Writing · topic · 55 articles
Disclosure regimes, nonprofit filings, public-records access, and how the accountability datasets are published as open data.
The 2025 federal inventory lists 3,611 agency-reported AI use cases and 445 designated high-impact systems. For 318 high-impact records, the agency left pre-deployment testing unstated; only 16 report an established appeal process. The blanks are disclosure facts, not proof a safeguard is absent — and the inventory spans every lifecycle stage, not only deployed systems.
Engineering and infrastructure · Transparency and open data · Federal data
In 2023, recycled passwords opened roughly 14,000 accounts at 23andMe and, through its relative-matching features, the profiles of millions. Within two years the genetic database had been fined on two continents and sold through a Chapter 11 auction for $305 million, under a court-appointed Consumer Privacy Ombudsman, over the objection of more than thirty states. The full custody chain — breach, penalty, bankruptcy, sale, and the 12-state statute wave that is its legacy — from the public record, via the new Genetic Privacy Ledger.
Cybersecurity and privacy · Finance and markets · Transparency and open data
Five days before the January 2021 order ending federal private-prison contracts, the Bureau of Prisons’ own feed recorded 14,095 people in 11 private facilities. Today it records zero — and it still records zero more than a year after the order was rescinded in January 2025. Both publicly traded operators state in their own SEC filings that they hold no BOP prison contracts. The two policy cycles behind the number, the removed Contract Prisons page, and the standing weekly tripwire on its return — all from BOP’s own numbers via the new BOP Ledger.
ICE publishes a price list for custody (203 detention facilities, 66,161 held on an average day) and a signature ledger (2,123 agreements deputizing 1,804 local agencies). Joined at the state level they draw one map: Texas leads both boards, California holds the third-largest detained population with zero agreements under a 2017 state law, West Virginia signed 38 agreements with no detention facility at all — and 86 percent of the detained population sits in states that signed up. Geography, not causation — the join stays inside what two files can prove.
Guaranteed-minimum contracts commit the government to paying for 45,621 detention beds whether or not anyone is in them. In ICE’s own file, 8,813 of those beds sat paid-for and empty at the 20 facilities running more than ten percent under their guarantee — while 36 facilities ran more than ten percent over. Two columns of the public file and a minus sign: the take-or-pay floor covering 76 percent of the detained population.
Justice and immigration · Government operations · Transparency and open data
Of 203 facilities in ICE’s own detention file, 61 carry no inspection result on record — 9,186 people held on an average day at facilities whose rating column is blank, 38 of them under the US Marshals Service umbrella. The blanks, the 21 missing inspection dates, the 73.1% of the population with no recorded threat level, and the 5 facilities that were inspected, failed, and still hold people.
Justice and immigration · Government operations · Transparency and open data
ICE’s own file lists 203 detention facilities holding 66,161 people on an average day — and federal records name a private operator for only 7 of them. The intergovernmental-agreement structure that ends the federal record at the county line, what the file does say (61 facilities with no inspection result on record, 8,813 guaranteed beds paid for and empty), and why “no private operator identified in federal records” is itself a finding.
The United States runs on 1.38 terawatts of generating capacity, and the federal filings say who owns every megawatt. Computed from Form EIA-860: independent power producers now out-own the investor-owned utilities on your bill; the federal government is one of the largest owners in the country; and a quarter-terawatt is jointly owned through capacity shares most customers have never heard of.
Ownership and consolidation · Environment and energy · Engineering and infrastructure · Transparency and open data
Section 117 requires American universities to disclose foreign gifts and contracts — but for most of the record, not who they came from. Computed from the federal file: 97 percent of the 62 billion disclosed dollars carry no source name, because the statute asks only for a country. The anonymity is not evasion; it is the design. What the law collects, what it hides, the 2019 enforcement spike, and what the DETERRENT Act fight would actually change.
Ownership and consolidation · Research and education · Transparency and open data
Since 1981 American universities have disclosed 62 billion dollars in foreign gifts and contracts under Section 117 of the Higher Education Act — 117,152 transactions at 528 institutions. A reading of the federal ledger: who received it, which countries and governments sent it, how it concentrates at the top, and what the disclosure regime does and does not reveal.
Ownership and consolidation · Research and education · Money in politics · Transparency and open data
Since 2020, export controls, CFIUS, outbound-investment screening, and the ICTS rules have all treated Hong Kong as part of China. The federal farmland register still counts it separately — which is why the most famous Chinese-linked land purchase in America sits outside the China total the debate cites. One territory, five federal answers, and 144,000 acres in the gap.
We took the largest conduit-flagged and no-country blocks in the US foreign farmland register and traced every ownership chain through public documents, with adversarial verification and a defamation review. Sovereign funds behind quiet flags, blank filings that resolve to Munich Re and the French state, a wall of fund structures whose investors no record names, and ghost entries carried for decades. The full map, chain by chain.
Between 2023 and 2025, most US states enacted or strengthened laws restricting foreign ownership of land — but the statutes disagree on who counts as a foreign adversary, whether Hong Kong counts as China, whether leases count as ownership, and who checks. What the laws say, the single completed enforcement action, and the broken federal register they all lean on.
State laws ban farmland ownership tied to foreign adversaries, but enforcement leans on a federal register that records only the first ownership tier. Computed from the government files: most register-flagged secondary Chinese interests sit behind holdings attributed to Singapore, Canada, Japan, and Hong Kong; one ChemChina-owned seed group appears under two country labels in a single file; and the acreage attributed to no country at all has grown six-fold since 2010.
Foreign persons report holding 46.3 million acres of US agricultural land — 3.6 percent of privately held farmland, nearly double the 2010 figure. Thirty state legislatures are writing laws about the number while almost nobody reads the register it comes from. A sourced walk through the AFIDA data: who holds American farmland, what held really means, and why the condition of the register is the sharpest finding in it.
Ownership and consolidation · Food and agriculture · Transparency and open data
The US organ-procurement, transplant, and tissue system, assembled from government records: hundreds of source-linked findings on a federally protected monopoly, the procurement-vs-care conflict at the bedside, the consent gaps over unclaimed bodies, the money, the prosecutions, and the sworn testimony. The index to the whole OrganWatch investigation. Institution level, zero personal data.
Organ and tissue industry · Health and medicine · Transparency and open data
For the first time, the US government grades every organ procurement organization on objective outcome measures and publishes the result. The tiers are damning: roughly a third of OPOs sit in the lowest band, which CMS itself deems out of compliance and eligible for decertification. A sourced reading of the CMS tier data — what the tiers mean, which OPOs are in Tier 3, and how the first-ever decertification finally happened.
Health and medicine · Organ and tissue industry · Transparency and open data
The consent gaps in US body donation exist because there is a paying market on the other side. A sourced account of the demand side: medical-device companies that run cadaver labs, the US military buying donated bodies for blast and landmine testing, surgical-training firms, and the per-part price market that moved tens of thousands of bodies — all lawful, because federal law bars selling organs for transplant but barely touches the non-transplant body trade.
Health and medicine · Organ and tissue industry · Transparency and open data
The consent gaps in US body and tissue donation are not theoretical — they have a criminal record. A sourced account of the court cases: a $58.5M verdict against an Arizona body-donation company, federal prison for operators who sold bodies with forged consent, convictions for shipping disease-infected tissue, and the 2025 Harvard Medical School morgue trafficking case — set against the law that bans selling transplant organs but barely touches the non-transplant body trade.
Health and medicine · Organ and tissue industry · Transparency and open data
If you died unclaimed, could your body be sent for dissection or research without consent? The answer depends almost entirely on the state. Reading the statutes for all 51 US jurisdictions finds that 33 permit use of an unclaimed or indigent body without affirmative next-of-kin consent, and only 13 require consent. A sourced, de-identified map of the 50-state patchwork.
Health and medicine · Organ and tissue industry · Transparency and open data
The hardest question in the US organ system is at the bedside of the dying: when does recovery begin, and who is watching for the patient rather than the organ? In 2025 a federal HRSA review of 351 donation-after-circulatory-death cases found concerning features in roughly 29% and concluded a number of patients may not have been deceased when procurement began. A sourced, de-identified account of the dead-donor rule, the NRP controversy, the premature-procurement findings, and the structural conflict behind them.
Health and medicine · Organ and tissue industry · Transparency and open data
Organ donation is free; the system around it is not. The federally designated OPOs are cost-reimbursed regional monopolies, and the largest are nonprofits reporting $100M+ revenue with seven-figure executive pay. A sourced follow-the-money account — the cost-plus model, the OPTN contract, the Senate Finance finding that OPOs have stronger incentives for tissue than for lifesaving organs, the for-profit tissue pipeline, lobbying against reform, and the federal audits. Institution/role level, zero personal data.
Health and medicine · Organ and tissue industry · Transparency and open data
When a person dies unclaimed or indigent in America, the law in most states lets their body be sent for dissection, research, or the for-profit body trade with no next-of-kin consent required. A sourced account of the consent gap — the state unclaimed-body statutes, the documented University of North Texas case, the coroner cornea-removal laws and the court split over whether a body is property, and the FDA exemption that leaves whole bodies and tissue barely regulated while transplant organs are tightly governed.
Health and medicine · Organ and tissue industry · Transparency and open data
The US organ-procurement system is a federally regulated monopoly — 56+ Organ Procurement Organizations with exclusive territories feeding a national network that had one contractor for nearly four decades. Its failures are documented by the government itself: a CMS performance rule, a bipartisan Senate Finance investigation, HRSA’s breakup of the monopoly, GAO and HHS-OIG audits, and in 2025 the first move to decertify an OPO. Sourced, with the public data behind it.
Health and medicine · Organ and tissue industry · Transparency and open data
Information-rights posture has two axes — how open the government is (Right to Information) and how protected the citizen is (Data Protection). Joining the two new Voidly datasets on country (a rare exact key), this maps the two-by-two space and the real tension where privacy law is used to deny access and openness without protection exposes individuals.
Censorship and information control · Cybersecurity and privacy · Transparency and open data
There is no single US cyber-breach registry. One incident can surface in three unconnected federal places — CISA’s KEV catalog (the exploited vulnerability), an SEC 8-K Item 1.05 filing (the material event), and the HHS OCR breach portal (health data) — each with a different trigger, threshold, and clock. A guide to joining them by victim organization and date.
Cybersecurity and privacy · Finance and markets · Transparency and open data · Engineering and infrastructure
A company can be on a US government list and it can mean five completely different things — an OFAC asset freeze, a BIS export-license denial, an NS-CMIC securities ban, a UFLPA import ban, or an FCC equipment-authorization bar. A field guide to telling the five regimes apart and why conflating them is wrong — the taxonomy behind SpyLedger and the sanctions-programs reference.
Three public datasets describe how organizations try to shape government and what they receive: FEC campaign finance (who gives), lobbying disclosures (who lobbies), and USAspending (who wins contracts). Joined on organization + parent name — there is no shared identifier — with the honest correlation-not-causation caveat.
Money in politics · Government operations · Transparency and open data · Engineering and infrastructure
A tax-exempt organization’s partial federal footprint — IRS recognition records, any required Form 990 filings, and USAspending grants, contracts, and subawards — joined only where a stable identifier supports the match. It distinguishes federal award obligations from grants made and cash outlays, preserves church filing exceptions, and documents the gaps that break the join.
Transparency and open data · Government operations · Engineering and infrastructure
Six federal datasets follow a prescription drug across its life — FDA approval, the National Drug Code directory, CMS Open Payments (manufacturer payments to prescribers), Medicare Part D prescribing and spending, and CDC overdose mortality — joined on the NDC code, ingredient, and manufacturer. The keys, the brand/generic and NDC-format gotchas, and what the assembled pipeline answers.
Health and medicine · Transparency and open data · Engineering and infrastructure
Voidly is sixteen datasets on how accountability is suppressed and reclaimed: network censorship, banned books, the surveillance industry, ownership opacity, foreign-held land, foreign money in universities, grid ownership, immigration detention and deputization, federal prisons, sanctions authorities, information and genetic rights, reported federal AI use, and the US organ system. One shared source-cited, agent-first, privacy-careful method.
Censorship and information control · Transparency and open data
The public-access status of 46 national beneficial-ownership registers (EU, UK, US, and major offshore centres) after the 2022 CJEU ruling — only 7 remain fully public. A record of corporate-transparency rollback as state behavior, with zero personal data, plus the open CC0 GLEIF ownership graph captured as the preservable counterweight.
Censorship and information control · Transparency and open data
The public corporate identity and government-designation status of 20 marquee spyware and mass-surveillance vendors (NSO Group, Intellexa, Hikvision, Huawei and more) — every designation rebuilt from a primary US/EU source and precisely typed: export control, sanction, equipment-authorization, or investment restriction.
Censorship and information control · Sanctions and illicit finance · Transparency and open data
A data read of the Verboten index across 119 countries: political content is the world’s #1 stated reason for banning a book (9,813 titles), LGBTQ+ bans are ~95% American, and the 2020s already hold 9,411 newly banned titles — the two censorship regimes and the four-century arc behind them.
Censorship and information control · Transparency and open data
A structured, source-cited index of book censorship worldwide — 19,283 banned or restricted titles across 119 countries — built on the CC-BY banned-books.org Open Censorship Core and served as static JSON for AI agents to query: is this book banned in that country, and why?
Censorship and information control · Transparency and open data · Engineering and infrastructure
The IRS publishes Form 990 filings for political organizations — 527 committees (direct political spending) and 501(c)(4) social welfare organizations (the dark money vehicle). The data covers revenue, expenditures, officer compensation, and political activities for 65,000+ organizations. Here is what the data contains, how to access it via ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer and the IRS bulk XML, and what it reveals about the shadow infrastructure of US political spending.
Federal data · Transparency and open data · Money in politics
When the SEC’s staff reviews a public company’s filings and has questions, it sends a comment letter — and EDGAR publishes both the staff’s questions and the company’s replies. This is the candid, lagged record of how disclosure standards get enforced in the space between formal enforcement actions: which accounting topics draw scrutiny, which companies got pushed, and how filings changed in response.
Finance and markets · Transparency and open data · Federal data
Oversight.gov is the single searchable library of federal Inspector General work, run by CIGIE to aggregate the audits, inspections, and investigations that some seventy-odd OIGs publish separately. This guide covers the Inspector General Act, CIGIE and the PRAC, recurring findings and open recommendations, how the catalog joins to spending and agency data, a worked Oversight.gov API walkthrough, and the caveats.
Government operations · Transparency and open data · Federal data
The Census Bureau's American Community Survey publishes 5-year estimates for every census tract in the US — income, poverty, race, housing tenure, education, employment, and 350+ other variables at the tract level. ACS is the denominator that makes every other federal dataset meaningful: HMDA denial rates per capita, OSHA injury rates per worker, SNAP participation per household. Here is what it contains, how to access it, and how to join it to enforcement data.
Federal data · Economy and demographics · Transparency and open data
After FOIA litigation, SBA public loan-level files cover 11.8 million loans and roughly $793 billion in approved principal. The records support aggregate analysis and exact-identifier linkage to identified official enforcement actions; servicing fields, fuzzy matches, and missing nonprofit records are not allegations.
Federal data · Finance and markets · Consumer protection · Transparency and open data
The STOCK Act requires members of Congress to report stock trades within 45 days. The House Clerk publishes scanned PDFs — not structured data. Here is how Quiver Quantitative, Capitol Trades, and journalists have structured this data, and what the disclosures reveal about trading patterns around legislation and committee assignments.
Federal data · Government operations · Transparency and open data
Schedule 13D is the federal filing an investor must submit on crossing 5 percent beneficial ownership of a US public company with intent to influence it — the document that turns a quiet stake into a public campaign, capturing the activist toeholds, proxy fights, and breakup demands of Icahn, Elliott, Pershing Square, and Starboard in near real time.
Finance and markets · Transparency and open data · Federal data
The IRS Exempt Organizations Business Master File is an account/status extract keyed by EIN and tagged with STATUS, subsection, NTEE sector, foundation type, ruling month, and financial fields. It is not a census or a uniform recognition list: self-declared organizations and churches that were not required to apply and did not apply are omitted.
The Corporate Prosecution Registry at Duke and UVA covers 3,000+ federal organizational prosecutions and every DPA/NPA since 1990 — including agreements DOJ refused to disclose under FOIA.
Federal data · Justice and immigration · Transparency and open data
foreignassistance.gov went dark on January 31, 2025. What the dataset contained, how it was archived, what the DOGE cuts actually targeted, and where to access it now.
Federal data · Government operations · Transparency and open data
USASpending.gov subaward data tracks the flow of federal money beyond the prime awardee — the sub-grants flowing from universities and state agencies to community organizations, and the sub-contracts from prime defense contractors to thousands of small suppliers, covering $500 billion+ in annual pass-through federal funding.
Government operations · Transparency and open data · Federal data
Grants.gov is the federal government unified portal for grant opportunities — listing every competitive federal grant, cooperative agreement, and other financial assistance opportunity from 26 grant-making agencies, covering $500 billion+ in annual awards to universities, state and local governments, nonprofits, and businesses across every federal program area.
Government operations · Research and education · Transparency and open data · Federal data
IRS Criminal Investigation is the only federal law enforcement agency with jurisdiction over federal tax crimes — filing 2,500-3,000 criminal cases per year with a 90%+ conviction rate covering tax evasion, money laundering, and identity theft refund fraud.
Transparency and open data · Sanctions and illicit finance · Federal data
The IRS EO BMF is a monthly account/status extract, not a census or a uniform recognition list. It omits self-declared organizations and churches that were not required to apply and did not apply; NTEE X is broader than church; and absence of a Form 990 can be a lawful filing exception. This guide separates a STATUS-filtered BMF recognition cohort, Pub. 78, automatic revocation history, and electronically filed Form 990 data, while excluding contributor identities from this project.
The IRS Statistics of Income program has published aggregated tax return statistics since 1916 — the definitive federal source on income distribution, effective tax rates, deductions, and credits. Here is the individual 1040 AGI class tables, the Piketty-Saez top 1% income share data, EITC distribution, estate tax stepped-up basis issue, corporate SOI and TCJA effective rate dynamics, and the restricted-use Public Use File for microsimulation.
Federal data · Transparency and open data · Economy and demographics
The Lobbying Disclosure Act requires quarterly filings with the Senate SOPR — covering lobbyist identities, issue codes, specific bills lobbied, and dollar amounts for every registered lobbying engagement. Here is the LDA API, the relationship to FARA and LD-203 contribution reports, and how to connect lobbying spending to legislative outcomes.
Federal data · Money in politics · Transparency and open data
How Voidly publishes its measurement corpus to external researchers: a keyset-paginated NDJSON streaming API with (ts, measurement_id) cursor and Server-Sent Events mode, nightly PyArrow Parquet generation sorted by (domain, ts) for 60% I/O reduction on single-domain queries with zstd level-3 compression, atomic HuggingFace Dataset Hub push with dataset card regeneration, and classifier_version tagging to keep probability distributions comparable across model updates.
Censorship and information control · Transparency and open data · Engineering and infrastructure
A complete field-by-field guide to the Voidly CC BY 4.0 measurement dataset — probe identity, DNS/TCP/TLS/HTTP layers, control comparison, ML classification output, BGP signals, corroboration fields, and filtering recipes for journalists and ML researchers.
Censorship and information control · Engineering and infrastructure · Transparency and open data
How the nightly Voidly export job extracts measurements from TimescaleDB and pushes Parquet snapshots to HuggingFace Hub: PyArrow schema with dictionary-encoded columns, server-side cursor streaming at 50K rows per round-trip, Zstandard level 3 compression, country + year_month partitioning, atomic HuggingFace commit with CommitOperationAdd, post-push SHA-256 verification, and the incremental vs. monthly full-snapshot strategy.
Censorship and information control · Engineering and infrastructure · Transparency and open data
How the Voidly CC BY 4.0 measurement dataset and the OONI historical corpus are hosted on HuggingFace — Parquet snapshot structure, daily incremental updates, git-lfs versioning, and Python/R filter recipes for journalists, ML researchers, and infrastructure teams.
Censorship and information control · Transparency and open data · Engineering and infrastructure
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