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ProPublica Partners With Beacon to Promote Workers’ Comp Reporting

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by Amanda Zamora

Today, ProPublica is teaming up with the journalism crowdfunding site Beacon to encourage more coverage of workers' comp across the country.

Nearly a century after most states established protections for the American worker, at least 33 have reduced benefits, created hurdles to getting medical care or made it more difficult to qualify for workers' comp, according to an ongoing investigation by ProPublica and NPR. It's an issue that potentially affects hundreds of thousands of workers who report serious work-related injuries or illnesses every year.

 As part of our investigation, Insult to Injury, we asked people to tell us about their experiences navigating workers' comp claims — and more than 300 have shared their stories so far.

Now, we're partnering with Beacon to invite journalists to take these stories — along with state-by-state research, detailed benefits data, and our Reporting Recipe — to help us document the impact of workers' comp reductions across the country.

Beacon's platform gives journalists the tools they need to fund their work by connecting directly with engaged readers. Its goal is to power impactful, in-depth stories that matter to the public – a mission that aligns with our own. In the past, Beacon has successfully funded projects on mass incarceration, net neutrality, climate change and more.

Here's how journalists can join the Beacon-ProPublica workers' comp partnership:

1. Dig into the story. Check out ProPublica's Reporting Recipe for background on workers' comp, benefits data and policies by state.

2. Find a source. Sign up here to be matched with workers who've been affected where you live.

3. Pitch your project. Think you've got a solid story in the works? Awesome! Head to Beacon to pitch your project and start raising funds. It could be a story, an interactive or a multimedia project, as long as it builds on ProPublica's workers' comp investigation to explore the impact in your city or state. As an added incentive, Beacon will match the first $250 raised for any ProPublica-based pitches – just make sure to add the "Workers' Comp" tag.

4. Send us your story! Local journalists play a vital role in making broader accountability issues — like disparities in workers' comp — accessible and relevant to communities most affected. We're excited to be opening up our investigation to support Beacon journalists who share our mission. We look forward to seeing your great work.

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How to Investigate Workers’ Comp In Your State

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by Michael Grabell

With income inequality and economic fairness at the center of national discussion, workers' compensation provides the perfect lens for examining how the social compact has changed. It is one of America's first safety net programs. And unlike other laws, it spells out a company's responsibility for its workers.

The American workers' comp system was born in the early 1900s as a "grand bargain" forged by business and labor as awareness grew about the grisly workplace accidents that came with industrialization. Workers gave up their right to sue their employers — even in cases of gross negligence — protecting businesses from lawsuit judgments that could bankrupt them. In exchange, workers were promised medical care for their injuries, enough wages to help them get by while they recovered and compensation for permanent disabilities.

But as a ProPublica investigation has found, state after state has been dismantling its workers' comp system, denying injured workers help when they need it most and shifting the cost of work-related disabilities onto public programs like Social Security Disability Insurance.

With more than 3.7 million work-related injuries and illnesses reported in 2013, these changes are hurting households across the country. But workers' comp legislation rarely gets significant news coverage, in part because it's such a bureaucratic system that varies state to state.

With this Reporting Recipe, we want to make it easier for journalists to find and report stories on changes in workers' comp policies and the impact on local workers. Read on for reporting tips, data and help finding potential sources. Still have questions? Email us at workerscomp@propublica.org.    

What's happened in your state?

New laws in 33 states essentially did three things: They reduced benefits, gave employers and insurers more control over medical care or made it more difficult for workers with certain injuries and diseases to qualify.

To give the public a better sense of the national scope of the changes, ProPublica scoured state laws and built a database highlighting the most significant provisions. You can find it here. How have policies changed in your state? What groups or companies influenced those changes? How do they compare to those in neighboring states?

For more context on policies by state, here are a few other resources that might be helpful:

Finally, many state workers' comp systems produce their own annual reports with specific statistics. Be sure to check their websites.

Wait — aren't workers' comp costs going up?

Insurance premiums for workers' comp are affected by several factors, such as the company's history of workplace injuries, the number of workers it has and how much it pays them. When the economy is growing, as it is now, businesses hire more workers and give raises and their premiums typically go up.

But workers' comp rates — the amount employers pay for every $100 they pay in wages — are at or near historic lows in almost every state in the country. The state of Oregon has been tracking this since the mid-1980s. Find the average premium rates for employers in your state here. Are businesses claiming the rates are rising when the data shows they're falling?

How do I find out what the workers' comp benefits and rules are in my state?

During our reporting, one expert told us, "If you've read one workers' comp law, you've read one workers' comp law." There is no federal oversight of workers' comp. So benefits can vary dramatically even for states right next to one another.

For example, the maximum compensation for the loss of an eye is $27,280 in Alabama, but $261,525 in Pennsylvania. We found two workers who lived within 75 miles of each other and suffered arm amputations under similar circumstances. One received $45,000 in compensation for the loss of his arm while the other received lifetime benefits that could exceed $740,000 over 50 years. Why the vast difference? They worked in different states.

You can find the maximum amount of benefits workers can receive for permanent injuries to various body parts by state in this interactive graphic.

But be careful with how you report these numbers. There's a lot of nuance. The maximums are based on various circumstances, such as the worker's wages, the severity of the injury and sometimes age and education. Read our methodology page as well as the footnotes that accompany each state. For more detail about calculating the benefits, check the state law or contact your state's workers' comp bureau. Here's a list with links to their workers' comp agencies by state.

So how do I find workers who've been affected?

We asked our readers to tell us about their experiences with workers' comp and have heard from more than 300 people so far, including nearly 200 employees who said they are interested in being put in touch with reporters in their region. Journalists can sign up to be matched with a potential source by completing this form. Here's a quick look at the workers' comp stories we've received so far:

Several states including Florida, Illinois and California also allow the public to browse recent decisions or search for workers' comp cases by claimant name or employer.

In addition, local workers' comp attorneys, unions and worker advocacy groups can be helpful in finding injured workers. The Workers' Injury Law & Advocacy Group has a directory of lawyers who specialize in representing injured workers with workers' comp claims. The National Council for Occupational Safety and Health and Interfaith Worker Justice both have information about local worker centers around the country.

Get your story funded: If you're a local journalist, see our Beacon partnership to learn more about how to raise funds to report this story.

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ProPublica’s ‘Get Involved’ Aims to Spur More Crowd-Powered News

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by Amanda Zamora

Over the next year, with the support of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, ProPublica will be working to improve how we engage communities to help us create journalism that spurs change.

From our inception, two things have distinguished ProPublica's journalism: our focus on deep, investigative reporting and our use of data to explain how systems meant to serve the public often fall short. We employ classic investigative reporting and big data techniques both to expose problems and to illuminate potential remedies. 

ProPublica reporter Marshall Allen and deputy data editor Olga Pierce are great examples of this strategy in action. The pair spent the better part of three years investigating the root causes of patient harm in U.S. hospitals (the third-leading cause of deaths in America, by some estimates), talking to hundreds of medical providers and patients and analyzing millions of rows of Medicare data to produce Surgeon Scorecard. For the first time, patients can explore the complication rates of nearly 17,000 surgeons before they entrust their lives to a doctor. A key ingredient in making this project possible? Our community.

ProPublica launched its patient safety investigation with a call for help that has now garnered more than 1,000 responses from patients and their loved ones. Many of these readers are also active in our 3,000-member Facebook group, an open forum for people impacted by patient harm to connect with each other. Scores of doctors and academics lent us their expertise as well, helping to model our complication rate data in a responsible and useful way. 

At a time when the news industry mostly measures engagement in clicks, shares and retweets, it's encouraging to see the way ProPublica's patient safety community has grown. When the Senate convened a hearing last year on the persistence of preventable deaths in U.S. hospitals, testimony by leading advocates sparked a conversation in ProPublica's patient safety community. 

The ProPublica Patient Safety Community on Facebook.

Which leads me to a third thing that distinguishes ProPublica: For us, engagement is as much about cultivating communities as it is about getting people to click on our stories. It's no secret that ProPublica's chief goal is impact. We want our journalism to make a difference, and we see our community as active collaborators in that mission.

As journalists, our role is to gather the news and report it as objectively and artfully as possible. But anyone watching knows our journalism isn't limited to the pages we produce each day. Our readers are grateful for the work we do, but they want to know what can be done to make things better. They're clamoring for action.

One way we facilitate action is by asking people to tell us what we don't know. These "callouts" are a standing feature of Get Involved, which offers our readers the opportunity to share stories, and to connect with us and with each other. With more than 10,300 contributions since 2009, our callouts have become a growing resource for our reporters and the backbone of our community-building efforts. We hear regularly from people thanking us for simply taking an interest in them. People who want to get their stories out. People who want to see change.

Which leaves us asking ourselves: How can we do better by those who entrust their stories to us? How can we channel their passions and perspectives into meaningful action? And how can we connect readers not only to each other, but also to our colleagues in newsrooms across the country?

I'm excited to say these are questions we'll be tackling over the next year with the support of Knight Foundation. One of our first areas of focus will be revamping Get Involved to better serve our partners in journalism. We're not the only ones enlisting the help of audiences to tell important stories. The Guardian's crowd-sourced police shootings project, The Counted, is just one recent example. There are many collaborative journalism efforts in the United States and around the world that we hope to both learn from and share with our community. We'll be open-sourcing even more resources from our own investigations, but also facilitating outreach among fellow journalists using digital tools to tell stories with and for their communities.

We're starting today with the creation of the Crowd-Powered News Network, a forum for journalists and others proactively engaging communities in storytelling to share ideas, practical support and best practices.

Are you creating journalism — whether online, on air or in film — in partnership with your community? Sign up now to join the Crowd-Powered News Network. 

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Speed Bumps: Why It’s So Hard to Catch Cheaters in Track and Field

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by David Epstein, ProPublica, and Michael J. Joyner, special to ProPublica,

Earlier this month, London’s Sunday Times and German broadcaster ARD published a joint investigation on doping in track and field that included an analysis of 12,000 leaked blood tests from 5,000 athletes between 2001 and 2012. The tests had been carried out by the IAAF, track and field’s international governing body. Two respected experts in doping methods said blood tests of 800 of the athletes were “highly suggestive of doping or at the very least abnormal.” Ten runners who won medals in endurance events at the 2012 Summer Olympics in London had suspicious test results. And a startling 80 percent of Russian medalists recorded tests that showed likely doping. The vast majority of athletes with suspicious tests were never sanctioned.

On Saturday, the 2015 track and field world championships kick off and, of course, some athletes who are doping will vie for medals. Most will not be caught; only 1 to 2 percent of tests in international Olympic sports result in sanctions each year. If doping is so rife in track and field, why are athletes penalized so rarely? It’s partly because many suspicious tests don’t quite reach the high evidence bar to be considered officially positive. But it’s also because doping athletes tend to employ methods that make drug testing extremely difficult. As Paul Scott, head of Scott Analytics, which provides testing services in multiple sports has put it: “Drug testing has a public reputation that far exceeds its capabilities.”

Here’s a look at why drug tests will never snare every cheater.

Looking for a (tiny) edge

Top-tier track and field has become so competitive that the margin of victory is often vanishingly small. In the men’s 100 meters at the last Olympics, the difference between gold and silver was .12 seconds, less than the time it would take you to blink if a flashlight were shined in your face. The difference between silver and bronze was less than half that.

The tiny gap between winning and losing has led athletes to look for what they call marginal gains, whether that comes from extra sleep, better equipment or cheating. It also means that athletes needn’t take the industrial strength drugs that some baseball players and Soviet Bloc athletes famously took. The most popular doping agents today are synthetic versions of natural hormones: testosterone and human growth hormone — which aid muscle building and workout recovery — and EPO, which causes the body to produce more oxygen-carrying red blood cells. Athletes have learned they can take small amounts — known as “microdosing”— to evade detection and still get the benefits.

Why is it so difficult to detect?

For starters, accurately measuring the presence of tiny concentrations of drugs — particularly synthetic versions of natural hormones — is difficult. For the sake of calling a test positive, it’s even more difficult. Consider the ubiquitous anti-doping test known as the T/E ratio. “T” is testosterone and “E” is another hormone called epitestosterone, a natural product of steroid metabolism that provides no benefit. Most people have a T/E ratio of 1-to–1. But there is natural variation among people, so the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) set the T/E ratio limit at 4-to–1. If a test goes above that, it is deemed suspicious and testing for synthetic testosterone ensues. This gives an athlete with a typical T/E ratio room to dope before hitting 4-to–1, and even small amounts of testosterone provide benefit. To make matters worse for drug testers, for many people, an elevated T/E ratio will quickly return to normal, even as the benefits of the drug are just beginning. Christiane Ayotte, director of the WADA-accredited lab in Montreal, knows that athletes are slipping through the porous T/E screen every day. She once said that she “cannot retire until we’ve found a better probe.” This is one reason why it’s important that athletes are tested repeatedly and, ideally, outside of competition without advance notice.

Still, athletes focused on cheating can find a way. A clever doper might add epitestosterone to the testosterone they take to keep their ratio within allowable limits. That was what made “the cream” of BALCO-scandal fame so difficult to detect.

Even if the T/E ratio test were perfect, some athletes would slip through simply because their genes alter how testosterone shows up in their urine. In these athletes, their T/E ratio wouldn’t rise even if they took testosterone, and for some, it actually falls. In the first study documenting this, two-thirds of Koreans and 10 percent of Swedes tested had the sail-past-drug-testing physiology.

So what can be done?

There’s a testing method called CIR — carbon isotope ratio testing — that does not rely on the T/E ratio and can distinguish between natural and synthetic testosterone. Ayotte has caught athletes in random testing with CIR even though they had normal T/E ratios. CIR measures the ratio of types of carbon atoms in urine — which differs between natural and synthetic testosterone. Sprinter Justin Gatlin, a favorite to win the 100 at the world championships, was sanctioned based on a CIR test even though he didn’t go above a T/E of 4-to–1. But the CIR test is costly and laborious, so it’s typically only done to follow up a suspicious T/E ratio. And it’s also far from foolproof. An athlete might stick to small doses because the test isn’t sensitive enough to detect the synthetic testosterone in urine at low concentrations. It’s also likely that kitchen chemists who work in sports doping are engineering synthetic testosterone with just the right ratio to beat the CIR tests. The hope of drug testers is that by combining various testing methods they raise the chances of catching a habitual cheater.

What about the Athlete Biological Passport?

The biological passport is a newer method of doping detection that tracks particular blood variables for individual athletes over time. It debuted in 2009 and has been updated since then. By monitoring things like the percentage of new red blood cells and the amount of oxygen-carrying hemoglobin, the passport documents physiologic trends for each athlete. In this way, a baseline profile is established — basically a minimum and maximum value for each variable for that athlete. The athlete could get in trouble if a future test shows a variable well outside the profile.

Before the passport, testers needed to detect a drug — or the chemicals that the drug breaks down into — in the body. The passport simply documents the effects of the drug. Thus, it has a longer testing window, and can detect previously undetectable doping methods, like when an athlete transfuses their own blood. Known as “blood doping,” athletes remove and refrigerate their blood, wait until their bodies regenerate the blood supply, then transfuse the refrigerated blood. The athlete ends up with a significant advantage: a lot more oxygen-carrying red blood cells. Because it’s their own blood, none of the older doping tests would pick it up. The passport, though, would document the reaction of the athlete’s body. When stored blood is reinjected, the athlete’s body would ramp down production of red blood cells. If the opposite occurred — an athlete’s body produced an unusually high proportion of new red blood cells — it could indicate the use of injected EPO, which signals the body to make them.

After the biological passport was introduced in cycling, the percentage of tests that showed unusual proportions of new red blood cells was more than cut in half, suggesting the test was having some deterrent effect. Lance Armstrong famously posted a series of his drug tests from 2008 and 2009 to prove that he wasn’t doping after his comeback. He didn’t fail any single test, but taken as a timeline, the tests look like the signature of blood transfusions. (When Armstrong confessed doping to Oprah in 2013, he still denied doping post-comeback.)

Okay, then why wasn’t he sanctioned?

So many devils in so many details. It is highly unlikely that Armstrong’s blood profile could’ve occurred naturally. And yet, it wasn’t so conspicuous as to reach the level required for a definitive positive.

In order for such a review to be triggered, the offending test result has to be so unusual that there’s a 99.9 percent chance that it’s a true positive. So if there’s only a 99 percent chance, that’s not good enough. This means there’s room for athletes who are very likely, but not conclusively, doping to slip through. In one study, for example, when the 99 percent probability was used, 10 of 11 subjects who were transfusing blood as part of the anti-doping research were caught through biological passport testing. But there was also one false positive. When the probability limit was set to 99.9 percent, only eight of 11 doping subjects were caught, but with no false positives. (And these subjects weren’t making specific efforts to avoid detection, as pro athletes often do.) Anti-doping is like the criminal justice system in the sense that it is constructed to keep the number of false positives to a minimum at the cost of letting some false negatives slip through what are, in fact, pretty big cracks.

Yikes, so the burden of proof is really on the testers.

Yes, and because the passport constitutes a very indirect form of drug testing — unlike some pre-employment testing which looks for direct metabolites of drugs like cocaine — athletes get the chance to try to explain abnormal results. And there actually are some good explanations. Blood count measurements can vary 10 percent or more just based on how hydrated an athlete is, the time of day, even the athlete’s body position during the test, not to mention training at altitude or sleeping in tents that simulate altitude.

And don’t forget natural human variation. Populations of elite athletes tend to include at least some people with physiology that is rather extreme compared to most normal people. For example, one recent U.S. gold medalist naturally has a T/E ratio of 11-to–1, and a cross-country skier who won seven Olympic medals famously had 50 percent more red blood cells than his peers due to a rare genetic mutation. The line for a positive test has to be set very conservatively because we know there are natural outliers, particularly among pro competitors. Even athletes with clearly abnormal results sometimes walk away clean, and some of them actually are clean.

What about testing for human growth hormone?

Similar difficulties, only worse. Back in 2013, the NFL and the NFL players’ union were bickering over whether to implement HGH testing. Rarely discussed was the fact that the test probably wasn’t going to catch anyone anyway. The most common test for HGH is called the “isoform test.” The isoform test looks for a ratio of different weights (or isoforms) of growth hormone in the body. One isoform weighs 20 kilodaltons and the other 22 kilodaltons. Synthetic HGH comes only in the 22-kilodalton variety. So if an athlete injects synthetic HGH, the drug throws off the ratio of isoforms in the body, and the test looks for the altered ratio. But the ratio corrects itself in hours. Plus, to account for natural variation, the limit for a positive test is set way beyond normal, which means an athlete using HGH would really have to get unlucky with test timing to get caught. In a study, even the subjects who were intentionally doped with HGH for research did not quite reach positive-test territory.

When the NFL and the players’ union were having their spat, nobody mentioned that of 10,000 HGH tests around the world, only a dozen had come back positive. Importantly, one of those tests — a cross-country skier’s — was overturned by the Court of Arbitration for Sport, which handles the final appeal if an athlete contests a doping sanction. The court deemed the “decision limit” for a positive test had not been sufficiently proven as scientifically valid. In its ruling, even the CAS panel seemed to acknowledge the skier—who had a very abnormal test result—was probably cheating. But the court wanted more scientific evidence proving that there was a 99.99 percent chance that the skier’s test was a true positive.

For HGH in particular, there is a better test called the “biomarker test,” which looks for changes in blood parameters after HGH injection. But that has generally been sparsely used due to the lack of a steady supply of testing kits.

Is there any hope?

Yes and no. As anti-doping authorities collect more biological passport data, they will have a better picture of what abnormal results look like, and can set the bar for a positive test less conservatively. And new biological markers that can be tested for evidence of doping will surely be discovered. But it is unlikely that anti-doping will reach the point where an athlete who is microdosing and carefully engineering their blood profile can’t potentially slip through unnoticed.

It helps that anti-doping authorities are constantly adding tests. Last year, biological passport profiling for steroids was added to the system that was already looking for blood doping. They’ve also employed DNA analysis to determine when athletes have submitted someone else’s urine. (Think former Minnesota Vikings running back Onterrio Smith and his “Whizzinator.”) Plus, samples from major championships are now stored for eight years so that they can be re-tested with new methods. The IAAF recently suspended 28 athletes after re-testing samples from previous track and field championships. Those suspensions could result in two American athletes — Kara Goucher and Shalane Flanagan —being upgraded from 10K bronzes in the world championships and Olympics, respectively, to silvers.

Still, even as technology has improved, the proportion of worldwide samples that test positive remains at about 1 to 2 percent year after year. The dopers and anti-dopers may be in technological lockstep. Perhaps the greatest innovation in modern anti-doping is the rise of investigations that lead to “non-analytical positives,” as with Lance Armstrong, who liked to note that he’d never failed a test.

If you find the testing situation in Olympic sports depressing, remember that the WADA-approved testing regimen is the absolute gold standard in sports. Major League Baseball comes the closest — but not all that close — among the major pro sports leagues. The reason more athletes in those leagues aren’t being sanctioned for doping probably isn’t because it isn’t occurring.

Enjoy the game.

Michael J. Joyner is a physiologist and expert in human performance at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. The views expressed here are his own.

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Nonprofit Explorer

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by Mike Tigas and Sisi Wei

We’ve updated our Nonprofit Explorer app with over 600,000 new tax filings from FY2013. Use the database to search over 1.8 million tax returns from tax-exempt organizations.

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‘Half Bemused, Half Really Afraid’: What It’s Like Reporting on the High Seas

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by Minhee Cho

There's an old saying in journalism that there are no new stories, everything's been done before, ProPublica's Joe Sexton says. But when he came across "The Outlaw Ocean," investigative reporter Ian Urbina's latest series for The New York Times, he couldn't help but be "genuinely jealous" of the intriguing, outrageous world he uncovered.

Urbina joined Sexton on the podcast to discuss the rampant labor, human rights and environmental abuses he witnessed out on the high seas and the challenges of reporting out in such remote, international waters.

Highlights from their conversation:

  • How Urbina made it his goal to get on board the ships "where the real rogue characters operate" some 250 miles out at sea; the challenge was getting there. We had to "hopscotch" our way from boat to boat, haggling with captains 50 miles at a time, he says. (4:09)
  • Urbina’s “half bemused, half really afraid” moment when the ship lost all power – causing a near mutiny. “That was the one moment when I thought what a ridiculous way to go,” he tells Sexton. (8:40)
  • How there’s a fear among journalists that no matter the level of reporting, your work may not lead to the kind of change you want to see. (13:21)
  • And lastly, Sexton couldn’t help but ask, did you get seasick? “I didn’t,” Urbina says. “Every translator we brought on board did … I lucked out.” (15:20)

Listen to this podcast on iTunes, SoundCloud or Stitcher. For more on Urbina's reporting, read his four-part series, "The Outlaw Ocean."

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Red Cross CEO Tried to Kill Government Investigation

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by Justin Elliott

This story was co-produced with NPR.

American Red Cross CEO Gail McGovern has long portrayed her organization as a beacon of openness, once declaring “we made a commitment that we want to lead the effort in transparency.”

But when the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, opened an inquiry last year into the Red Cross’ disaster work, McGovern tried to get it killed behind the scenes.

“I would like to respectfully request that you consider us meeting face-to-face rather than requesting information via letter and end the GAO inquiry that is currently underway,” McGovern wrote in a June 2014 letter to Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss.

Senator to Red Cross: Where’s the Transparency on Haiti?

“I still have a lot more questions for the Red Cross,” said Sen. Charles Grassley. Read the story.

How the Red Cross Raised Half a Billion Dollars for Haiti ­and Built Six Homes

Even as the group has publicly celebrated its work, insider accounts detail a string of failures. Read the story.

McGovern sent the letter, which was obtained by ProPublica and NPR, after meeting with Thompson, the ranking member of the homeland security committee. At the request of Thompson’s office, the GAO had earlier that year started an inquiry into the Red Cross’ federally mandated role responding to disasters and whether the group gets enough oversight.

In her letter, McGovern suggested that, in lieu of the investigation, the congressman call her directly with questions. She provided her personal cell phone number.

In a statement, Thompson criticized McGovern’s request to spike the investigation.

“Over time, the public has come to accept the American Red Cross as a key player in the nation’s system for disaster relief,” he said. “It is unfortunate that in light of numerous allegations of mismanagement, the American Red Cross would shun accountability, transparency and simple oversight."

Craig Holman, a veteran observer of congressional investigations as an advocate with the watchdog group Public Citizen, said he couldn’t remember another instance in which the subject of a GAO inquiry asked for the inquiry to be called off.

“This is both a unique and particularly brazen lobby campaign by Gail McGovern to bring an end to an independent GAO investigation,” he said.

In a written statement, Red Cross spokeswoman Suzy DeFrancis said the group worked “cooperatively” with the GAO, providing documents and making at least a dozen senior officials available for interviews.

“We had discussions with the GAO and members of Congress about the purpose and intent of the GAO study so we could respond in a way that would meet their goals, which we are doing,” DeFrancis wrote.

The GAO inquiry continued despite McGovern’s appeal. The agency’s final report is expected to be released next month, according to a GAO spokesman.

McGovern’s effort echoes other instances in which the Red Cross has resisted requests for more information about its work. Last year, the Red Cross fought a ProPublica public records request about its Superstorm Sandy response by hiring a law firm and citing “trade secrets.” (The group later reversed its stance.)

The Red Cross has also declined to detail its spending in response to the Haiti earthquake. Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, recently questioned the Red Cross for including rules barring the release of financial information in its Haiti contracts.

In her letter to Thompson, McGovern said dealing with the GAO was taking up too much staff time.

“Responding to the questions and participating in interviews (particularly because of the broadness of the questions) is using a great deal of staff resources while we are preparing for hurricane season and simultaneously responding to tornadoes, storms, wildfires and floods across multiple states,” McGovern wrote. “In addition, I feel that I can better address your concerns when we have a two way dialogue.”

According to its website, the Red Cross employs six full-time government and congressional relations staffers, as well as retaining an outside lobbying firm.

A GAO spokesman said the agency was not aware of McGovern’s letter and “it didn’t have any impact on our work.”

Thompson’s close scrutiny of the Red Cross goes back years. He led an effort to review the group’s troubled response to Hurricane Katrina, which hit his home state of Mississippi.

The Red Cross was chartered by Congress over a century ago and operates as a kind of public-private hybrid. It responds to disasters hand-in-hand with the federal government but that work is largely funded through private donations. A law passed after Hurricane Katrina reforming the Red Cross explicitly empowered the GAO to investigate the group.

If you have information about the Red Cross, email justin@propublica.org.

To anonymously send us documents online, visit our SecureDrop site.

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A Trail of Evidence Leading to AT&T’s Partnership with the NSA

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by Julia Angwin and Jeff Larson, ProPublica; and Henrik Moltke and Laura Poitras, special to ProPublica,

ProPublica

Pep Montserrat, special to ProPublica

A Trail of Evidence Leading to AT&T’s Partnership with the NSA

Documents provided by Edward Snowden mention a special relationship between the National Security Agency and an unnamed telecommunications company. Here’s how we figured out that’s AT&T.

by Jeff Larson and Julia Angwin, ProPublica and Henrik Moltke and Laura Poitras, special to ProPublica

Today we reported that the National Security Agency’s ability to capture Internet traffic on United States soil has relied on its extraordinary, decadeslong partnership with a single company: the telecom giant AT&T.

While it has long been known that American telecommunications companies work closely with the spy agency, the documents we’ve published show that the relationship with AT&T has been considered unique and especially productive. One document described it as “highly collaborative” and another lauded the company’s “extreme willingness to help.”

By following breadcrumbs we found throughout the trove of documents released by Snowden, we were able to prove that a program called Fairview was the cover term for the agency’s partnership with AT&T. We also found evidence that Verizon participates in the agency’s smaller Stormbrew program.

Fairview Defined

We started with the basics. A slide deck called “Fairview Overview” described the partnership between NSA’s Special Source Operations unit and a corporate partner:

We inferred from this that the Fairview partner was a single big U.S. telecom. There are only a handful American operators at this scale: AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and Internet backbone providers such as CenturyLink, Cogent Communications and Level 3 Communications.

The Cable Cut

Our best clue came from an internal NSA newsletter, which contained an update about how data collection was restored after the Japanese earthquake of 2011:

On 5 Aug 2011, collection of DNR and DNI traffic at the FAIRVIEW CLIFFSIDE trans-pacific cable site resumed, after being down for approximately five months. Collection operations at CLIFFSIDE had been down since 11 March 2011, due to the cable damage as a result of the earthquake off of the coast of Japan.

Several submarine cables near Japan were damaged after the earthquake. However, only one of them was restored on August 5, 2011, according to Satoru Taira, vice president in the Crisis Management Planning Office at NTT Communications, the Japanese telecom that operates the Japan landing station for the cable. That restored cable is the northern leg of the Japan-US cable that is operated by AT&T in the United States, according to Federal Communications Commission filings.

Although there are many partners in the consortium that share ownership of the Japan-U.S. cable, AT&T is the primary network operator of the cable and owns the Manchester, California cable landing point for the U.S-Japan cable, according to FCC filings.

AT&T-Specific Jargon

Our next clue was some jargon we found in an NSA glossary.

Even the NSA has a hard time keeping track of all its code words, so it has a dictionary of terms. Inside that dictionary, we found an entry that described a Fairview program using terminology we hadn’t heard before: “SNRC.”

SAGURA - DNI access from FAIRVIEW’s Partner’s DNI backbone which includes OC-192 and 10GE peering circuits. The Partner has provided a current view of the forecasted and equipped 10GE and OC-192 peering circuits at the eight SNRCs as of March 2009.

A little sleuthing revealed a 1996 article in the publiction Network World in which AT&T described its Internet hubs as Service Node Routing Complexes, or SNRCs. Former AT&T employees Jennifer Rexford, who is now a professor at Princeton University, and Joel Gottlieb, who now runs his own consulting service, confirmed for us that SNRC was AT&T-specific jargon. We also found that AT&T had included the term SNRC in a glossary of technical terms it submitted with a government contract.

Elsewhere, in a diagram of Fairview data flows, the term Common Backbone, or CBB is used to describe the Fairview partner’s Internet backbone. The term CBB is also specific to AT&T, according to Rexford and Steven Bellovin, another former AT&T employee, now a professor at Columbia University.

A network map of Fairview shows eight “Peering Link Router Complexes” A 2009 AT&T network map shows eight “Backbone Node with Peering” at roughly those same locations.

UN Ring

In April 2012, an internal NSA newsletter boasted about a successful operation in which NSA spied on the United Nations headquarters in New York City with the help of its Fairview and Blarney programs. Blarney is a program that undertakes surveillance that is authorized by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

FAIRVIEW and BLARNEY engineers collaborated to enable the delivery of 700Mbps of paired packet switched traffic (DNI) traffic from access to an OC192 ring serving the United Nations mission in New York … FAIRVIEW engineers and the partner worked to provide the correct mapping, and BLARNEY worked with the partner to correct data quality issues so the data could be handed off to BLARNEY engineers to enable processing of the DNI traffic.

We found historical records showing that AT&T was paid $1 million a year to operate the U.N.’s fiber optic provider in 2011 and 2012. A spokesman for the U.N. secretary general confirmed that the organization “has a current contract with AT&T” to operate the fiber optic network at the U.N. headquarters in New York.

Cable Landing Stations

Internal NSA maps of Fairview’s backbone network show the partner company’s nine cable landing stations on the East and West coasts of the United States. Those positions correspond to cable landing stations owned by AT&T, documented by the company in regulatory filings to the FCC

The internal NSA slide below shows the locations of Fairview’s cable stations and other program locations. The map shows AT&T stations where submarine cables enter the United States.

“Company A”

A 2009 working draft of an NSA inspector general report about President Bush’s Stellar Wind warrantless wiretapping program, which was previously released by The Guardian, referred to the helpful cooperation of two companies — Company A and Company B, which provided “two of the most productive SIGINT collaborations that the NSA has with the private sector.”

Company A was described as having “access to 39% of international calls into and out of the United States” while Company B had access to 28 percent of international calls. At the time, AT&T had 39 percent and MCI had 28 percent of the international message telephone traffic, according to a 1999 FCC report.

Stormbrew Includes Verizon

We were also curious about the NSA’s next-biggest corporate partnership after Fairview, described in the documents as Stormbrew.

We found a 2013 presentation in the documents that showed a map of a Stormbrew submarine cable connecting the West Coast of the United States to five Asian cities: Chongming and Qingdao in China, Keoje and Shin-Maruyama in Japan, and Tanshui in Taiwan. Those landing points match exactly with the landing points of the Trans-Pacific Express submarine cable that is operated by Verizon.

In an internal NSA newsletter, we found a reference to the construction of the Stormbrew cable landing station:

Stormbrew has completed SCIF construction and also received security certification for BRECKENRIDGE, its latest collection site on 11 September 2009. The 10,000 square foot facility is equipped with the necessary power, communications and equipment racks to support the planned near-term deployment of 15 TURMOIL systems, providing 150G of processing against the newly acquired ••••••••••••••••.

Initial collection system deployments are scheduled for 2nd quarter 2010. The BRECKENRIDGE/••••••• effort commenced in February 2007 and is the first “cable-head” collection effort conducted under STORMBREW.

The date that the effort started — February 2007— is also when Verizon filed its initial request for “a license to construct, land and operate the TPE cable,” according to FCC filings.

author photo

Julia Angwin is a senior reporter at ProPublica. From 2000 to 2013, she was a reporter at The Wall Street Journal, where she led a privacy investigative team that was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Reporting in 2011 and won a Gerald Loeb Award in 2010.

author photo

Jeff Larson is the Data Editor at ProPublica. He is a winner of the Livingston Award for the 2011 series Redistricting: How Powerful Interests are Drawing You Out of a Vote. Jeff’s public key can be found here.

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NSA Spying Relies on AT&T’s ‘Extreme Willingness to Help’

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by Julia Angwin and Jeff Larson, ProPublica; Charlie Savage and James Risen, The New York Times; and Henrik Moltke and Laura Poitras, special to ProPublica,

ProPublica

Pep Montserrat, special to ProPublica

NSA Spying Relies on AT&T’s ‘Extreme Willingness to Help’

The National Security Agency’s ability to capture Internet traffic on United States soil has been based on an extraordinary, decadeslong partnership with a single company: AT&T.

by Julia Angwin and Jeff Larson, ProPublica; Charlie Savage and James Risen, The New York Times; and Henrik Moltke and Laura Poitras, special to ProPublica

The National Security Agency’s ability to spy on vast quantities of Internet traffic passing through the United States has relied on its extraordinary, decades-long partnership with a single company: the telecom giant AT&T.

While it has been long known that American telecommunications companies worked closely with the spy agency, newly disclosed NSA documents show that the relationship with AT&T has been considered unique and especially productive. One document described it as “highly collaborative,” while another lauded the company’s “extreme willingness to help.”

AT&T’s cooperation has involved a broad range of classified activities, according to the documents, which date from 2003 to 2013. AT&T has given the NSA access, through several methods covered under different legal rules, to billions of emails as they have flowed across its domestic networks. It provided technical assistance in carrying out a secret court order permitting the wiretapping of all Internet communications at the United Nations headquarters, a customer of AT&T.

The NSA’s top-secret budget in 2013 for the AT&T partnership was more than twice that of the next-largest such program, according to the documents. The company installed surveillance equipment in at least 17 of its Internet hubs on American soil, far more than its similarly sized competitor, Verizon. And its engineers were the first to try out new surveillance technologies invented by the eavesdropping agency.

One document reminds NSA officials to be polite when visiting AT&T facilities, noting: “This is a partnership, not a contractual relationship.”

The documents, provided by the former agency contractor Edward Snowden, were jointly reviewed by The New York Times and ProPublica. The NSA, AT&T and Verizon declined to discuss the findings from the files. “We don’t comment on matters of national security,” an AT&T spokesman said.

It is not clear if the programs still operate in the same way today. Since the Snowden revelations set off a global debate over surveillance two years ago, some Silicon Valley technology companies have expressed anger at what they characterize as NSA intrusions and have rolled out new encryption to thwart them. The telecommunications companies have been quieter, though Verizon unsuccessfully challenged a court order for bulk phone records in 2014.

At the same time, the government has been fighting in court to keep the identities of its telecom partners hidden. In a recent case, a group of AT&T customers claimed that the NSA’s tapping of the Internet violated the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches. This year, a federal judge dismissed key portions of the lawsuit after the Obama administration argued that public discussion of its telecom surveillance efforts would reveal state secrets, damaging national security.

The Secretariat building at the United Nations headquarters in New York City. (David Sleight/ProPublica)

The NSA documents do not identify AT&T or other companies by name. Instead, they refer to corporate partnerships run by the agency’s Special Source Operations division using code names. The division is responsible for more than 80 percent of the information the NSA collects, one document states.

Fairview is one of its oldest programs. It began in 1985, the year after antitrust regulators broke up the Ma Bell telephone monopoly and its long-distance division became AT&T Communications. An analysis of the Fairview documents by The Times and ProPublica reveals a constellation of evidence that points to AT&T as that program’s partner. Several former intelligence officials confirmed that finding.

A Fairview fiber-optic cable, damaged in the 2011 earthquake in Japan, was repaired on the same date as a Japanese-American cable operated by AT&T. Fairview documents use technical jargon specific to AT&T. And in 2012, the Fairview program carried out the court order for surveillance on the Internet line, which AT&T provides, serving the United Nations headquarters. (NSA spying on United Nations diplomats has previously been reported, but not the court order or AT&T’s involvement. In October 2013, the United States told the United Nations that it would not monitor its communications.)

The documents also show that another program, code-named Stormbrew, has included Verizon and the former MCI, which Verizon purchased in 2006. One describes a Stormbrew cable landing that is identifiable as one that Verizon operates. Another names a contact person whose LinkedIn profile says he is a longtime Verizon employee with a top-secret clearance.

AT&T’s cable station in Point Arena, California. NSA collection at this site was temporarily disrupted after the 2011 Japanese earthquake damaged the undersea cable. (Henrik Moltke for ProPublica)

After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, AT&T and MCI were instrumental in the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping programs, according to a draft report by the NSA’s inspector general. The report, disclosed by Snowden and previously published by The Guardian, does not identify the companies by name but describes their market share in numbers that correspond to those two businesses, according to Federal Communications Commission reports.

AT&T began turning over emails and phone calls “within days” after the warrantless surveillance began in October 2001, the report indicated. By contrast, the other company did not start until February 2002, the draft report said.

In September 2003, according to the previously undisclosed NSA documents, AT&T was the first partner to turn on a new collection capability that the NSA said amounted to a “‘live’ presence on the global net.” In one of its first months of operation, the Fairview program forwarded to the agency 400 billion Internet metadata records — which include who contacted whom and other details, but not what they said — and was “forwarding more than one million emails a day to the keyword selection system” at the agency headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland. Stormbrew was still gearing up to use the new technology, which appeared to process foreign-to-foreign traffic separate from the post-9/11 program..

In 2011, AT&T began handing over 1.1 billion domestic cellphone calling records a day to the NSA after “a push to get this flow operational prior to the tenth anniversary of 9/11,” according to an internal agency newsletter. This revelation is striking because after Snowden disclosed the program of collecting the records of Americans’ phone calls, intelligence officials told reporters that, for technical reasons, it consisted mostly of landline phone records.

That year, one slide presentation shows, the NSA spent $188.9 million on the Fairview program, twice the amount spent on Stormbrew, its second-largest corporate program.

After The Times disclosed the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program in December 2005, plaintiffs began trying to sue AT&T and the NSA In a 2006 lawsuit, a retired AT&T technician named Mark Klein claimed that three years earlier he had seen a secret room in a company building in San Francisco where the NSA had installed equipment.

Klein claimed that AT&T was providing the NSA with access to Internet traffic that AT&T transmits for other telecom companies. Such cooperative arrangements, known in the industry as “peering,” mean that communications from customers of other companies could end up on AT&T’s network.

After Congress passed a 2008 law legalizing the Bush program and immunizing the telecom companies for their cooperation with it, that lawsuit was thrown out. But the newly disclosed documents show that AT&T has provided access to peering traffic from other companies’ networks.

AT&T’s “corporate relationships provide unique accesses to other telecoms and I.S.P.s,” or Internet service providers, one 2013 NSA document states.

Because of the way the Internet works, intercepting a targeted person’s email requires copying pieces of many other people’s emails, too, and sifting through those pieces. Plaintiffs have been trying without success to get courts to address whether copying and sifting pieces of all those emails violates the Fourth Amendment.

Many privacy advocates have suspected that AT&T was giving the NSA a copy of all Internet data to sift for itself. But one 2012 presentation says the spy agency does not “typically” have “direct access” to telecoms’ hubs. Instead, the telecoms have done the sifting and forwarded messages the government believes it may legally collect.

“Corporate sites are often controlled by the partner, who filters the communications before sending to NSA,” according to the presentation. This system sometimes leads to “delays” when the government sends new instructions, it added.

The companies’ sorting of data has allowed the NSA to bring different surveillance powers to bear. Targeting someone on American soil requires a court order under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. When a foreigner abroad is communicating with an American, that law permits the government to target that foreigner without a warrant. And when foreigners are messaging other foreigners, that law does not apply and the government can collect such emails in bulk without targeting anyone.

AT&T’s provision of foreign-to-foreign traffic has been particularly important to the NSA because large amounts of the world’s Internet communications travel across American cables. AT&T provided access to the contents of transiting email traffic for years before Verizon began doing so in March 2013, the documents show. They say AT&T gave the NSA access to “massive amounts of data,” and by 2013 the program was processing 60 million foreign-to-foreign emails a day.

Because domestic wiretapping laws do not cover foreign-to-foreign emails, the companies have provided them voluntarily, not in response to court orders, intelligence officials said. But it is not clear whether that remains the case after the post-Snowden upheavals.

“We do not voluntarily provide information to any investigating authorities other than if a person’s life is in danger and time is of the essence,” Brad Burns, an AT&T spokesman, said. He declined to elaborate.

This story was co-published with The New York Times.

author photo

Julia Angwin is a senior reporter at ProPublica. From 2000 to 2013, she was a reporter at The Wall Street Journal, where she led a privacy investigative team that was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Reporting in 2011 and won a Gerald Loeb Award in 2010.

author photo

Jeff Larson is the Data Editor at ProPublica. He is a winner of the Livingston Award for the 2011 series Redistricting: How Powerful Interests are Drawing You Out of a Vote. Jeff’s public key can be found here.

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When Only 15% of Defendants Can Afford $500 Bail and More in Muckreads Weekly

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by Terry Parris Jr.

Some of the best #MuckReads we read this week. Want to receive these by email?  Sign up to get this briefing delivered to your inbox every weekend.

a

Indefensible: The story of New Orleans' public defenders (BuzzFeed News)

"'You've got a $135 million police force, an $80 million jail, a $6 million court system, and a $15 million DA's office,' Orleans Parish's chief public defender said. 'All those are designed to put people in jail. That is what is designed to catch you and incapacitate you. There is $6 million to make sure your rights aren't violated, justice is done, and you get the right person. That is an incredible disparity.'"

How killing elephants finances terror in Africa (National Geographic)

"But in central Africa, as I learned firsthand, something more sinister is driving the killing: Militias and terrorist groups funded in part by ivory are poaching elephants, often outside their home countries, and even hiding inside national parks. They're looting communities, enslaving people, and killing park rangers who get in their way."

Mothers of ISIS: Their children abandoned them to join the worst terror organization on earth (The Huffington Post)

"Since the Syrian civil war began four years ago, some 20,000 foreign nationals have made their way to Syria and Iraq to fight for various radical Islamist factions. Over 3,000 are from Western countries. While some go with their families' blessing, most leave in secret, taking all sense of normalcy with them. … Over the last year, dozens of these mothers from around the world have found each other, weaving a strange alliance from their loss."

The bail trap (The New York Times Magazine)

"In New York City, where courts use bail far less than in many jurisdictions, roughly 45,000 people are jailed each year simply because they can't pay their court-assigned bail. And while the city's courts set bail much lower than the national average, only one in 10 defendants is able to pay it at arraignment. To put a finer point on it: Even when bail is set comparatively low — at $500 or less, as it is in one-third of nonfelony cases — only 15 percent of defendants are able to come up with the money to avoid jail."

The Teflon toxin: DuPont and the chemistry of deception (The Intercept)

"As with tobacco, public health organizations have taken up the cause — and numerous reporters have dived into the mammoth story. Like the tobacco litigation, the lawsuits around C8 also involve huge amounts of money. And, like tobacco, C8 is a symbol of how difficult it is to hold companies responsible, even when mounting scientific evidence links their products to cancer and other diseases."

Anatomy of a calamity: How the VA's Aurora hospital project spiraled out of control (The Denver Post)

"...there is no agreement on fully funding the new medical campus, which the VA admitted in March could cost a stunning $1.73 billion. The design includes features such as a curved lobby spanning two city blocks, 43 elevators and a vivarium for animal experiments. The cost is five times an initial $328 million estimate and nearly three times the $604 million construction target."
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