📄 This article was primarily reported using public records requests. We are making it available to all readers as a public service. FOIA reporting can be expensive, please consider subscribing to 404 Media to support this work. Or send us a one time donation via our tip jar here. The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL),…
Large parts of the CDC’s website and several important databases were taken down on Friday and Saturday to comply with Trump’s executive orders banning DEI content. Saturday, a message at the top of the CDC’s home page said the website “is being modified to comply with President Trump’s Executive Orders.” CDC websites and databases taken…
Elon Musk’s DOGE, the newly formed government agency aiming for drastic cuts across the U.S. government, has brought in an HR employment attorney and consultant who has spent the last few years teaching companies her “refreshing approach to diversity and inclusion” which include attempting to “redefine” DEI in a manner that she says is more…
Welcome back to the Abstract! This week, we’re serving up some much-needed good news about global biodiversity! Well, it’s more like a silver lining, but in the Anthropocene you have to take what you can get. As you may have noticed, humans are highly annoying and deadly to many other lifeforms on Earth, a condition…
This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss AI’s boom or bust, trying Github’s Copilot, and making time for good ideas. JASON: When we started 404 Media, I bought a macro lens for my camera and…
A group of men who sold Anom devices, the encrypted phone secretly backdoored by the FBI which led to the largest sting operation in history, pleaded guilty this month in San Diego. The defendants had been set to go to trial, in which the government was preparing to reveal the real identity of the confidential…
The FOIA Forum is a livestreamed event for paying subscribers where we talk about how to file public records requests and answer questions. If you’re not already signed up, please consider doing so here. Recently we had a FOIA Forum where we focused on getting information from federal government agencies. With any new administration there is…
At an all hands meeting inside Meta Thursday, Mark Zuckerberg did not address Meta’s $25 million settlement with Donald Trump that will see the company paying $22 million for the eventual establishment of the Trump Presidential Library. But Zuckerberg did say that he had to be increasingly careful about what he says internally at Meta…
Datasets aggregated on data.gov, the largest repository of U.S. government open data on the internet, are being deleted, according to the website’s own information. Since Donald Trump was inaugurated as president, more than 2,000 datasets have disappeared from the database. As people in the Data Hoarding and archiving communities have pointed out, on January 21,…
In 2015, a federal worker named Katherine Spivey gave colleagues a presentation about how to “write plainly,” so that the general public can more easily understand content on government websites. One of her pieces of advice, among many, was to “use pronouns” such as the word “you” to describe the reader rather than jargon like…