Tag: transparency

Indiana U. professor supports transparency unless it applies to people like him

A new Indiana law requiring public university professors to post their syllabi online “threatens academic freedom,” according to an Indiana University Bloomington professor who is involved in government transparency efforts.

The law, included in a budget passed in May, “almost certainly will have a chilling effect on professors,” according to Professor Gerry Lanosga.

Beginning this school year, professors must post their syllabi online for not just students to see, but the entire public, which includes the taxpayers who actually fund the operations of the university. 

Yet for Professor Lanosga (pictured), this amounts to “surveillance,” according to comments he gave the student newspaper. He also joked “Maybe the impact on posting them to the public is that students may read it more.”

The media studies professor said he has nothing to hide, even though he opposes the law.

“It isn’t inherently bad — faculty don’t have anything to hide in their syllabi and people will comply with the law,” Lanosga said. “But what is the rationale? What are the motives? It hasn’t been made clear,” he told the Indiana Daily Student.

The rationale is that public university professors are supposed to serve, well, the public. They are paid by taxpayers to teach classes and conduct research. The secondary principle is that the work of public employees should be generally available to the public. 

Lanosga should know this since he specifically lists “freedom of information” as an interest on his faculty bio, he won the “Investigative Reporters and Editors’ Freedom of Information Medal,” and serves on the board of the Indiana Coalition for Open Government. 

Instructors have some flexibility to reveal certain information just to enrolled students, according to the student newspaper. A good law leaves some room for exceptions.

But in general, the work of public professors should be free and open to the taxpayers. There are other benefits as well – perhaps prospective high school students want to know what they will learn in a political science, chemistry, or economics class if they attend IU.

Keep reading

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Misses Financial Disclosure Deadline After Extension, Omits Fiancé’s Finances

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) must be too busy flying first class to worry about following financial transparency rules.

AOC skipped filing her mandatory 2024 financial disclosure documents and instead requested a 90-day extension past the May due date.

Despite being given extra time, the far-left Congresswoman missed the second date as well and, according to an exclusive from The New York Post, finally filed the documents a week late.

Absent from her disclosure, however, was any sign of her partner of more than a decade, fiancé Riley Roberts.

Although AOC calls Roberts her “spouse” for perks, she has excluded him from disclosures.

Per The Post:

Ocasio-Cortez, 35, came under fire from the House Ethics Committee last month for calling Roberts, 37, her “spouse” on some ethics forms to receive perks such as travel and gala access, but leaving him off financial disclosures so she doesn’t have to disclose his assets.

“There is a reason Congress requires financial disclosures to include the spouses of members of Congress,” Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette, interim vp of policy and government affairs at the Project On Government Oversight, told The Post.

“If spousal disclosures were not required, it would be all-too easy to exploit that loophole and simply transfer any conflicted or problematic assets or financial activity into the spouse’s name.

“If her fiancée is going to avail himself of some of the perks and privileges of being the spouse of a member of Congress, he should surely have to likewise comply with the less convenient parts,” he said.

Keep reading

There’s Probably No ‘Smoking Gun’ in the JFK or Epstein Cases. We Should Be Allowed To Look Anyway.

The CIA’s coverup about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy is unraveling. Despite the agency denying that it knew anything about assassin Lee Harvey Oswald before the murder, newly declassified documents shed light on the links between Oswald, a Cuban guerrilla group known as the Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil (DRE), and CIA case officer George Joannides.

Several months before the assassination, Oswald had offered to work for the DRE, a CIA proxy overseen by Joannides. Years later, Joannides—operating under a fake name—became the CIA’s liaison to Congress during a congressional investigation into the assassination. The documents add to a pile of evidence that the CIA had been following Oswald for years and deliberately covered it up afterward.

Oswald “really wasn’t alone, he had the CIA looking over his shoulder for four years,” said Jefferson Morley, a historian who has long pushed for opening the Joannides files, in an interview with The Washington Post.

Decades of dogged investigative work have poked plenty of holes in the official story around Kennedy’s assassination. But they haven’t produced a smoking gun, a single document that demonstrates what the CIA wanted out of Oswald or what knowledge it had about his fatal plans. And that smoking gun may never turn up; Morley and others speculated to the Post that Joannides was running an “off-the-books” operation through the DRE.

The same is likely to be true about another case that’s in the news this week: that of the late sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. After he died in custody in 2019, calls have grown for the government to release the “Epstein client list.” As I argued several months ago, such a list likely doesn’t exist. What does exist is a scattered patchwork of evidence about the people Epstein associated with and leads waiting to be followed up on.

To be clear, the official story on Epstein has some troubling inconsistencies. Last week, the Department of Justice and FBI released a memo stating that they found “no credible evidence found that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals as part of his actions.” But it has been publicly reported that Epstein attempted to extort tech tycoon Bill Gates over Gates’ (legal) extramarital affair.

The Trump administration has not exactly inspired confidence in its transparency or diligence. Attorney General Pam Bondi said in February that bombshell information was “sitting on my desk,” then released a heavily redacted set of documents labeled “Epstein Files: Phase 1,” most of which were already public. Last week, the Department of Justice claimed it would release “raw” surveillance footage from Epstein’s prison wing on the night he died, then published a sloppily compiled video clip with a minute of footage missing.

President Donald Trump himself told his followers on Saturday not to “waste Time and Energy on Jeffrey Epstein, somebody that nobody cares about.” (It was a change in tune from last year, when Republican politicians attacked the Democratic administration for not pursuing the Epstein case enough.)

Government coverups rarely involve compiling one document that lays out all the wrongdoing in detail—such as the CIA’s “family jewels” in the 1960s—and hiding it from the public. It makes far more sense for officials to keep the wrongdoing from being put to paper in the first place. Conspirators make informal plans off the record. Internal investigators turn a blind eye to evidence that they think might lead to inconvenient places.

Epstein was only arrested in 2019, after all, because reporting by Julie Brown in the Miami Herald and a lawsuit by victim Virginia Giuffre forced the federal government to reopen the case. Authorities had originally struck a plea deal with Epstein in 2007 that gave him a short prison term along with immunity for any co-conspirators who might come to light.

Keep reading

EPA Promises ‘Total Transparency On The Issues Of Geoengineering And Contrails’

As this Substack has been exposing for many years, geoengineering is an all too real weather warfare program, with the government owning the following patents (just like they own patents for the Modified nRMA slow kill bioweapon C19 “vaccines”):

  • US3613992A – Weather Modification by Artificial Satellites (1971): Method for modifying wether using satellites.
  • US3564253A – Artificial Ion Cloud Method and Apparatus (1971): For creating artificial ion clouds to alter atmospheric conditions.
  • US4686605A – Method and Apparatus for Altering a Region in the Earth’s Atmosphere (1987): This patent, linked to HAARP, describes a system for altering the ionosphere.
  • US20060201547A1 – Hurricane and Tornado Control Device (2006): A method of disrupting or controlling the energy of hurricanes and tornadoes.
  • US2007012532A1 – System and Method for Wind and Water Alteration (2007): Used to control atmospheric conditions, specifically rain and wind.

And if weather warfare geoengineering were such a crazy conspiracy theory, then why was NOAA tasked with monitoring weather manipulation projects under the Weather Modification Reporting Act of 1972?

And if weather warfare geoengineering were such a crazy conspiracy theory, then why did the U.S. sign on to the international treaty known as the Environmental Modification Convention (ENMOD) in 1977, which prohibits the military or any hostile force from deploying environmental modification methods, not limited to weather manipulation, in warfare?

The ENMOD Convention includes the following:

  • Article 1 prohibits the use of environmental modification techniques as a means of destruction, damage, or injury to any other State Party.
  • The Convention defines environmental modification techniques as deliberate manipulations of natural processes affecting the earth’s biota, lithosphere, hydrosphere, atmosphere, or outer space.
  • The treaty entered into force for the United States on January 17, 1980, after the ratification by the Senate.

Of course, ENMOD also leverages the whole “climate change” scam back when it was called Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW), except that now there is no warming on average, but we digress.

Keep reading

From Moscow to Malmstrom: Russian-Style Disinformation Tactics Target U.S. UFO Transparency Efforts

In 2016, RAND analysts Christopher Paul and Miriam Matthews coined the term ‘firehose of falsehood’  for Russia’s modern propaganda style: bombard every channel with a torrent of messages – some true, many half-true, others outright fiction – until audiences stop trying to separate fact from noise. 

Paul and Matthews found that Russia’s method has four tell-tale features: 

  • High-volume, multichannel delivery
  • Rapid, continuous repetition
  • No commitment to objective reality, mixing truth, half-truth and fabrication at will
  • No commitment to internal consistency – mutually contradictory stories are launched simultaneously without embarrassment.

Nearly a decade on, that very playbook appears to be running again, not in Moscow’s backyard but in America’s escalating fight over Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) transparency.

Russian propaganda ranks among the world’s most formidable, especially within the murky battlespace of disinformation and psychological operations.

Russia’s truth-plus-fiction approach was evident after Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 was shot down over eastern Ukraine in July 2014. 

Russian outlets began with genuine uncertainties – conflicting radar tracks, chaotic eyewitness accounts, and an admitted lack of hard data in the first hours, which primed audiences to accept a flood of speculative narratives. 

Within days, Russian-connected sources offered mutually exclusive theories: a Ukrainian Su-25 fighter jet, a CIA plot, a missile fired at President Putin’s aircraft, even pre-loaded corpses on board the Boeing 777. 

By anchoring each false claim to the genuine early chaos, Russia made every theory sound plausible – and drowned the facts in noise.

Put simply, a single verifiable fact can clear the path for multiple Trojan horses of disinformation.

Keep reading

Bill to Audit U.S. Gold Reserves Introduced in Congress

In a small step toward ensuring transparency and protecting U.S. economic stability, legislation to fully audit U.S. gold reserves was introduced in Congress last week.

H.R. 3795, titled the Gold Reserve Transparency Act of 2025, is sponsored by U.S. Representative Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and co-sponsored by Representatives Warren Davidson (R-Ohio), Addison McDowell (R-N.C.), and Troy Nehls (R-Texas). According to a press release by Massie’s congressional office, the bill would require “the Comptroller General to conduct and publicly release a full audit of gold reserves held by the United States. The Comptroller General’s audit will include gold held in ‘deep storage’ locations such as Fort Knox, Kentucky.”

The press release continues:

The Gold Reserve Transparency Act of 2025 further requires the Comptroller General to conduct subsequent audits of the nation’s gold reserves every five years. In addition, the Comptroller General is instructed to report on the sufficiency of measures currently in place to ensure the physical safety of the gold reserves, to provide a full accounting of encumbrances against the gold reserves, and to document any sales, purchases, disbursements, or receipts over the past 50 years that have affected the gold reserves.

In a post on X, Massie stated:

In February, President Trump said he wanted to go to Fort Knox to “make sure the gold is there.” This bill provides the full disclosure President Trump seeks.

A full audit of U.S. gold reserves — as well as of the Federal Reserve — is long overdue. In a 2015 article titled “Has the Federal Reserve Sold the Gold at Fort Knox?” The New American reported on indications that the U.S. mint could not account for U.S. gold reserves and that the Federal Reserve secretly misused them, amid calls at the time to conduct an audit. The article reported:

There are many who claim that the Federal Reserve doesn’t want a proper audit because the gold is not there, at least not all of it. Some groups believe that as part of its effort to manipulate the economy, the Federal Reserve has sold the gold.

Not until 10 years later did this issue gain widespread attention, after Elon Musk and U.S. Senators Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) highlighted the lack of transparency at Fort Knox.

Keep reading

UFO sleuths want fewer secrets in Trump-era investigations

After generations of stigma and secrecy around sightings of unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs), or what the public calls UFOs, investigators probing hundreds of unsolved cases say the second Trump administration could be a turning point for transparency.

“We’re trying to get as much of the raw evidence out as we can without putting our partners’ equities at risk,” said Jon Kosloski, director of the Pentagon’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, the government-wide task force leading research into mysterious sightings.

“The office has hired additional personnel and we’re investing in automated security review software that can redact the sensitive information from videos,” he said of an effort to release more currently classified material related to the probes.

Congress established the Resolution Office in 2022 to “detect, identify and attribute” mysterious objects of interest in the air, outer space, and underwater, with special focus on mitigating potential threats to military operations and national security.

More than 1800 cases have been reviewed by the Pentagon so far, with the vast majority ultimately resolved as likely balloons, drones, debris or animals based on a comprehensive review of available data.

Kosloski says “several dozen” cases remain anomalous even after rigorous analysis of evidence. They continue to receive new reports of anomalies by military service members and the general public every month.

“It’s a potential problem, a national security problem, safety of flight issue,” Kosloski told ABC News. “We seem to have the full support of the administration” in pursuing answers.

Keep reading

UK Leads Global Push For Notification Data Requests

Back in 2023, we reported on how US agencies have used push notification metadata on smartphones for surveillance, pressuring tech companies like Apple and Google to hand over user information. Prompted by Senator Ron Wyden’s inquiry, Apple revealed it had been legally barred from disclosing this practice, which raises serious concerns about civil liberties and government overreach.

Cut to today and government demands for user information tied to Apple’s push notification system continued into the first half of 2024, with the United Kingdom submitting 141 requests, despite the nation’s relatively small size, and the United States following with 129.

Germany also obtained data during this period. Singapore, despite making inquiries, received none. These figures come from Apple’s most recent transparency report, shedding light on global government interest in a lesser-known surveillance vector.

Even some privacy apps can be undermined by surveillance at the push notification level. Many apps have to rely on Apple or Google to deliver notifications; services that can expose critical metadata such as which app sent the notification, when it was sent, and how often.

This metadata can be used by governments to infer user activity, and social connections, and even de-anonymize users. It bypasses app-level encryption entirely, exploiting a layer outside the user’s or developer’s control.

Apple’s report outlines what’s at stake with these requests. When someone enables notifications for an app, the system generates a “push token” that links the device and app to a specific Apple account.

Keep reading

Who’s Programming The AI, Mr. President?

President Trump’s new legislative centerpiece – the One Big Beautiful Bill – has a promising name and some compelling goals: reduce government bloat, streamline agencies, and modernize operations with cutting-edge technology.

But there’s a problem. A big one.

No one will tell us who’s programming the AI.

This sweeping bill includes a 10-year moratorium on any state or local government regulating artificial intelligence. According to The Washington Post and AP, more than 60 existing state-level laws will be overridden if this provision passes. All regulatory authority over AI—including systems that will be used in law enforcement, healthcare, defense, and finance—will be centralized in the federal government for a decade.

Even worse? The bill empowers the Department of Commerce to deploy “commercial AI” across virtually every federal agency—from the IRS to Homeland Security—according to Indian Express and The Verge.

And yet, no one in the White House or Congress has revealed who is writing the AI code, what datasets it’s trained on, whether it can be independently audited, or whether it’s bound by the U.S. Constitution.

This isn’t just a transparency issue. This is a constitutional crisis in the making.

To be clear, President Trump’s instincts here may be sound. We’ve long needed to shrink the federal leviathan and replace unconstitutional bureaucracies with systems that serve the people—not special interests.

But good intentions won’t protect us from unseen programmers, black-box algorithms, and unaccountable automation.

This bill mandates AI integration across government “to improve efficiency and security.” But efficiency isn’t liberty. Security isn’t sovereignty. And no AI—no matter how “smart”—should be allowed to rewrite, ignore, or reinterpret constitutional rights.

According to Business Insider, the AI moratorium’s stated goal is to “foster innovation” and avoid a “fragmented regulatory landscape.” In reality, it strips states of their authority to protect their citizens from deepfakes, algorithmic bias, digital censorship, and mass surveillance.

This is not governance. This is outsourced tyranny, hidden under the guise of modernization.

So let’s ask the question about what happens when AI is weaponized. If the systems being implemented were open source, transparent, built entirely on constitutional jurisprudence, and auditable by the public, we’d be having a very different conversation.

Instead, we’re facing a future where an algorithm may determine whether you’re eligible for services, a machine learning system may flag you as a “threat” based on your social media posts, and a black-box model may deny you a loan, reject your legal challenge, or freeze your bank account.

Keep reading

Jill Biden’s Press Sec GOES OFF on Bidens For Concealing One Scandal After Another… “Allergic to Transparency”

Jill Biden’s former press secretary Michael LaRosa went off on the Bidens for concealing one scandal after another.

“This was a group in the White House who were allergic to transparency, and I’m talking about just in the East Wing. The very first day walking into the White House, the usher was fired, and I couldn’t get reporters straight answers, because nobody would give me straight answers,” LaRosa said on Fox & Friends.

Michael LaRosa said the Bidens lied about everything from the dogs biting secret service agents to wedding arrangements.

“They took days and months to be deliberative, and I’m talking about the small things, about when the dog bites occurred,” Michael LaRosa said.

“Or about the wedding with the grandkids,” he added. “They got caught lying to the press about press coverage, because they were so scared to be transparent about anything.”

“I said to myself at some point, ‘If it’s this hard to get them to just be transparent and disclose things and to just be upfront from the beginning about anything, even the small things… My God, what would happen if there were big things?’” he said.

Keep reading