Accurate, Focused Research on Law, Technology and Knowledge Discovery With Daily Postings Since 2002
Washington Post [no paywall] Depositions offer insight into what Elon Musk’s group was up to. Members describe a club-like atmosphere in which they slashed agencies with little oversight. Members of the U.S. DOGE Service spoke regularly over Signal, the encrypted chat service that can auto-delete messages. They were informally recruited by people they knew. And …
404 Media: “Ron DeSantis has empowered hundreds of Florida conservation police to work directly with ICE.. Florida’s Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) police are performing dozens of license plate lookups on Flock cameras for Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE), according to public records that show details of the searches. The practice highlights how ICE, …
CRS Report No. R48889. March 31, 2026. Availability of Federal Data: Policy Considerations for Disclosure, Preservation, and Governance – Federal data can provide valuable information for various audiences—from farmers seeking to protect bats that eat crop-harming insects to local efforts determining where to rebuild to avoid coastal flooding. In 2013, the Office of Management and …
“President Trump DOJ says he’s not required to turn over official records.” The Justice Department has concluded that a federal law requiring presidential records to be turned over to the government is unconstitutional, a senior White House official tells Axios. The finding is an indication Trump will be reluctant to give all of his official …
Heatwave risk, down to your block: the new tool making it visible – “Cities around the world are increasingly exposed to extreme heat, which poses serious risks to public health, infrastructure and livability. However, many cities struggle to plan and implement effective cooling interventions due to limited access to relevant, localized data and a lack …
IEEE Spectrum – “Facial recognition technology (FRT) dates back 60 years. Just over a decade ago, deep-learning methods tipped the technology into more and menacing—territory. Now, retailers, your neighbors, and law enforcement are all storing your face and building up a fragmentary photo album of your life. Yet the story those photos can tell inevitably …
Data is Beautiful – VeridionData – Top 20 Federal Government Contractor by Contract Value Sources: SAM.gov/FPDS FY2023 all-federal contract obligations, supplemented with FY2024 DoD data from Defense Security Monitor and Washington Technology Top 100. FY2023 because it’s the latest complete all-agency dataset publicly available. Subsidiaries rolled up under parent companies. I handle the sector labels; some companies straddle …
Map showing light pollution across the world – www.lightpollutionmap.info is a mapping application that displays light pollution related content. The primary use was to show VIIRS/DMSP data in a friendly manner, but over the many years it received also some other interesting light pollution related content like SQM/SQC measurements, Sky brightness, almost realtime clouds, aurora prediction …
ProPublica: “In late 2024, the federal government’s cybersecurity evaluators rendered a troubling verdict on one of Microsoft’s biggest cloud computing offerings. The tech giant’s “lack of proper detailed security documentation” left reviewers with a “lack of confidence in assessing the system’s overall security posture,” according to an internal government report reviewed by ProPublica. Or, as …
Project Saltbox: An RFI released today details ICE’s plans to rent co-working space for over 300 personnel nationwide ICE is seeking co-working space for over 300 personnel nationwide, according to market research released earlier today. In the request, the agency outlines their need for flexible workspace (private offices and/or workstations). ICE is specifically looking for vendors …
“For the first time, journalists and researchers have a searchable directory of over 1,500 of the world’s knowledge repositories. The new publication is from Newsjunkie.net, the data-journalism resource known for its “Who’s Behind the News” reporting. Guide to Public Archives II, a fully revised and expanded directory of the world’s artifact and document repositories, is …
MIT Technology Review: “The Pentagon is discussing plans to set up secure environments for generative AI companies to train military-specific versions of their models on classified data, MIT Technology Review has learned. AI models like Anthropic’s Claude are already used to answer questions in classified settings; applications include analyzing targets in Iran. But allowing models to train …
