Michael Morisy

Documented found AI clones of real immigration lawyers and scam accounts on TikTok. Thursday at 1 pm ET I'm talking with Max Siegelbaum and Sam Rabiyah about how they found them. Register at us06web.zoom.us/webinar/regi... @documentedny.bsky.social

NEW collab w/ @theshoestring.bsky.social: Records I obtained from a lawsuit offer a rare window into the secretive world of sheriffs’ offices, where misconduct is often shielded from outside scrutiny by #Massachusetts’ weak public records law.

“Can the president then offer on eBay to sell them, all of our national security secrets to the highest bidder?” This question was posed during our Presidential Records Act appeal hearing. DOJ's answer? Yes. More in the Classifieds.

People making millions with scammy innovations like switch the subject and sender information in emails.

An 87yo in WI charged 17,766 times for $77k. An 89yo in D.C. charged 26,456 times for $429k. A 76yo in CA charged 27,236 times for $578k. There are thousands of examples like these. Republicans are even worse. We shouldn't have to protect our elderly parents from this.

On Tuesday, Oct. 27, at noon: what role should local police play when federal immigration operations come to a city? I'm joining former DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson, Eileen Grench of Documented and moderator Dara Lind. Register: is.gd/8JnyRR @documentedny.bsky.social @immcouncil.org

EFF just won our lawsuit against the Office of Personnel Management for unlawfully disclosing personal information about federal employees to DOGE in violation of the 1974 privacy act!

From the archives: In 2015, Conor used MuckRock to file a Freedom of Information Act request for two years’ worth of passenger complaints about Amtrak’s café cars.

This is open court testimony. During testimony yesterday, a security officer twice hit the censorship switch during a discussion between Dr. Kupers and a defense lawyer over what was described as the defendant being beaten in host country detention after his capture in Dubai.

Kind of a classic trope of extortionists, where you want a middleman who can act like they're trying to help and is just passing on what the villain is doing, while acting sympathetic to the victim.

This has happening for the past year+ globally with RTI/FOIA/public records systems. Very existential problem I haven't seen much serious government policy response to yet.

For the contract, data, and Michelle Pfieffer nerds out there, a 🧵. ICE plans to buy ERO ONE through OASIS+. OASIS+ is a GSA contract vehicle for professional services. GSA has already vetted a pool of companies. Agencies order work from that pool, and only companies in the pool can compete.

Kash Patel basically faking crime stats now, by pretending that arrests made by state/local law enforcement were done by the FBI. www.ms.now/news/crime-s...

FOIA nerds and MuckRock users: We have a regular all-hands and I'd love to invite a few folks who use MuckRock to talk about how they put the service to work. If that's you and you're interested, let me know!

Try this: www.baltimoresun.com/2026/10/13/w...

Want to join the fight for press freedom at this critical moment? @rcfp.org is hiring three legal fellows to help protect journalists and their First Amendment rights! The deadline to apply for all positions is Oct. 15:

My @propublica.org colleagues have no business running a private school for kids. And yet they were easily able to start schools in two states -- with a third ProPublica Academy pending that would be located inside a North Carolina bar.

Not a great sign when your 12-person private fundraiser includes someone who hates you enough to leak damaging audio

And this is almost an aside in the story, but also absolutely bonkers. Meta claimed Zuck as a "researcher" to get a $355 million tax break on his $4.1 billion stock-based compensation.

New: Through a series of complex agreements with cities, the White House built a massive license plate camera database accessible to the feds. The program aggregates data across license plate companies (Flock, Axon, more) & is searchable by many agencies: www.404media.co/how-cities-a...

We got data on thousands of patients harmed at hospitals. We need you to analyze it and help gather more data. www.muckrock.com/news/archive...

Love what RW has built. There's so many areas where a singular focus can have impact and build an audience, with the big caveat that it has to be done well.

Welp, this is our last open API endpoint, I think, so hopefully the last time this happens. Yay?

There have been two occasions in my career where I had to go to war with teammates against mistaken understandings of probability. In both cases, it was because people expected large numbers of d6s to occasionally result in maximum damage. But the curves for 3d6 and 15d6 (e.g.) look like this:

Spam bots are clowning on me.

one of the fun things about digging up older surveys is that you get a lot of practice with the game of "am I more offended by the underlying question or the choice of scale"

This graph from @josephpolitano.bsky.social surprised me! Reading is way down, but book sales are way up! www.apricitas.io/p/ai-and-the...

LOL: Flock sent a letter to the mayor of Lowell complaining about comments he made during a city council meeting about how Flock sells data. Flock claimed that it does not sell data, but the mayor responded by pointing out that Flock advertised this feature to Lowell.

New York Journo Nerd Bluesky: Do you also have problems getting anybody in the state of New York to respond to FOIL requests, or am I uniquely terrible at getting the University of Buffalo to respond to goddamn anything I submit

This is what they do when you give them endless money. $20.5M in fees and costs for buying 7 warehouses they're now going to sell. $10M for unused Guantánamo tents, and unneded food. ICE bought 11 warehouses for $1.07B without any plan. Taxpayer money, burned. www.cbsnews.com/news/ice-spe...

🚀 NOTICE: Federal US website newly registered. https://trumptv.gov Action taken by the nan (Executive Office of the President) at or around 2026-09-24 11:21:17.

BREAKING: An Iowa state court dismisses President Donald Trump’s frivolous lawsuit against veteran pollster J. Ann Selzer (represented by @thefireorg.bsky.social) and the Des Moines Register newspaper, a victory for First Amendment rights. Opinion here: www.fire.org/research-lea...

Five cops in Indianapolis were just criminally charged with abusing Flock to spy on their ex-wives, their wives' ex-partners and women they met on duty. Audit was triggered by us at the @washingtonpost.com, the prosecutor said. From last month: wapo.st/4yfNHng

This is something my colleague @billybinion.bsky.social writes about all the time. Cities regularly refuse to compensate people when police trash their property in the course of chasing someone else.

Filing public records requests is fun! (I mean, the software the City of Portland uses for it is awful, but, you know, sometimes you get back something interesting.) bsky.app/profile/kate...

Another new database from the IJF! This one is special — it brings together government contracts and lobbying records, so you can trace the connections between money and influence in Canada.

Update: ICIJ reporter Micah Reddy has been released from custody in Djibouti. He is safe and will soon reunite with his family. We are grateful to everyone who shared their support for Reddy, his family and ICIJ's efforts to bring him home. buff.ly/Uh160cS

a wonderful use of @muckrock.com

INBOX: Science retracted a news article this week after editors found that the author (likely an AI agent) impersonated the identity of an established science journalist, both with editors and sources in the story. Furthermore, two of the quotes provided were plagiarized: (h/t @wudan.bsky.social)

BREAKING: Records obtained through a FOIA lawsuit shows that despite record number of pregnant women are in detention, ICE has lost count of the number of miscarriages. A Deleted Data/Immigration/Guardian investigations collab

Civic Strata: A shared foundation for data, documents and community reporting. rjionline.org/news/buildin...

ATTENTION: every person in their late 30s on this website github.com/arnegiacomo/...

I strongly believe there's been more in-depth, widely consumed, nuanced policy discussion the last few election cycles than I've ever seen, but a) you have to sit through hours of podcasts/videos to get to it, b) politicians are the least interested in participating.

NEW: Donald Trump Jr.’s Bahamas Wedding Was Secretly Bankrolled by Russian Oligarch Close to Putin Umar Kremlev footed the bill for hundreds of thousands of dollars of wedding expenses at Donald Trump Jr.’s lavish wedding, including renting out a private island and paying for the fireworks show.