John Cox

Blogs · @wyome · Now · Shelf

Tagged investigation · everything

Interesting

Medium

Want to see something crazy? Open this link on your phone with WiFi turned off.

US telecommunications companies grant third-party services like Danal and Payfone direct access to sensitive customer data—including home addresses, phone numbers, and real-time cell tower location data—through enterprise APIs ostensibly designed for fraud detection. These services can look up this information using only a mobile phone's IP address, with minimal consent requirements and likely inadequate oversight, enabling potential tracking or de-anonymization of nearly any American cell phone user without meaningful safeguards or warrant requirements. The article demonstrates working demos of these capabilities and notes that major carriers' opt-out mechanisms appear ineffective at preventing such access.

Permalink privacysecuritymobileinvestigation

www.nytimes.com

Breonna Taylor’s Life Was Changing. Then the Police Came to Her Door.

# Summary Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old emergency room technician with no criminal record, was shot five times and killed by Louisville police during a March 2020 raid on her apartment that was ostensibly targeting her ex-boyfriend, a convicted drug dealer named Jamarcus Glover. The raid resulted from a flawed investigation: while police had legitimate evidence of Glover's drug operation at nearby addresses, their justification for raiding Taylor's apartment relied on thinner evidence—his GPS-tracked visits to her complex, her car appearing at a drug house, and bank transfers between them—leading to questions about whether probable cause existed. Taylor had distanced herself from Glover weeks before her death and was planning a future with her boyfriend Kenneth Walker, who fired one shot in self-defense when officers breached the door without adequately announcing themselves, prompting police to return fire; one officer was later fired for blindly shooting through her window from the parking lot, and no drugs or cash were found in her apartment.

Permalink politicsinvestigationlouisville2020s

nymag.com

The Secrets of the JFK Assassination Documents

Scott Sayare's piece traces how journalist Jefferson Morley, using declassified files from the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act, uncovered that CIA officer George Joannides—secretly Oswald-era handler of the anti-Castro group DRE—was deceptively installed as the Agency's liaison to the 1970s House Select Committee on Assassinations, blocking scrutiny of his own prior role. The article builds the case that CIA headquarters knowingly falsified cables about Oswald before the assassination and then spent decades stonewalling congressional and independent investigators (HSCA, the Church Committee, the ARRB), while also probing the limits and possible overreach of Morley's own escalating theories about Oswald as a CIA "agent of influence." It's a dense, well-sourced anatomy of institutional cover-up and the perils of obsessive truth-seeking, worth keeping as one of the more sober, document-driven accounts of the assassination's unresolved CIA angle.

Permalink politicsjournalisminvestigation

nymag.com

Was COVID-19 a Wuhan Lab Leak? A Coronavirus Investigation

Nicholson Baker's exhaustive January 2021 piece makes the case, point by point, that COVID-19 likely originated from a laboratory accident rather than a natural spillover, tracing the decades-long history of gain-of-function research, Ralph Baric and Shi Zhengli's collaborative work engineering chimeric bat-human coronaviruses, and the Wuhan Institute of Virology's proximity to a 2012 mineshaft where workers fell ill with a SARS-like pneumonia. It's notable less for offering definitive proof than for laying out, months before the theory gained mainstream legitimacy, nearly every strand of evidence and argument that major outlets and intelligence agencies would later revisit — making it worth keeping as the founding document of the lab-leak debate's serious treatment.

Permalink healthsciencecoronaviruscovid-19

longreads.com

A Manson Murder Investigation 20 Years In the Making: ‘There Are Still Secrets’

This is an interview with Tom O'Neill about his two-decade odyssey researching CHAOS, his book arguing that the standard Manson murders narrative concocted by prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi conceals darker, unresolved connections—particularly Manson's ties to CIA mind-control researcher Jolly West and MKUltra-era experiments in the Haight-Ashbury scene. O'Neill discusses how the reporting spiraled beyond his control, unearthing suppressed police evidence, terrified and hostile sources, and unresolved leads he ultimately had to publish without tidy conclusions, while wrestling with the ethical risk of feeding conspiracy paranoia rather than genuine accountability. It's worth keeping for its candid look at the messy, obsessive process of long-form investigative reporting and its skepticism toward tidy true-crime narratives generally.

Permalink 1960sinvestigationtrue crime

Boing Boing

Unsealed court-settlement documents reveal banks stole $trillions' worth of houses - Boing Boing

Unsealed court documents reveal the full scope of bank fraud during the 2008 mortgage crisis: major lenders committed felonies by forging ownership documents to foreclose on homes they didn't legally own, after bungling the title transfers required when mortgages were securitized into bonds. The $95 million settlement paid by the banks was less than one percent of the trillions in stolen property value, and the legal system's failure to prosecute has allowed banks to continue foreclosing with fraudulent documents, leaving millions of homes with clouded titles that some cannot even be sold.

Permalink real estateeconomicsinvestigation

Mother Jones

Follow the Dark Money | Mother Jones

# Summary This article traces the century-long battle over campaign finance regulation in American politics, showing a cyclical pattern where scandals prompt reform efforts that are subsequently dismantled through court decisions and legal loopholes. From Watergate's revelations about secret corporate donations funding the break-in, through the post-Watergate reforms of the 1970s that were partially gutted by the Buckley decision, to the soft-money scandals of the Clinton era that led to McCain-Feingold in 2002, the article documents how conservative legal strategists like James Bopp Jr. systematically challenged campaign finance laws—culminating in the Citizens United decision that opened the floodgates to unlimited corporate spending and ushered in the super-PAC era. The author argues that money in politics behaves like water, finding new channels around each regulatory dam, and that we are now back to the pre-Watergate era of massive undisclosed donations despite public demand for stricter controls.

Permalink historypoliticsinvestigation