This video starts with a mystery: in 2011, James and Theresa Arnold moved to a farm in
Butler County, Kansas, just north of the town of Potwin.
It was a quiet town.
A small town.
The kind of town you’d go to and think “gee, this town sure is small and quiet.”
A few days after the Arnolds moved in, though, two sheriff’s deputies showed up looking
for a stolen truck.
The Arnolds found this odd, as they hadn’t stolen a truck and, famously, police never
make mistakes—still, they didn’t think much of it.
But police kept showing up, looking for various stolen items.
So did FBI agents, looking for runaway children.
The IRS sent agents claiming the Arnolds had committed tax fraud.
Ambulances, searching for suicidal veterans, would barge onto the property at night, waking
them up.
They got threatening phone calls from people who claimed the Arnolds had scammed them out
of money, or stolen their credit cards.
Sometimes they’d find total strangers angrily searching through their barn, and one time
they found a broken toilet on their driveway, seemingly put there either as a bizarre, confusing
threat, or a bizarre, confusing gift.
So, why?
Why were the Arnolds undergoing this Kafkaesque torture?
Comment below if you’ve figured it out: your prize is increasing my comment engagement.
Also feel free to comment whether or not I used Kafkaesque correctly, because I’m pretty
sure I didn’t.
In order to understand the answer, we need to talk about MaxMind.
Despite sounding like a PBS series about a kid whose superpower is math, MaxMind is actually
a company that specializes in geolocating IP addresses.
Over 5,000 companies, plus a slew of government agencies, use MaxMind to figure out where
people are based on their IP addresses.
IP addresses, if you don’t know, are strings of numbers––or, in some cases, numbers
and letters––that are unique to your computer.
The same way a physical address allows your home to receive mail or Amazon packages, an
IP address allows your device to receive email or desperate Amazon attempts to make a new
Game of Thrones.
The thing is, while IP addresses are really good at communicating where your device is
within the internet, they aren’t really designed to communicate where that device
is physically.
That’s why IP mapping companies like MaxMind have to figure that out themselves, gathering
IP location info through everything from sophisticated methods like buying data from from smartphone
apps that track a phone’s GPS coordinates, to desperately sketchy methods like “war
driving,” where they send a bunch of people out in cars to find open Wi-Fi networks and
capture their IP addresses, like a slightly more depressing version of Pokemon Go.
Then people, companies, or agencies go to MaxMind’s database and go “Hey, where
is this IP address,” and MaxMind looks at all their data and goes, “uhhhh…
here, probably.”
The thing is, despite their best efforts, sometimes MaxMind can’t narrow the location
down all that much.
Maybe they can only figure out what city an IP address is in, but nothing more than that.
Or maybe they just know that it’s somewhere in Texas.
Or, in some cases, all MaxMind knows is that the IP address is in the United States.
So, what do they do in that scenario?
Well, the way MaxMind was designed, it still had to spit out coordinates.
So to indicate “all we know is, it’s in America,” MaxMind decided to just send users
coordinates that are in the center of America.
Except, not exactly, because the exact center of America has these long, ugly coordinates,
so MaxMind changed it to the short, sexy coordinates 38 degree north, 97 degrees west.
Normally, what you should do in a situation like this is make sure those coordinates are
in the middle of a lake or something, so that it’s clear to people you aren’t actually
trying to provide them with an actual, exact location.
But MaxMind, being a poor, naive, multi-million dollar tech company, didn’t think of that.
And you’ll never guess what just so happened to be on the exact coordinates of 38 degree
north, 97 degrees west: the Arnolds’ farm.
Well, actually you probably did guess it was the Arnolds farm.
It was pretty obvious from the build-up.
It turned out that there were over 600 million IP addresses that MaxMind showed as coming
from the Arnolds’ home.
So when the FBI was tracking the IP address of a kidnapper; or the IRS was tracking the
IP address of a fraudster; or some sad, lonely man was trying to figure out what monster
broke his brand new toilet, they would see that the IP address tracked to the Arnolds’
farm, and instead of realizing that was MaxMind’s way of saying “all we know is, they’re
in America,” they would assume that farm is where the IP address was actually coming
from, and go there in the middle of the night to wake up the Arnolds to question slash harass
slash provide unnecessary medical care to them.
The crazy thing is, the Arnolds had absolutely no idea why any this was happening for years
until a reporter named Kashmir Hill constructed a database of locations that had multiple
IP addresses mapped on them, noticed the Arnolds had a bonkers number of them, and then called
the farm to basically be like “Hey, just curious, has anything weird been happening
to you lately,” to which the Arnolds replied “is that a question or a threat?”
After learning what had been going on, the Arnolds sued MaxMind, who promptly moved the
default US location to the middle of a lake with no nice families living in it.
But seeing as a lot of their customer companies don’t update their data regularly, the Arnolds
still live in a tech-induced hellscape, which brings me to our sponsor: Meta.
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