Amazon investors introduce two votes limiting company’s facial recognition technology, contracts reveal that the “trade secret” of ransomware firms is to pay off hackers directly by charging clients extra, and Chicago’s City Council legislative committees fuel a system of patronage and cronyism.

Last week, we made it easier to register for our newsletter and pushed a small fix on a landing page.

MuckRock’s new feature updates include an easier way to get an API key, improvements on request purchasing, eliminating emojis in mailed requests, fixed email submission warning, and a new process that has all checks over $150 now being sent via certified mail.

Last week, we fixed a bug that accidentally hid some organization’s requests from their request page. We also continued hacking away at a new project that helps scan the websites of agencies in our database to look for how well they follow best practices from accessibility and speed to securing visitor privacy.

Idaho is one step closer to becoming the first state to make pretrial risk assessment algorithms more transparent and open to public scrutiny, addressing long festering concerns about the risk to civil rights of automated pretrial tools in criminal justice.