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27 Articles

FOIA 101: How to dig up information on federal political appointments

by Beryl Lipton

August 08, 2019

There may be no complete repository of federal appointees, but FOIA can be your inroad to learning the history of who has been added to an agency.

Army names Silicon Valley’s data mining company Palantir to lead battlefield intelligence

by Beryl Lipton

May 30, 2019

Palantir, a data mining startup based in Silicon Valley, will be handling initial delivery of the U.S. Army’s battlefield intelligence network, the Pentagon confirmed earlier this year, positioning the company to influence the Army’s long-term implementation of its artificial intelligence priorities.

Hundreds of agencies, including the FBI and ICE, have access to Ohio AG’s facial recognition platform

by Beryl Lipton

May 15, 2019

More than 4,500 individuals at federal and local law enforcement agencies currently have access to a facial recognition database hosted by the Ohio Attorney General’s office, including at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Depending on where you live, it can be really difficult to get a rape kit

by Vanessa Nason

December 12, 2017

After hearing stories of women having to travel long distances to receive the rape kit exams that are guaranteed to them under the Violence Against Women Act, we began to file the same request with the health departments in all 50 states asking for locations where sexual assault forensic examiners are available on staff or on-call. Like most of the other data surrounding sexual assault policies, what we’ve found so far varies widely, and there are large deserts - huge, mostly rural areas without easy access to a medical examiner

GAO not releasing details on collection agency with financial ties to Betsy DeVos’ contested bid with the Department of Education

by Caitlin Russell

November 01, 2017

If a company is going to be reimbursed for fees associated with filing bid protests against an agency headed up by a person with whom they’ve done business in the past, both the process by which the protests came to be sustained and any reimbursements paid to the company ought to be a matter of public record. In the case of Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and Performant Financial Corporation, that isn’t the case.