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Architectures, trade-offs, investigations, and post-mortems from work on censorship measurement, OSINT pipelines, election analysis, and post-quantum communications.
Older articles retain their original AI Analytics byline. Read about the MORVS transition.
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The US organ-procurement, transplant, and tissue system, read from the government’s own records — the monopoly, the bedside, the money, the consent gaps, the court record. Nine parts, institution-level only.
Who holds American agricultural land from abroad — the federal register nobody reads, the shell structures behind friendly flags, the thirty-state law wave, and the Hong Kong question. Five parts.
Who runs the beds, who checks them, and who pays for the empty ones — ICE’s own detention file read at the unit level: the county-shell contract structure, the inspection blanks, and the guaranteed-minimum floor. Three parts.
Sixty-two billion disclosed dollars, and the statute that lets most of them stay nameless — the Section 117 ledger, read in two parts.
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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 Today it records zero — and it still records zero more than a year after the order was rescinded in January 2025.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 CDC publishes overdose mortality through the National Vital Statistics System, CDC WONDER, and monthly VSRR provisional counts — tracking 107,000+ annual drug deaths at the county, demographic, and drug-category level. Here is the ICD-10 code structure, the three waves of the opioid epidemic, racial disparity inversion driven by fentanyl, and how to access the data.
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
The FDIC publishes a complete failure list covering 4,000+ bank closures since 1934 — S&L crisis wave, the 2008–2012 GFC wave with 500+ failures, and the 2023 SVB/Signature/First Republic episode. Here is the dataset schema, how to use call report data and the Texas Ratio to identify at-risk institutions, and how financial journalists access FDIC BankFind.
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 FDA publishes every warning letter on its website — pharmaceutical cGMP violations, food safety failures, device adulteration, and clinical investigator fraud. Here is the enforcement hierarchy from Form 483 to criminal referral, how to access and scrape the letter database, and what the record reveals about repeat violators and food safety trends.
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