Michael Morisy

Indiana's balloon budget cements its status as elite More like 'floating champs.'

You: Would like to know how much the national champion-winning Indiana Hoosiers spent on balloons.

I: Would like you to become a paid subscriber to FOIAball.

www.foiaball.com/p/indiana-oh...

me and my RCFP lawyers outside the courthouse this morning

BREAKING — WE WON! DC Superior Court Judge Darlene Soltys ordered the DC Metropolitan Police to produce ALL body cam footage of the March 2025 DOGE raid on the US Institute of Peace within 14 days.

Thanks to my @rcfp.org lawyers for their tireless work.

Details on thehandbasket.co later today!

FOI Fest 2026 FOI Fest 2026 will be held at Birkbeck University of London and online. You need to register here in order to attend. FOI Fest 2026 is being co-organised by the FOI Network, with...

We've now published the final agenda at www.mysociety.org/transparency.... A really good line-up of speakers now includes investigative journalist @jennacorderoy.bsky.social, @rosewhiff.bsky.social of Transparency International, our Climate Scorecards partners @climateemergencyuk.bsky.social...

How to register to vote and check your registration status For the 2026 primary elections, NPR has collected deadlines and information on how to register to vote — online, in person or by mail — in every U.S. state and territory.

For the 2026 primary elections, NPR has collected deadlines and information on how to register to vote — online, in person or by mail — in every U.S. state and territory. n.pr/4ayRPUJ

More than a year after its formation, I continue to track DOGE's activities and try to shed light on their staffing based on what limited information I can find.

dogetrack.info

This is a first: I’m trying to get federal contracts from a county in California and they’re claiming they need the federal govts permission to fulfill my records request. They lawyer cited The Supremacy Clause of the United States Constitution. Article VI, Clause 2 and Comity doctrine. Huh?

Today is @muckrock.com's Sweet 16. What a journey so far: Helping millions of people learn about public records, exposing (sometimes literally!) buried government secrets, and discovering all the ways unexpected ways transparency matters in people's every day lives. Thank you!

That infographic would kill on LinkedIn.

Beautiful copypasta: "I have failed in that sacred trust...Like the scribes of antiquity who bore their stylus as both privilege and burden, I understand that legal authorship demands more than mere competence - it requires absolute fidelity to truth and
precision in every mark upon the page."

While reporting this, I had something happen that's never happened. A comms rep for one of the co's disputed my reporting and said what I was telling them was untrue because it was not in Grok, xAI's chatbot.

I was looking directly at the files. And this person was using AI to challenge the truth.

ICE and CBP’s Face-Recognition App Can’t Actually Verify Who People Are ICE has used Mobile Fortify to identify immigrants and citizens alike over 100,000 times, by one estimate. It wasn't built to work like that—and only got approved after DHS abandoned its own privacy r...

NEW: Records reviewed by WIRED show DHS’s facial recognition app (Mobile Fortify) isn’t designed to actually "verify" identity—despite DHS claims and its agents relying on its matches to support probable cause in the field.

❤️

I wanna keep doing this work, in any form (podcast! newsletter! movie? AI literacy class!). Pls msg me on Signal at nitasha.10 if you need someone who’s well-sourced in AI & SV, worked hard to understand the technology + ideas + players, cares about getting it right and informing the public

"Ah, a headshot I like!"

*Taken 14 years ago*

🫥

How are opioid settlement funds being spent in your state? You can use FOIA to find out Over the last six months, MuckRock teamed up with a class of investigative journalism students at West Virginia University to request opioid settlement spending documents from all 55 counties in West…

Over the last six months, MuckRock teamed up with a class of investigative journalism students at West Virginia University to request opioid settlement spending documents from all 55 counties in West Virginia. www.muckrock.com/news/archive...

Forget it Roger, it's Toontown

A scrappy story-sharing tool with local newsroom DNA gains traction Plucky Wire was incubated in an unlikely place for a journalism technology: the tiny Granite State News Collaborative. Now, it's being used by hundreds of outlets countrywide.

“If and when collaboration starts to really take off, it won’t be because someone built some whizzy new tech.” www.niemanlab.org/2026/01/a-sc...

The IMLS Propaganda Machine Is In Full Swing The agency overseeing U.S. libraries and museums is now full-on regime propaganda.

"The propaganda is going to get a lot worse and more pervasive before it gets better... our tax money was given to a private business actively destroying our public education systems, [and] none of the grant money allocated for libraries and museums will go to actual libraries and museums."

Remember, 99% of your future readership are Moltys. Plan accordingly

How ICE Already Knows Who Minneapolis Protesters Are

A Minnesota woman observing ICE agents in her car was cornered on one-way streets. An agent approached, called her by name—citing facial recognition. Days later, her Global Entry and TSA privileges were revoked, with no explanation.

College approached and paid student to write op-ed in The Dartmouth The Dartmouth ran the article on Nov. 17 without knowledge that the College had been involved. 

Dartmouth's communications office coached a student on what to say in an op-ed in the Dartmouth praising the college's new wellness AI, and the AI project office paid him for his time writing it.

This is wildly unethical; the responsible staff need to be fired.

www.thedartmouth.com/article/2026...

An AI Toy Exposed 50,000 Logs of Its Chats With Kids to Anyone With a Gmail Account AI chat toy company Bondu left its web console almost entirely unprotected. Researchers who accessed it found nearly all the conversations children had had with the company's stuffed animals.

NEW: An AI toy company's web portal had basically protections, allowing anyone with a Gmail address to access some 50,000 transcripts of kids' chats with their stuffed animals. @agreenberg.bsky.social has the scoop: www.wired.com/story/an-ai-...

This is great! @taniel.bsky.social and @boltsmag.org are putting together a big Q&A for people who want to know more about state and local response to ICE operations.

Send them your questions!

Loose Rules Let State Police Hand Out Lax Penalties for Serious Misconduct

NEW, by me: Loose Rules Let State Police Hand Out Lax Penalties for Serious Misconduct

The agency's disciplinary system is weaker than other large departments in NY. Troopers who committed serious misconduct have been allowed to remain on the job.

www.nytimes.com/2026/01/28/u...

Kotaku Is Hiring A Staff Reporter We want your scoops

Kotaku is hiring for *three* positions:

- Staff reporter: kotaku.com/kotaku-is-hi...
- Nights and weekends editor: kotaku.com/kotaku-is-hi...
- Community editor: kotaku.com/kotaku-is-hi...

Looking for DC-area Spanish-to-English interpreters if you have any recommendations you've used. One session for an in-person conference.

I'm guessing he means 99% cheaper? I don't know how "100x less" makes sense unless energy prices go negative. But if prices are falling 99%, quality AI inference sure sounds like a cheap commodity, in which case I'd expect frontier model makers of today to push for regulation that entrenches them.

OpenAI Town Hall with Sam Altman YouTube video by OpenAI

Generally feel Sam Altman's proclamations are worth the bits they're printed on, but interesting that he thinks inference (I think?) be "100x" less expensive than it is now. www.youtube.com/live/Wpxv-8n...

And I genuinely, truly and non-trollingly, understand concerns about threats to officers in question, but in every single other law enforcement shooting I've covered, authorities name the individual(s) involved. This is just the baseline of public accountability.