resistance survival guide Archives - THE BUTTERFLY BUREAU

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

October 2, 2026

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, …

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

October 1, 2026

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 …

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

September 30, 2026

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 …

RSG #358: How To Reconstruct a Federal Investigation From Attorney Proffer Records

September 29, 2026

Federal investigations do not always advance through subpoenas, raids, and dramatic courthouse entrances. Sometimes an attorney calls a prosecutor and says, in careful lawyer language, “My client may know something useful, but we would prefer not to stroll blindly into criminal exposure.” That conversation may lead to an attorney proffer, a client proffer session, a …

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

September 28, 2026

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 …

RSG #356: How to Mine FOIA Logs Before Filing Your Own Request

September 25, 2026

Before you send an agency another broad request for “all records about” a scandal, look at what other people have already asked for. A Freedom of Information Act request log can reveal useful search terms, agency offices, dates, tracking numbers and records someone else pursued. The agency’s reading room may even have the released material …

RSG #355: How To Prove a Government Document Existed Before It Disappeared

September 23, 2026

A government document can vanish from a public archive, disappear from a Freedom of Information Act production, or become mysteriously unfamiliar to the agency that once quoted it. That does not necessarily mean someone destroyed it. It does mean the document left traces, and those traces can be investigated. Documents create administrative footprints. They are …

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

September 22, 2026

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 …

RSG #353: How To Trace FBI Evidence Through Evidence Control Records

September 21, 2026

Physical evidence does not explain its own history. A seized telephone cannot tell you who collected it, where it was stored, whether a laboratory examined it, or why it later vanished from the public record. That history lives in evidence control records. Learning how to trace FBI evidence through evidence control records can help researchers …

RSG #351: How To Reconstruct an Epstein Investigation From Closing Records

September 17, 2026

An investigation rarely ends with a dramatic official stamping “CASE CLOSED” across a folder while violins play in the background. More often, it ends through a quiet collection of memoranda, database entries, supervisor approvals, evidence instructions, referral notices, declination decisions, and administrative forms. Those closing records can reveal what investigators examined, which allegations they pursued, …