Gilfoyle reports on the systems behind the events. The beats here are corporate capture, surveillance, the carceral economy, public health, and global power — all places where the surface news rarely answers the question "why is this actually happening?" Every claim on this byline traces to a public source. Every source is listed at the bottom of the piece. If the reporting affects you and you have something we should look at, the tip line is the place.
Gilfoyle is a pen name. The human writing under it is not named on this site. Some of the people and institutions named in our reporting have meaningful resources to retaliate, and we prefer the reporting to continue.
Pseudonymity is the only thing about our operation that is not public. The methodology, sourcing standards, corrections policy, and contact channels are all on this site and linked from every page. Read the full Masthead and the Methodology.
17 pieces published
Flock Safety, a private company, has deployed automatic license plate readers in more than 5,000 U.S. communities. Each camera reads every passing plate. The plates are stored in a national database that every Flock customer can query. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, the ACLU, and academic researchers have documented how the network functions and who has access.
Civil asset forfeiture lets U.S. police take cash, cars, and property from people who have not been charged with a crime, on the assumption that the property itself…
The Department of Justice has filed or joined a series of major False Claims Act cases against UnitedHealth, Humana, Aetna, and other Medicare Advantage insurers, alleging billions of…
The Pentagon's most senior officials, generals, admirals, and senior civilian leadership, routinely leave government for the defense contractors they oversaw. The Project On Government Oversight has documented the…
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is the federal regulator with the most direct authority over Wall Street. Its senior staff routinely take jobs at the banks, law…
Palantir Technologies sells a single product to the U.S. federal government, repackaged across agencies under different names. The company has held continuous contracts with ICE since 2014, with…
Two private companies, Securus Technologies and ViaPath, sit on nearly every prison and jail communications contract in the United States. The families of the incarcerated pay the bill,…
When the U.S. Department of Commerce added NSO Group to the Entity List in November 2021, it was framed as a structural blow against the commercial-spyware industry. Four…
Hospital system consolidation in the United States has accelerated since 1998. The promise that drove the merger wave, and the regulatory approvals that allowed it, was that scale…
The American bail bond industry, alone among advanced democracies, lets a private insurer decide whether a person accused of a crime walks free or sits in jail. Two…