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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 the staying power of surveillance coverage, the jigsaw of reporting, and eyestrain. JASON: I’ve started this year in the same way I spent a lot of last…

This story was reported with support from the MuckRock foundation. One of the largest distributors of print books for libraries is winding down operations by the end of the year, a huge disruption to public libraries across the country, some of which are warning their communities the shut down will limit their ability to lend…

The woman who helped coerce other women into the clutches of sex trafficking ring GirlsDoPorn will spend two years in prison, a federal judge ordered on Friday.  GirlsDoPorn operated for almost a decade; its owners and co-conspirators were indicted on federal sex trafficking charges in October 2019. Over the years, its content became wildly popular…

A division of ICE, the Secret Service, and the Navy’s criminal investigation division all had access to Flock’s nationwide network of tens of thousands of AI-enabled cameras that constantly track the movements of vehicles, and by extension people, according to a letter sent by Senator Ron Wyden and shared with 404 Media. Homeland Security Investigations…

You can see the specific steps that a government agency is taking to comply with the Trump administration’s policies against diversity, equity, and inclusion on the agency’s GitHub, which shows it frantically deleting and editing various documents, employee handbooks, Slack bots, and job listings across everything the agency touches.  18F is a much-hyped government agency…

🌘 Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week. Astronomers think they have solved the puzzle of so-called “little red dots” in space, a population of bizarre objects at the very edge of the observable universe, according to a study…

Code updates to a government database that helps track whether a federal program to get children ready for school at age five is actually working show software engineers are purging it of references to “forbidden words” related to DEI. The updates, shown in Github commits, are to a database for the Department of Health and…