Michael Morisy

Complaining about cancel culture in Riyadh is one of the best examples I've seen of how "free speech culture" rots the brain.

Almost half of New York's newspapers have closed in the last 20 years. New York Focus launched in 2020 to fill those gaps.

5 years later, we’ve grown into a statewide newsroom making real impact:
✨ Nearly 1 million annual readers
✨ 15 full-time staff
✨ Investigations that sparked real change

With the DOJ's argument essentially being ICEBlock was used to deduce that ICE agents were at an ICE facility. Follow that line of argument and I guess they outlaw signage next?

ICE to Buy Tool that Tracks Locations of Hundreds of Millions of Phones Every Day Documents show that ICE has gone back on its decision to not use location data remotely harvested from peoples' phones. The database is updated every day with billions of pieces of location data.

Good juxtaposition of @404media.co scoops: ICE can track you www.404media.co/ice-to-buy-t... But you can't track ICE www.404media.co/iceblock-own...

Boston Police Deployed 71 Drone Flights Over Caribbean Carnival New records obtained by BINJ also confirm that BPD flew a drone over this year’s Dominican Parade

Boston Police Deployed 71 Drones (!!!) Flights Over Caribbean Carnival horizonmass.news/2025/10/02/b...

FOIA Friday: Records reveal surge in ICE arrests across Virginia • Virginia Mercury Records reveal surge in ICE arrests across Virginia

"Kevin Martingayle, a Virginia Beach attorney and UVA Law alumnus, said the university is “highly likely” to lose if sued. “They were told of this requirement in 2013 … and the Supreme Court of Virginia said it again in 2023,” he said. “They are inviting litigation and that’s a real mistake.”"

Spending Soars, Rankings Fall at New College of Florida Student outcomes and rankings are slipping at the liberal arts college while spending is up. Critics believe the college is at risk of implosion, and some are calling for privatization.

You'll be shocked to learn New College of Florida is on the brink of implosion just a couple of years after DeSantis engineered an extreme right-wing takeover

Fun fact: NCF's new overlords spend $134K per student (!!...the average at other FL publics is $10K) www.insidehighered.com/news/governa...

Trump Canceled 94 Million Pounds of Food Aid. Here’s What Never Arrived. ProPublica obtained records from the Department of Agriculture that detail the millions of pounds of food, down to the number of eggs, that never reached food banks because of the administration’s cut...

“ProPublica obtained records from the Department of Agriculture of each planned delivery in 2025, detailing the millions of pounds of food, down to the number of eggs, that never reached hungry people because of the administration’s cut.” projects.propublica.org/trump-food-c...

Take a peek inside university luxury boxes at big games FOIAball obtained attendee lists for suites school presidents use to wine and dine.

Did you know that most university presidents get a luxury box for football games?

Did you know that who they invite is a public record?

Take a peek inside presidential suites in this week's FOIAball.

foiaball.beehiiv.com/p/luxury-box...

Detained journalist Mario Guevara's attempt to block deportation order denied by Court of Appeals A federal court has denied journalist Mario Guevara's last-minute appeal to stop his deportation to El Salvador.

The regime is deporting an Atlanta journalist and being pretty open about the fact that it‘s in direct retaliation for his coverage:

“An immigration judge granted Guevara a $7,500 bond in July, but the government filed a stay, claiming that his reporting on law enforcement activity was dangerous”

On trial for journalism in Kentucky. Two months after their arrests while covering a protest, a pair of local reporters face criminal charges.

Student journalist Lucas Griffith faces trial today for covering a protest against the deportation of Ayman Soliman, who himself fled persecution for his journalism in Egypt.

Lucas did nothing wrong. This is a big deal and would be national news in normal times.

“If universities sign and then violate the terms of the compact, they could be forced to return any money given to them by the federal government that year as well as any private contributions.”

Transparency Update: FOIA turns 50 Read More at Inside Investigator >>

Today is the 50th birthday of Connecticut's FOIA statute. The law gets some things right, but also has a glaring flaw: a lack of deadline by which agencies have to respond to requests. insideinvestigator.org/transparency...

No school, no fresh air and isolated David spent eight months incarcerated at the Youth Justice and Education Center. Center portrait by Kevin Wurm / MLK50 / CatchLight Local / Report for

Since 2023, youth as young as 13 have been held in solitary confinement units for weeks or months inside Shelby County’s juvenile detention center. mlk50.com/2025/10/01/n...

Wave of Phony News Quotes Affects Everyone—Including EFF Whether due to generative AI hallucinations or human sloppiness, the internet is increasingly rife with bogus news content—and you can count EFF among the victims. WinBuzzer published a story June 26

Whether due to generative AI hallucinations or human sloppiness, the internet is increasingly rife with bogus news content –— and you can count EFF among the victims. www.eff.org/deeplinks/2...

This case -– perhaps the most important ever to fall within the jurisdiction of this district court –- squarely presents the issue whether non-citizens lawfully present here in United States actually have the same free speech rights as the rest of us. The Court answers this Constitutional question unequivocally “yes, they do.” “No law” means “no law.”

Judge Young—who has been on the bench for as long as I have been alive—calls it the most important case he has ever considered.

Louisiana Hands Meta a Tax Break and Power for Its Biggest Data Center Mark Zuckerberg’s company faces backlash after rowing back promises to create between 300 and 500 new jobs to man its subsidiary’s new data center.

SCOOP: I FOIA'd economic development agreements & the ground lease for Meta's massive data center in Louisiana and found the state secured no explicit mandates for Meta to create locally-hired full time jobs to receive property tax breaks
www.wired.com/story/louisi...

I only know the general outlines of the Hatch Act, but this feels like something that's generally not permitted.

Yeah, last year I wrote about a 1993 Time column that is beat-for-beat the same complaints about college kids you hear today.¹ Year before that I wrote about how “woke” companies were just updated “p.c.” gripes.²

¹ www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...
² www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

Looking for suggestions for conversation starter games! We did You Think You Know Me, which was super fun, and TableTopics, which was okay. The other Pink Tiger games look great but not exactly right. The Hygge game and Questions for Humans both seem a little bit too cheesy for us...

NEWS: Sinclair says its ending its pre-emption of "Jimmy Kimmel Live!"

Trump Clears Way for American-Owned TikTok Valued at $14 Billion

Musk paid $44 billion for Twitter. Trump allies are closing in paying $14 billion for TikTok US. Russia-levels of crony capitalism. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/25/t...

Holy moly! Great work here by @zackwhittaker.com @sarahp.bsky.social

Exclusive: Neon takes down app after exposing users' phone numbers, call recordings, and transcripts Call recording app Neon was one of the top-ranked iPhone apps, but was pulled offline after a security bug allowed any logged-in user to access the call recordings and transcripts of any other user.

ICYMI: A viral app called Neon, which pays you to record your phone calls so your audio can be used to train AI, has gone offline after I discovered a security lapse that allowed any user to access the phone numbers, call recordings, and call transcriptions of any other user.

USDA is ending future Household Food Security Reports AND the Current Population Survey Food Security Supplement–our most comprehensive source on food insecurity in the U.S. For approximately $1 million a year, it informs over $100 billion in nutrition programs. Cutting it means cutting evidence.

My latest @ocregister.bsky.social piece, "Bureaucrats and political repression: A cautionary tale," is out now. Key passages in screenshots in case you hit a paywall.

www.ocregister.com/2025/09/24/b...

FOIAFriday

Tomorrow, KNKX reporter Nate Stanford will be joining us about ChatGPT logs and how you can obtain them through public records.

Register: us02web.zoom.us/webinar/regi...

The Story of DOGE, as Told by Federal Workers WIRED spoke with more than 200 federal workers in dozens of agencies to learn what happened as the Department of Government Efficiency tore through their offices.

"This used to be the best job I’ve ever had, the best environment I’ve ever had, the best culture I’ve ever had—and they fucking ruined it.

I will never ever forget how much they ruined it."

If you've received a notice from Meta, Google, etc., about your online accounts being subject to "law enforcement process" -- it may be an administrative subpoena. And I want to hear about it: shawnmusgrave.82 on Signal.

And even if it was something that could be played off as a joke, Paramount forked over $16 million and Brendan Carr unilaterally dumped 60 Minutes work product online. They've shown that not only are they making threats, they're threats they'll follow through on.