public records investigation

RSG #361: How To Trace Government Evidence That Was Collected but Never Examined

Government agencies collect phones, computers, DNA samples, financial records, surveillance footage, documents, fingerprints, weapons, photographs, and entire storage devices. The existence of an evidence receipt proves that an item entered government custody. It does not prove that anyone examined it. That distinction matters. Evidence can be photographed, packaged, numbered, stored, transferred, rejected by a laboratory, …

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Resistance Kitty examines a broken evidence pipeline showing six steps for tracing evidence that never reached prosecutors, from proving the evidence existed through reporting only what the records prove.

RSG #360: How To Trace Evidence That Never Reached Prosecutors

An investigator collects an interview, photograph, recording, financial record, forensic result, or digital extraction. The evidence enters an agency file. Then, somewhere between collection and prosecution, it stops moving. Sometimes the explanation is ordinary. The evidence was duplicative, unrelated, legally unusable, transferred elsewhere, or received after a decision was made. Sometimes an agent failed to …

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RSG #359: How To Audit the Government’s Handling of Witness Recantations

RSG #359: How To Audit the Government’s Handling of Witness Recantations

A witness changes her story. An informant withdraws an accusation. A cooperating defendant admits that his first account was incomplete. Suddenly, the government must decide whether it has received a meaningful correction, a frightened retreat, a tactical lie, or evidence that its case has been wobbling around in borrowed heels. A witness recantation does not …

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RSG #357: How To Reconstruct a Federal Investigation From Redaction Patterns

A heavily redacted federal file can look like the government handed a black marker to an anxious raccoon. Names vanish. Entire paragraphs disappear. Exemption codes multiply. Page counts change between releases. One agency conceals information that another agency quietly publishes six months later. The black boxes are not the evidence. However, their placement, size, legal …

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RSG #354: How To Reconstruct Deleted or Missing Government Communications From Secondary Records

RSG #354: How To Reconstruct Deleted or Missing Government Communications From Secondary Records

A missing government email does not always disappear without leaving a trace. It may survive inside a reply, forwarded message, calendar invitation, attachment inventory, mobile device export, case file, routing record, litigation exhibit, or the mailbox of another participant. That does not mean every deleted message can be recovered. It means researchers can often reconstruct …

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RSG #347: How To Track Unproduced Attachments Cited in Epstein Records

RSG #347: How To Track Unproduced Attachments Cited in Epstein Records

Epstein records frequently refer to photographs, interview notes, memoranda, recordings, spreadsheets, exhibits, email attachments, evidence inventories, and reports that do not appear beside the document citing them. Sometimes the missing material was lawfully withheld. Sometimes it was released under another file name, separated during processing, filed on a different court docket, or buried in another …

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RSG #342: How To Investigate Government Use of Private Spyware Against Journalists and Activists

RSG #342: How To Investigate Government Use of Private Spyware Against Journalists and Activists

Private spyware gives governments access to capabilities once associated with elite intelligence agencies. Depending on the product and method used, an operator may collect messages, contacts, photographs, location data, recordings, and other information from a targeted device. Journalists, activists, dissidents, attorneys, and human rights defenders face particular danger because compromising one phone can expose entire …

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RSG#336: How To Investigate Government Use of Social Media Monitoring Tools

Your local police department may describe social media monitoring as nothing more than checking public posts. That sounds delightfully harmless, rather like saying a surveillance camera is merely enjoying the scenery. Modern social media monitoring can involve keyword searches, location filters, relationship mapping, automated alerts, covert accounts, image analysis, and commercial software that collects posts …

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RSG #337: How To Investigate Government Purchases of Commercial Location Data

Your phone knows where you sleep, work, worship, shop, protest, receive medical care, and spend Tuesday evenings when you told everyone you were staying home. That location history can travel through mobile applications, advertising systems, software development kits, data aggregators, and commercial brokers. Government agencies have purchased access to commercially available information rather than obtaining …

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RSG#335: How To Audit Predictive Policing Systems and Their Hidden Feedback Loops

Predictive policing systems promise to help police anticipate where crime might happen or who might become involved. The sales pitch usually arrives carrying words such as objective, efficient, intelligent, and data driven. Nothing says impartial justice quite like a vendor presentation with a glowing heat map. The problem is that these systems do not observe …

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