ProPublica

Since its launch in 2013, the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer has quickly become the go-to spot for racists on the internet.The site can count among its readers Dylann Roof, the white teenager who slaughtered nine African Americans in Charleston (SC) in 2015, and James Jackson, who fatally stabbed an elderly black man with a sword in the streets of New York earlier in 2017. Traffic is up lately, too, at white supremacist sites like The Right Stuff, Iron March, American Renaissance and Stormfront, one of the oldest white nationalist sites on the internet. The operations of such extreme sites are made possible, in part, by an otherwise very mainstream internet company — Cloudflare.

Based in San Francisco (CA), Cloudflare operates more than 100 data centers spread across the world, serving as a sort of middleman for websites — speeding up delivery of a site’s content and protecting it from several kinds of attacks. Cloudflare says that some 10 percent of web requests flow through its network, and the company’s mainstream clients range from the FBI to the dating site OKCupid.

Virtually every day, Democratic lawmakers write the Trump Administration demanding answers on a range of issues. And every day they are met with the sounds of silence.

The recent unanswered letters include: a request from senators asking for details on Jared Kushner’s conflicts of interest; another asking how agencies will implement Trump-ordered changes to Obamacare; and a third asking for details on officials the administration has quietly installed in so-called beachhead teams across the government. A recent, informal audit by Rep John Sarbanes (D-MD) found 100 letters that went unanswered as of mid-March, though not all of them made clear requests for information. “These findings confirm what many feared: The Trump Administration has little regard for transparent government,” Rep Sarbanes said. A Rep Sarbanes spokesman said the audit found just a small handful of letters that did receive responses, such as one sent to the Federal Railroad Administration and another related to a pipeline issue. The reasons for the lack of responses aren’t clear.

While President Donald Trump has not moved to fill many jobs that require Senate confirmation, he has quietly installed hundreds of officials to serve as his eyes and ears at every major federal agency, from the Pentagon to the Department of Interior. Unlike appointees exposed to the scrutiny of the Senate, members of these so-called “beachhead teams” have operated largely in the shadows, with the White House declining to publicly reveal their identities. While some names have previously dribbled out in the press, we are publishing a list of more than 400 hires, providing the most complete accounting so far of who Trump has brought into the federal government. Here is a run-down of some of the Trump hires:

Curtis Ellis was a columnist for WorldNetDaily, a website best known for its enthusiastic embrace of the false notion that President Obama was born outside the United States. Ellis was hired Jan. 20 as a special assistant to the secretary at the Labor Department. Asked about his role in a brief phone interview, he said: “Nothing I can tell you.”
Jon Perdue, a self-described guerrilla warfare expert and fellow at a little-known security think tank, wrote a book called “The War of All the People: The Nexus of Latin American Radicalism and Middle Eastern Terrorism.” He is also a onetime contributor to Breitbart. Perdue was hired as a special assistant at the Treasury Department.

If the government ends up approving the $85 billion AT&T-Time Warner merger, credit won’t necessarily belong to the executives, bankers, lawyers, and lobbyists pushing for the deal. More likely, it will be due to the professors. A serial acquirer, AT&T must persuade the government to allow every major deal. Again and again, the company has relied on economists from America’s top universities to make its case before the Justice Department or the Federal Trade Commission. Moonlighting for a consulting firm named Compass Lexecon, they represented AT&T when it bought Centennial, DirecTV, and Leap Wireless; and when it tried unsuccessfully to absorb T-Mobile. And now AT&T and Time Warner have hired three top Compass Lexecon economists to counter criticism that the giant deal would harm consumers and concentrate too much media power in one company.

Economists who specialize in antitrust — affiliated with Chicago, Harvard, Princeton, the University of California, Berkeley, and other prestigious universities — reshaped their field through scholarly work showing that mergers create efficiencies of scale that benefit consumers. But they reap their most lucrative paydays by lending their academic authority to mergers their corporate clients propose. Corporate lawyers hire them from Compass Lexecon and half a dozen other firms to sway the government by documenting that a merger won’t be “anti-competitive”: in other words, that it won’t raise retail prices, stifle innovation, or restrict product offerings. Their optimistic forecasts, though, often turn out to be wrong, and the mergers they champion may be hurting the economy.

Facing a wave of criticism for allowing advertisers to exclude anyone with an “affinity” for African-American, Asian-American or Hispanic people from seeing ads, Facebook said it would build an automated system that would let it better spot ads that discriminate illegally.

Federal law prohibits ads for housing, employment and credit that exclude people by race, gender and other factors. Facebook said it would build an automated system to scan advertisements to determine if they are services in these categories. Facebook will prohibit the use of its “ethnic affinities” for such ads. Facebook said its new system should roll out within the next few months. “We are going to have to build a solution to do this. It is not going to happen overnight,” said Steve Satterfield, privacy and public policy manager at Facebook. He said that Facebook would also update its advertising policies with “stronger, more specific prohibitions” against discriminatory ads for housing, credit and employment.

The federal agency that enforces the nation’s fair housing laws said it is “in discussions” with Facebook to address what it termed “serious concerns” about the social network’s advertising practices. Heather Fluit, a spokeswoman for the Department of Housing and Urban Development, said that the department was “aware of published reports that Facebook’s advertising tool may allow users to discriminate in housing advertisements.” Fluitt said Facebook’s advertising policies will be examined by HUD’s office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity.

Imagine if, during the Jim Crow era, a newspaper offered advertisers the option of placing ads only in copies that went to white readers. That’s basically what Facebook is doing nowadays.

The ubiquitous social network not only allows advertisers to target users by their interests or background, it also gives advertisers the ability to exclude specific groups it calls “Ethnic Affinities.” Ads that exclude people based on race, gender and other sensitive factors are prohibited by federal law in housing and employment. The ad we purchased was targeted to Facebook members who were house hunting and excluded anyone with an “affinity” for African-American, Asian-American or Hispanic people. When we showed Facebook’s racial exclusion options to a prominent civil rights lawyer John Relman, he gasped and said, “This is horrifying. This is massively illegal. This is about as blatant a violation of the federal Fair Housing Act as one can find.”

A Q&A with Dave Levinthal, a writer for the Center for Public Integrity.

During the 2016 election, journalists have become part of the story in an unprecedented way. GOP Candidate Donald Trump has levied repeated accusations that the media is biased, insulting them and even barring them from covering his events. He seemed to find proof for this rallying cry in an article written by Dave Levinthal and Michael Beckel for the Center for Public Integrity. The story shows that of very few self-identified journalists who have given money to a presidential candidate, 96 percent gave to Hilary Clinton. The piece quickly flew around the Internet, aided in part by Donald Trump. It’s long been a rule in journalism that reporters should not donate to political campaigns. But the story’s examples left many underwhelmed. We spoke with Levinthal about how his story, as well as how campaign coverage during this election has changed given the media’s role in the spotlight. He said, "If there's anything, I think, to be taken from that it's that there really isn't much of a standard practice across the news industry when you throw publications large and small, when you throw in radio, television, online print, be it what it may. It really just depends on the news organization itself."

When Google bought the advertising network DoubleClick in 2007, Google founder Sergey Brin said that privacy would be the company’s “number one priority when we contemplate new kinds of advertising products.” And, for nearly a decade, Google did in fact keep DoubleClick’s massive database of web-browsing records separate by default from the names and other personally identifiable information Google has collected from Gmail and its other login accounts. But this summer, Google quietly erased that last privacy line in the sand – literally crossing out the lines in its privacy policy that promised to keep the two pots of data separate by default.

In its place, Google substituted new language that says browsing habits “may be” combined with what the company learns from the use Gmail and other tools. The change is enabled by default for new Google accounts. Existing users were prompted to opt-in to the change this summer. The practical result of the change is that the DoubleClick ads that follow people around on the web may now be customized to them based on the keywords they used in their Gmail. It also means that Google could now, if it wished to, build a complete portrait of a user by name, based on everything they write in email, every website they visit and the searches they conduct.

We live in an era of increasing automation. Machines help us not only with manual labor but also with intellectual tasks, such as curating the news we read and calculating the best driving directions. But as machines make more decisions for us, it is increasingly important to understand the algorithms that produce their judgments. We’ve spent the year investigating algorithms, from how they’ve been used to predict future criminals to Amazon’s use of them to advantage itself over competitors. All too often, these algorithms are a black box: It’s impossible for outsiders to know what’s going inside them. Sept 28 we’re launching a series of experiments to help give you the power to see inside. Our first stop: Facebook and your personal data.

Facebook has a particularly comprehensive set of dossiers on its more than 2 billion members. Every time a Facebook member likes a post, tags a photo, updates their favorite movies in their profile, posts a comment about a politician, or changes their relationship status, Facebook logs it. When they browse the Web, Facebook collects information about pages they visit that contain Facebook sharing buttons. When they use Instagram or WhatsApp on their phone, which are both owned by Facebook, they contribute more data to Facebook’s dossier. And in case that wasn’t enough, Facebook also buys data about its users’ mortgages, car ownership and shopping habits from some of the biggest commercial data brokers. Facebook uses all this data to offer marketers a chance to target ads to increasingly specific groups of people. Indeed, we found Facebook offers advertisers more than 1,300 categories for ad targeting — everything from people whose property size is less than .26 acres to households with exactly seven credit cards.