speaker 05

  She heard her dad walking up the stairs from the living room.

• 11:49Speaker 06

  I can always hear when someone comes up the stairs and he knocks. He always knocks on the door. So he knocked and just like walked right in. I thought automatically like I was in trouble or something. But then I could just like tell like he was just confused. And he was like a little hesitant to like come up to me. I could tell.

• 12:12Speaker 06

  And he was just like, what is this?

• 12:16Speaker 05

  What is this? What was he showing you?

• 12:19Speaker 06

  I think it was the website.

• 12:22Speaker 05

  It was the faked picture of her naked. And next to it, a poll asking the site's users to rank what they wanted to do to her sexually.

• 12:34Speaker 05

  This next part is graphic and it might be difficult to hear.

• 12:39Speaker 06

  It was...

• 12:45Speaker 06

  I always had trouble saying these parts. It was drink her piss, milk her, have her drink my piss. And there was something else and I can't entirely remember what the other one was.

• 13:03Speaker 05

  So they were ranking what they wanted to do to you sexually?

• 13:06Speaker 06

  Yes. Yeah.

• 13:10Speaker 05

  She kept scrolling and it got worse.

• 13:13Speaker 06

  You could see what they posted, like their nude pictures and them jerking off and coming on our pictures. Even like pictures of our pictures with their dicks there and the ejaculation there. And then there was like some like writings of like, um, rap her.

• 13:44Speaker 06

  My dad was very confused. He asked me what this was and how did it get up there? And I did not know because I've never seen it before, which I obviously told him.

• 14:01Speaker 06

  So that's how we found out about the website.

• 14:15Speaker 00

  Support for WBUR comes from the Quiet Tension Podcast. There's a part of high performance that drives you, shapes you, and pulls at you too. Rarely spoken, almost never examined. That's the quiet tension. Coming up, psychologist and executive coach Dr. Sharon Churbin with Steve Paliuka on what separates the leaders people follow from the ones they don't. Stay with us for a preview. Listen closely wherever you get your podcasts. Support for WBUR comes from Heading Home. Homelessness isn't always visible. Many families continue working, sending their children to school, and participating in their communities while quietly experiencing housing instability.

• 14:59Speaker 00

  Heading Home, the largest family shelter provider in Massachusetts, has been working to prevent and end homelessness for more than 50 years. Join their mission and see how you can help at headinghomeinc.org.

• 15:16Speaker 05

  Kayla says her dad is a big guy, big personality like her. Loud laugh. Back then, he was a police officer, a beat cop, really, for the Nassau County Police Department. He didn't want to talk to us for this podcast, but Kayla says he's really protective of his kids, which means he regularly Googles their names, searching the internet for anything related to them.

• 15:42Speaker 06

  For me specifically, I was playing soccer competitively. So when I was going to college and playing soccer then, he just got nervous. When they search things, he doesn't want them to see things are wrong. Or... You know, like, exactly what we found.

• 16:04Speaker 05

  When he shows you the phone, what is the photograph on the phone that you're looking at? The specific photo that that you first see?

• 16:12Speaker 06

  I'm almost positive it was the one um with the bikini taken off my body. And it was just me naked. Well, not me, but me with someone else's body parts on my body parts that looked exactly like my own.

• 16:33Speaker 05

  Was there ever a moment, even a split second moment, that you thought it was you naked?

• 16:39Speaker 06

  Yes. I definitely, like, at first, like, I was like, oh, my god, that's me. Like, how did they get that? But then I was like, no, that's in my friend's backyard. Like, I was obviously wearing a bikini, and I remember the bikini, it was a blue one. And it was mesh a little bit, so that's why I would think it was so easy for them to completely alter the picture. But I just like instantly was like, whoa, how? How did they get that picture of me? Like, I never took a picture like that. It was frightening how exact it looked.

• 17:21Speaker 05

  The website it was on was called ComeOnPrintedPics.com. And it encouraged its members to do exactly what that title implies. To print out photos of girls and young women and masturbate to them. And then to post a photo of the user's erection or ejaculation on top of that image. This is a practice they called tributing.

• 17:50Speaker 06

  To have to see my dad find all of that and like, I don't know, like, just not understanding what's going on. I didn't even know anything was going on. And then my dad just coming in and seeing all that, it's like, nobody wants to see that, but like, to have your dad see that, that's like,

• 18:12Speaker 06

  not even uncomfortable. Like, that's not even a word for it, but just like unimaginable.

• 18:23Speaker 05

  I wish I could tell you that this website was tucked away in the dark web, where users needed to download a special browser or slink through some other secret cyberdoor. But it wasn't. It was just out, in the open.

• 18:40Speaker 05

  Kayla was out in the open too. Postings on the site included her real name, which is how her dad found it. Sometimes the images posted to the website were actual, unaltered photos, revenge porn-type stuff. But often, the original photos were taken from innocent social media posts, like Kayla's. And then the site's users turned those images into non-consensual pornography, often with underage subjects.

• 19:15Speaker 05

  This type of photo manipulation was new to Kayla, but it wasn't new to me. I'd been starting to see more of it. Over the past few years, I've been reporting on big tech and social media platforms, what they're doing or not doing to prevent harm to kids, what guardrails they're putting up to stop exactly this kind of thing from happening. And images like these were starting to multiply with shocking speed alongside the rise of artificial intelligence. I kept hearing more and more about the dark side of this new technology, about deep fakes.

• 19:55Speaker 07

  Altered videos online, known as deep fakes. The rise of deep fakes. Computer-generated videos, known as deep fakes. Deep fake videos make people appear to say things they never did or never would.

• 20:07Speaker 05

  It's getting harder and harder to trust our eyes and ears. When I first heard about the Levittown case, I knew the reporting was going to take me to some uncomfortable but important places. From the rise of generative AI to the explosion of deep fakes, to child sexual abuse material online. I also knew that it was going to be really hard to find the victims and dive into this website on my own. So I turned to my colleague for help, Margie Murphy. She's a technology reporter at Bloomberg.

• 20:43Speaker 00

  At the time, I remember I was reporting on this new generative AI tool that people were using to create child sexual abuse material. I typically write about people who hide on the fringes of the internet, like teenage hackers extorting global businesses, or cyber criminals using AI to scam people. Not that long ago, when I started on this beat, deepfakes weren't that easy to make, and kind of always had a tell. If you looked at them long enough, you would notice something was off. Yet they caught your attention.

• 21:14Speaker 01

  With AI, there's been so much innovation.

• 21:18Speaker 00

  But in the last few years, there have been rapid breakthroughs in machine learning.

• 21:22Speaker 01

  Amazon investing up to $4 billion in startup Anthropic. Microsoft reportedly investing $10 billion in OpenAI.

• 21:30Speaker 00

  And truly hundreds of millions of dollars has flowed into image generating software powered by AI.

• 21:37Speaker 01

  Microsoft, Amazon, you name it, they are all actively investing in young AI startups.

• 21:44Speaker 00

  That has made it a lot cheaper and easier to make convincing photos or videos of pretty much anything you can think of. Now, there are billions upon billions of deepfake images out there. And this probably won't surprise you, but the vast, vast majority, by one estimate, more than 90% of all deepfake imagery, is pornographic. Typically, people who have had their image turned into porn have not consented to having their faces, bodies, or voices morphed in this way. A lot of people don't even know that these images of themselves exist. But as Olivia and I learned, Kayla's dad had found this website in a regular search of her name.

• 22:30Speaker 00

  And now he and Kayla knew it was there.

• 22:33Speaker 06

  Seeing what people had to say about my body as the pictures were like when I'm, what, 13, 14? I think I instantly cried. I was just like, I think I remember kind of like stating more to myself than anybody else. Like, why is this happening to me? Like, what is going on? Like, is this even real life? I felt betrayed by my body because it felt so real. Like, the pictures just seemed so real.

• 23:08Speaker 00

  The websites he uses also encouraged each other to comment on the image.

• 23:11Speaker 05

  And even harass the person being pictured.

• 23:16Speaker 06

  It's unimaginable to think that people can even say how gross like to tell you to rape me or milk me. I remember a lot of mine was with my braces because I had braces until I was in 11th grade. And then I had some pimples and I would see people saying that they loved my brace face and my pimples on my face, they like them younger.

• 23:49Speaker 05

  Did you actively search through the website for all photos of you and look at other photos on there and what the people were saying? Or did you just, could you just not look at it at all?

• 24:00Speaker 06

  No, I constantly looked at it. I was searching to see if there were new pictures that would be uploaded.

• 24:09Speaker 05

  After learning about the website, Kayla's biggest question was, who did this?

• 24:18Speaker 05

  Who went through the trouble of scraping her pictures from social media, editing them to make her look naked, and then posting them on this site, asking others to harass her? She wanted it to stop, so she took a break from VSCO, a photo sharing app.

• 24:37Speaker 06

  Because I started to notice that was the main place that they took my pictures from.

• 24:42Speaker 05

  I mean, for you, you can't unsee that. That's your body and that's someone putting it out there naked on this website. How do you survive and how do you cope?

• 24:54Speaker 06

  I quite literally just put it in the back of my head and moved on and just did not think about it, tried not to think about it.

• 25:06Speaker 06

  We are still on lockdown, so I was stuck with my thoughts a lot, but I was also stuck with my family. We all kind of just put it in the back of our heads and essentially, basically pretended that it never happened.

• 25:22Speaker 05

  Kayla didn't tell anyone about it, not even her friends, though her father reached out to his colleagues at the Nassau County Police Department. He wanted to know, what could they do to help Kayla?

• 25:36Speaker 06

  My dad did seek advice to his buddies at work. He did ask if there was anything that they could do, but his buddies really didn't know how to go about it because it's so hard to trace like those types of websites when they're all anonymous and they're essentially a porn website, so it's really hard to trace those back to the original owner or anything like that.

• 26:01Speaker 05

  Bear in mind, this was happening in 2020, when the term deepfakes wasn't as widespread or recognised as it is now. And there weren't any laws, federal or in New York State at this time, to prevent faked pornographic images of real people.

• 26:17Speaker 06

  I didn't really know what there was to do after my dad already tried to contact the police department and his buddies. Um, and them just telling us that like there really was not much that they can do. Going through a complete and trying to go through all the steps that it took, I just don't think I was, I was strong enough at that moment.

• 26:43Speaker 05

  And as more time passed, can you describe how your feelings about that website and those photos changed?

• 26:52Speaker 06

  I think, um, after some time, I stopped looking at the website, um, put it in the back of my head. But it completely altered the way that I thought about my body. And, um, there's this thing called body dysmorphia. Your brain alters the way that you look at your body. And I completely went through that. I used to feel so confident about it because I was an athlete. I felt so in tune with my body. And then it completely changed. I started having eating issues and wasn't able to eat full meals. I Would feel sick after eating. I couldn't even eat three bites of food. I would eat

• 27:36Speaker 06

  two bites and feel absolutely disgusted in what I'm eating and disgusted in my body for wanting food. It completely changed just who I was as a person. I completely got depressed and just wasn't myself.

• 27:53Speaker 05

  And that's where the story could have ended, with Kayla's faked pictures still online, and her and her dad not able to do anything about it. Her small, safe, suburban world turned upside down. But 10 months later, Kayla's phone rang.

• 28:09Speaker 06

  I got a call when I was working at my old job at a clothing store. It was around New Year's Eve. I remember it was like 7:40 and I was behind the register. It was very quiet in the store, so I was just on my phone. We weren't really supposed to be on our phones, but I just remember being on my phone. And I see one of the classmates, it was her dad's name popped up on my phone, which was so weird to me because I was like, I don't even have this number. Why are they calling me? And I just remembered the last name. And I answered and I was like, hello? And she's like, hi, this is blank. She goes, I saw

• 28:54Speaker 06

  you on the website. I just want to let you know I'm also on this website. And I remember just like walking away from the register and I was just like, okay, like, how many other people are on there? Who do you think it is? And that's when she said, I figured out who it was, I think.

• 29:26Speaker 05

  In an instant, Kayla's story got so much bigger. From there, it would stretch beyond her bedroom. Past the high school, out of Levittown, across the country and around the world. What she didn't and couldn't know, but what Olivia and I would learn through our investigation, was that there was a global web of cyber criminals, taking advantage of a plodding justice system, being pursued by online vigilantes and hackers, willing to take risks the cops and prosecutors wouldn't.

• 30:02Speaker 05

  The story took us from New York to small-town New Zealand, through the darkest corners of the internet, back into bedrooms of mid-century homes, lined up in neat little rows.

• 30:29Speaker 05

  This season on Levittown.

• 30:32Speaker 06

  There are things you don't want to believe about your friends. You kind of think that the people in your circle are like, you put them on a pedestal. This individual was just out to ruin their lives for no reason. It was a very new type of crime, where we, it was a grey area per se. You have certain police officers that will wait for calls to come in, and then they'll go and respond to those calls. I'm the person that will go and hunt people. They call it an arms race between law enforcement and technology. And it's just, we're losing. We are absolutely losing.

• 31:18Speaker 05

  This series is reported and hosted by Margie Murphy and me, Olivia Carville. Produced by Kaleidoscope. Led by Julia Nutt, edited by Neda Tului Semnani, producing by Dara Look Potts. Executive produced by Kate Osborne. Original composition and mixing by Steve Bone.

• 31:39Speaker 05

  Levittown archival clips, provided by Screen Ocean Clips and Footage. Our Bloomberg editors are Caitlin Kenny and Jeff Grokop. Additional reporting by Samantha Stewart. Sage Baumann is Bloomberg's executive producer and head of podcasting. Kristin Powers is our senior executive editor. From iHeart, our executive producers are Tyler Clang and Nikki Etor. Levittown is a production of Bloomberg, Kaleidoscope and iHeart Podcasts. If you liked this show, give us a follow and tell your friends.

• 32:21Speaker 00

  Support for WBUR comes from the Quiet Tension podcast with Dr. Sharon Churbin, psychologist, executive coach and a close listener to what lives beneath high performance. Here she is with Steve Paliuka, who built Bain Capital and helped bring a championship back to Boston, on the thing the best leaders do that most don't.

• 32:42Speaker 07

  The best leaders kind of give credit and take blame. When something goes wrong, they're the first ones to take responsibility for it. And they see the good in the other people on the team. They don't immediately try to deflect whatever problem there was, what went wrong. You miss the sales target on the salesperson, they reflect on themselves and what they could do better. Same thing, you know, what Joe Mazzulla does in basketball. If you see his press conferences and the Celtics don't play well, the first thing he says is, you know, I need to coach better. I made a mistake here, I made a mistake there. Not many coaches do that. But that's why the players, you know, love Joe and that's why, another reason he's a great coach. So there are things like that that you learn.

• 33:23Speaker 07

  There are many, many more things like that I learned from people like Red Auerbach and my classmates from business school and sports and all the rest.

• 33:32Speaker 00

  And really what an array of leaders, because leadership is both the same and different depending on the environment that you're in.

• 33:42Speaker 00

  Listen for more of the Quiet Tension wherever you get your podcasts.

• 33:48Speaker 02

  Witness the beginning of the revolution.

• 33:52Speaker 03

  Hey Mitch, you've been trying to take down these games from Star.

• 33:55Speaker 02

  Filmed for IMAX.

• 33:56Speaker 03

  Make them remember you.

• 33:59Speaker 02

  The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping, November 20th, rated PG-13.

• 34:03Speaker 00

  LinkedIn is pretty amazing at helping you grow your small business. We cannot stop your new clients from emailing you at 3 a.m.

• 34:12Speaker 00

  We can help you sell, market, and hire in one place. We cannot help you be in three places at once. And while we can't help you organize your calendar, LinkedIn can help you land more clients so you have a calendar to organize. Grow your small business on LinkedIn. Learn more at LinkedIn.com/smallbusiness.