2013 to 2019
The disclosures
The Snowden documents, the Senate torture report, Flint, Ferguson, and the 2018 bank rollback.
Key facts
- On June 5, 2013 the Guardian published a secret court order for every Verizon call record.
- The Senate found the CIA's interrogations brutal and ineffective, and the CIA admitted searching the committee's computers.
- The Justice Department found Ferguson's policing was driven by revenue.
Timeline
59 events, oldest first
- 20132013Health, Food & Regulators
DEA's oxycodone quota over 400 percent of 2002
Not cut until 2017.
- January 25, 2013CIA, War & Covert Operations
John Kiriakou sentenced to 30 months
The officer who confirmed the waterboarding program on television. No one who ran the program was charged.
- March 6, 2013Wall Street & Banking
Holder: some institutions so large it is difficult to prosecute them
To the Senate Judiciary Committee.
- April 15, 2013Congress, Elections & Speech
STOCK Act's online database repealed by unanimous consent
No debate in either chamber.
- May 14, 2013Taxes & Government Spending
Treasury inspector general: the IRS flagged Tea Party and other applications by name and viewpoint
298 applications set aside; some held more than three years; donor lists requested and later destroyed.
- May 22, 2013Taxes & Government Spending
Lois Lerner invokes the Fifth Amendment before the House after saying she broke no laws
The House votes her in contempt a year later, 231 to 187.
- 2013Police, Courts & Prisons
188 Chicago drug convictions thrown out after a sergeant's extortion ring is exposed
Ronald Watts planted drugs on people who would not pay.
- June 5, 2013Surveillance & Privacy
The Guardian publishes a secret court order for every Verizon call record
The order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court required Verizon to hand over the records of all calls on its network, including local calls, every day, and barred the company from saying so. It was the first of the documents from Edward Snowden.
- June 6, 2013Surveillance & Privacy
PRISM slides published
NSA slides describe collection directly from the servers of Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, YouTube, Skype, AOL, and Apple, at a cost of about $20 million a year.
- June 9, 2013Surveillance & Privacy
Edward Snowden identifies himself as the source
A 29 year old contractor for Booz Allen Hamilton at an NSA facility in Hawaii, he asked the Guardian to name him.
- August 16, 2013Surveillance & Privacy
NSA audit shows 2,776 rule violations in a year
The Washington Post published the agency's own quarterly oversight report from May 2012. Most of the incidents were database queries that went wrong through human error.
- September 2013Surveillance & Privacy
New York Times reveals Hemisphere
Never refer to Hemisphere in any official document.
- September 5, 2013Surveillance & Privacy
BULLRUN: the NSA's program against internet encryption
A classification guide lists the agency's capabilities against TLS/SSL, HTTPS, SSH, VPNs, VoIP, and webmail.
- September 11, 2013CIA, War & Covert Operations
NSA memorandum on sharing raw intercepts with Israel published
Routine transfer of unminimized collection, under an agreement that creates no enforceable rights.
- October 30, 2013Surveillance & Privacy
MUSCULAR: the NSA taps the lines between Google's data centers
A hand drawn slide marks the spot where encryption is added and removed, with a smiley face.
- November 22, 2013Wall Street & Banking
The one Wall Street executive sent to prison for the crisis: 30 months
Three days after JPMorgan's $13 billion settlement released no one from prosecution.
- December 9, 2013CIA, War & Covert Operations
NSA document on surveillance inside online games published
World of Warcraft, Second Life, and Xbox Live. No plot found.
- 2013Taxes & Government Spending
Ferguson court issues over 9,000 warrants in a city of 21,000
Most from minor violations.
- 20142014Police, Courts & Prisons
Federal fire study: a lit cigarette did not ignite gasoline in over 4,500 tries
The method the Chicago confession described.
- April 7, 2014Police, Courts & Prisons
Texas parole board denies a posthumous pardon for Willingham
No court or governor has ever cleared him.
- April 25, 2014Health, Food & Regulators
Flint switched to the Flint River by a state appointed manager
Lead in the water of 100,000; twelve Legionnaires' deaths.
- 2014Police, Courts & Prisons
Study: at least 4.1 percent of people sentenced to death are innocent
And most of the innocent on death row are never cleared.
- May 28, 2014Health, Food & Regulators
Phoenix VA: 1,700 veterans waiting and on no list
Manipulation found prevalent throughout the VA by August.
- July 31, 2014CIA, War & Covert Operations
CIA admits searching the Senate Intelligence Committee's computers
The director had denied it in March. No one was prosecuted or disciplined.
- August 7, 2014Health, Food & Regulators
Veterans Choice Act: $10 billion for private care, $5 billion for hiring
For veterans waiting more than 30 days or living more than 40 miles away.
- August 21, 2014Wall Street & Banking
Bank of America pays $16.65 billion and admits the loans were misrepresented
No executive charged.
- October 2014Housing & Private Equity
IRS stops seizing legal source deposits
After the seizures were reported.
- October 16, 2014Surveillance & Privacy
FBI director: encryption leads to a very dark place
The bureau asks for a way through it.
- November 13, 2014Health, Food & Regulators
Pfizer, the Gates Foundation, and CIFF: a contraceptive at $1 a dose in 69 countries
Cut to 85 cents in 2017; listed by the foundation as a volume guarantee.
- December 9, 2014CIA, War & Covert Operations
Senate: CIA interrogations brutal, ineffective, and misrepresented to everyone
119 held, 26 wrongfully; one dead of hypothermia.
- 2015January 16, 2015Housing & Private Equity
Justice Department bars most federal adoption of local seizures
Reinstated July 19, 2017.
- March 4, 2015Taxes & Government Spending
Justice Department: Ferguson's policing shaped by revenue, not public safety
First, Fourth, and Fourteenth Amendment violations found.
- May 6, 2015Police, Courts & Prisons
Chicago creates a $5.5 million reparations fund for Burge's torture victims
With an apology and a lesson taught in the public schools.
- August 5, 2015Taxes & Government Spending
Bipartisan Senate report: gross mismanagement, no evidence of political interference
422 backup tapes believed to hold Lerner's emails were erased in March 2014.
- October 23, 2015Taxes & Government Spending
Justice Department closes the IRS case: mismanagement, but poor management is not a crime
No evidence any official acted from a political motive; no charges.
- December 18, 2015Health, Food & Regulators
Congress repeals country-of-origin labeling for beef and pork
After the WTO authorized $1 billion in retaliation; the agency said it had no discretion.
- 2016January 15, 2016Police, Courts & Prisons
New Orleans puts poor defendants on a waiting list for a public defender
At least three other Louisiana parishes had waitlists too.
- March 21, 2016Health, Food & Regulators
Governor's task force finds the state fundamentally accountable for Flint
A story of government failure, intransigence, unpreparedness, delay, inaction, and environmental injustice.
- July 15, 2016CIA, War & Covert Operations
The 28 pages on Saudi support for the hijackers declassified
Withheld since 2002.
- August 4, 2016Police, Courts & Prisons
Missouri's public defender assigns the governor to a case to protest the caseloads
The state ranked 49th in the country on indigent defense.
- 2017March 1, 2017Police, Courts & Prisons
Seven Baltimore officers charged with racketeering; nearly 800 cases later dropped
The prosecutor called it a criminal conspiracy, not aggressive policing.
- March 20, 2017Housing & Private Equity
Treasury inspector general: rights read in 5 of 229 IRS structuring interviews
$17.1 million forfeited from 231 people with legal money.
- June 22, 2017Health, Food & Regulators
USDA halts fresh Brazilian beef: 11 percent refused at the border against 1 percent worldwide
After Brazilian police found meat inspectors taking bribes.
- September 28, 2017Taxes & Government Spending
Inspector general: the IRS also flagged names like Progressive, Occupy, and ACORN Successors
61 cases pulled under the Progressive criterion.
- October 26, 2017Taxes & Government Spending
The IRS apologizes and settles; a class of more than 400 groups is paid $3.5 million
Its treatment was wrong and should never have occurred.
- December 22, 2017Taxes & Government Spending
Corporate tax rate cut from 35 to 21 percent, permanently
Large profitable corporations paid 9 percent the next year.
- 2018March 14, 2018Wall Street & Banking
Senate passes the bank rollback, 67 to 31
Strict supervision threshold raised from $50 billion to $250 billion.
- July 10, 2018Police, Courts & Prisons
Defense bar: sentences after trial can run three to eight times longer than after a plea
Trial now happens in fewer than 3 percent of criminal cases.
- November 2018Housing & Private Equity
Blackstone spends $5.6 million to defeat California's Proposition 10
The measure would have let cities expand rent control. The money came from Blackstone's investment funds, which are financed in large part by public employee pensions, including California's.
- 2019February 20, 2019Housing & Private Equity
Timbs v. Indiana: excessive fines clause applies to the states
A $42,000 vehicle taken for an offense with a $10,000 maximum fine.
- March 15, 2019Congress, Elections & Speech
First veto of a resolution ending a national emergency
The border emergency; the second veto October 15, 2019.
- March 28, 2019Surveillance & Privacy
Inspector general: DEA never did a legal analysis of its bulk collection
Agents told to keep it out of court filings. 16 recommendations.
- April 16, 2019CIA, War & Covert Operations
Congress votes to end the Yemen war; vetoed
The first use of the resolution's own procedure.
- 2019Health, Food & Regulators
Blue Water Navy veterans covered
Within 12 nautical miles, 1962 to 1975.
- June 27, 2019Congress, Elections & Speech
Rucho: partisan gerrymandering beyond the reach of the federal courts
5 to 4.
- July 1, 2019Housing & Private Equity
Structuring forfeiture limited to illegal money by law
The Taxpayer First Act.
- September 4, 2019Health, Food & Regulators
Gates Foundation buys a $55 million stake in BioNTech
Fifteen months before its vaccine with Pfizer was authorized.
- October 18, 2019Health, Food & Regulators
Event 201: a fictional coronavirus pandemic rehearsed by the Gates Foundation, Johns Hopkins, and the World Economic Forum
Not a prediction, the center said in January 2020.
- December 17, 2019Surveillance & Privacy
Secret court asks whether any FBI application can be trusted
17 errors and omissions in the Carter Page applications.
Stories (15)
- 2004 to 2014Why Only One Wall Street Executive Went to Prison After the 2008 Mortgage Fraud CrisisThe FBI warned Congress in 2004 that mortgage fraud was pervasive and growing and could do as much damage as the savings and loan crisis, which had produced more than 800 convictions. The government's own inquiry into the 2008 crisis found lenders made loans they knew borrowers could not afford and a systemic breakdown in accountability and ethics. The banks then paid $13 billion and $16.65 billion to settle civil claims in which they admitted selling securities they knew did not meet their own guidelines. One Wall Street executive went to prison, for 30 months. In 2013 the attorney general told the Senate that some institutions had become so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them. In 2012 his department had let a bank that admitted laundering money for drug cartels pay a fine instead of facing a charge.Wall Street & Banking
- 2013 to 2018What Edward Snowden's NSA Documents RevealedIn 2013 a contractor at the National Security Agency gave reporters thousands of internal documents. They show the government collecting the phone records of every Verizon customer, taking email and files from the servers of Google, Facebook, and Apple, working to break the encryption that protects the internet, and logging thousands of violations of its own rules in a year.Surveillance & Privacy
- 1992 to 2024Project Hemisphere: How Police Searched Trillions of AT&T Phone Records Without WarrantsFrom 2007 to 2024 the White House drug office paid AT&T to let police search a database of the company's call records that went back to 1987 and grew by four billion records a day. Any officer with a subpoena could use it, and many agencies write their own subpoenas. The training slides told officers never to mention the program in an official document. The New York Times found it in 2013. The funding was suspended, the program was renamed, and it was started again in 2017 and again in 2022. The Justice Department's inspector general found in 2019 that the DEA had never done a full legal analysis of it, or of an earlier program that collected the records of Americans' calls to as many as 116 countries from 1992 to 2013. In 2022 two senators disclosed that the CIA had been running its own bulk collection program with no statute behind it.Surveillance & Privacy
- 2002 to 2023NSA Surveillance Inside Online Video Games and US Military Recruitment on TwitchA 2008 NSA document from the Snowden files described agents from the NSA, CIA, FBI, and Pentagon inside World of Warcraft, Second Life, and Xbox Live, so many that a group was set up to keep them from surveilling each other, with no plot found. The Army built a free game in 2002 to recruit teenagers and ran giveaways on Twitch in 2020 that led to a recruiting form. A 2019 Call of Duty put a real 1991 American bombing in Russia's name.CIA, War & Covert Operations
- April 25, 2014 to 2026The Flint, Michigan Water Crisis: Lead Poisoning, 12 Legionnaires' Deaths, and All Criminal Charges DroppedOn April 25, 2014 a manager appointed by the state of Michigan to run the city of Flint in place of its elected government switched the city's water to the Flint River to save money. The state's environmental agency did not require the corrosion control that federal rules called for, lead leached from the pipes into the water of a city of 100,000, and an outbreak of Legionnaires' disease killed twelve people. The governor's own task force found the state fundamentally accountable. Nine officials including the governor were charged in 2021. Every charge was thrown out on a procedural ruling, and no one was convicted of anything.Health, Food & Regulators
- 2007 to 2026CIA Whistleblower John Kiriakou on Torture, Senate Spying, and Congressional OversightA former CIA officer who confirmed the waterboarding program on television in 2007 and went to prison in 2013 for naming a covert officer to a reporter says the committees that oversee the agency serve it, that the CIA searched the Senate committee's computers and no one was punished, and that officers were not permitted to spy on Israel while the NSA sent Israel raw intercepts under a memo that binds no one.CIA, War & Covert Operations
- 2014 to 2026Secret VA Hospital Waiting Lists in Phoenix and Nationwide Care Delays Twelve Years LaterIn 2014 the inspector general found 1,700 veterans at the Phoenix VA hospital waiting for a doctor and on no list, with other lists kept outside the official one so the reported wait times did not include them, and found the practice prevalent throughout the VA's hospitals. He opened investigations at 93 sites. Congress spent $15 billion to let veterans go to private doctors. Twelve years later the inspector general found that about half of the VA's own referrals and half of its referrals to private care still miss the timeliness standards, and the department had cut nearly 30,000 employees in a year while its secretary said wait times were falling.Health, Food & Regulators
- 2002 to 2014The 2014 Senate Torture Report: CIA Black Sites, Waterboarding, and Zero ProsecutionsIn December 2014 the Senate Intelligence Committee published the findings of its five year study of the CIA's detention and interrogation program. The agency held at least 119 people in secret prisons, 26 of whom by its own standard should not have been held, and used what it called enhanced interrogation techniques on 39 of them. One died of hypothermia. The committee found the techniques were not an effective means of acquiring intelligence, that the interrogations were brutal and far worse than the CIA represented, and that the agency repeatedly gave inaccurate information to the Justice Department, the White House, Congress, its own inspector general, and the press. The Justice Department had closed its investigation in 2012 without a charge. The one CIA officer who went to prison in connection with the program was the one who had spoken about it publicly, convicted of giving a reporter the name of a colleague.CIA, War & Covert Operations
- 2010 to 2015Ferguson, Missouri: How a City Funded Its Budget Through Police Ticket Quotas and Municipal Arrest WarrantsIn March 2015 the Justice Department published what it had found in Ferguson, Missouri, a city of about 21,000 people. The city's finance director had written in 2010 that unless ticket writing ramps up significantly the city would not make its collections, and the police and the municipal court had complied: fines and fees went from $1.38 million of the city's revenue in 2010 to a budgeted $3.09 million in 2015. In 2013 the court issued more than 9,000 arrest warrants, most of them for minor violations. Black residents were 67 percent of the population and 85 percent of the stops, 90 percent of the citations, 93 percent of the arrests, 95 percent of the charges for the manner of walking in the roadway, and nearly 90 percent of the people the police used force on. The department found a pattern of conduct that violated the First, Fourth, and Fourteenth Amendments.Taxes & Government Spending
- 2010 to 2018How the IRS Targeted Tea Party, Patriot, and Occupy Groups Applying for Tax-Exempt StatusBetween 2010 and 2013 the Internal Revenue Service pulled aside applications for tax-exempt status using the words in the group's name and the positions it took. A 2013 report by the Treasury's own inspector general found the agency flagged applications with Tea Party, Patriots, or 9/12 in their names, held 160 of them open from 206 to 1,138 days, and asked 27 groups for their donor lists it later agreed it should not have requested. A 2017 report found the agency had also flagged names like Progressive, Occupy, and ACORN Successors. A bipartisan Senate report and the Justice Department both concluded the delays were mismanagement, and the department found no evidence that any official acted from a political motive that would support a prosecution. No one was charged. The IRS apologized and paid $3.5 million to settle one class action.Taxes & Government Spending
- 1963 to 2023Overloaded Public Defenders: How Indigent Defendants Get Less Than 14 Hours of Legal Work on a FelonyIn 1963 the Supreme Court ruled that a person too poor to hire a lawyer cannot be given a fair trial unless the state provides one. The right is real and the funding is not. A national standard set in 1973 said one defense lawyer should carry no more than 150 felonies a year; a 2007 federal survey found about three-quarters of county public defender offices took more than the recommended limit, and most had no power to say no. A 2023 study by the RAND Corporation and the American Bar Association found offices carrying 300 to 350 felonies per lawyer, which leaves under 14 hours for the average felony case. Missouri's system, ranked 49th in the country on spending, once tried to appoint the governor himself as a public defender to make the point. New Orleans put poor defendants on a waiting list for a lawyer. A defense that thin is one more reason the plea offer gets signed.Police, Courts & Prisons
- 2005 to 2019IRS "Structuring" Seizures: $242 Million Taken from Small Businesses for Cash Deposits Under $10,000Federal law makes it a crime to deposit cash in amounts under $10,000 in order to avoid the report banks must file on deposits above it, whether or not the money is legal. From 2005 to 2012 the IRS used that law to seize more than $242 million from more than 2,500 people. The Treasury's inspector general later sampled 278 of the cases and found no evidence of any crime other than the deposits in 91 percent of them. Agents interviewed the owners without telling them they could refuse, in most cases did not tell them why they were there, and ignored the explanations they gave. A dairy farmer lost $29,500 and a convenience store supplier more than $400,000. Neither was charged. The IRS stopped in October 2014; Congress made the change law in 2019.Housing & Private Equity
- 1952 to 2025How the Corporate Share of Federal Taxes Fell from 32% to 8.6%In 1952 the corporate income tax supplied 32.1 percent of federal revenue. In fiscal 2025 it supplied $452 billion of $5,235 billion, 8.6 percent, while individuals paid $2,656 billion in income tax and $1,748 billion in payroll tax. The Government Accountability Office found that in 2018, the first year of the 21 percent rate, large profitable corporations paid an average of 9 percent and a quarter of them paid nothing. Over the five years after the cut, 342 of the largest profitable companies paid 14.1 percent, and 23 paid nothing at all. Companies in the S&P 500 spent $942.5 billion buying their own shares in 2024.Taxes & Government Spending
- 2010 to 2026Financial and Institutional Ties Between the Gates Foundation, Pfizer, BioNTech, and Fauci's NIHA private foundation, a drug company, and a government official appear together in the record at specific places and dates: a five-member leadership council for a Decade of Vaccines in December 2010 that seated Anthony Fauci beside the foundation's head of global health; a $200 million NIH and Gates Foundation partnership announced with a Fauci quote in October 2019; a $1 per dose contraceptive deal between the foundation and Pfizer in 2014 and a $1.5 billion vaccine purchase commitment that Pfizer supplies; a $55 million foundation stake in BioNTech in September 2019, fifteen months before the government bought BioNTech and Pfizer's vaccine; a pandemic exercise the foundation co-hosted in October 2019; and a World Health Organization whose largest funder in 2024 and 2025 is the foundation, not the United States.Health, Food & Regulators
- 1978 to 2026The Secret FISA Court: Rubber-Stamped Wiretaps and Systematic FBI Errors in Carter Page and Section 702 WarrantsSince 1978 a court that sits in secret, hears only the government, and publishes almost nothing has approved the surveillance of Americans. In 2025 it received 287 applications and denied four in full. When its opinions have been declassified they have recorded the government misleading it: in 2011 a judge wrote that the NSA's admission that it had been collecting tens of thousands of wholly domestic emails a year was the third instance in less than three years in which the government has disclosed a substantial misrepresentation regarding the scope of a major collection program. In 2019 the court found the FBI's applications to wiretap an American had contained 17 significant errors and omissions and asked whether any of the bureau's applications could be trusted; an audit of 29 more found errors in every one. In 2022 it found the FBI had run more than 278,000 improper searches of Americans. In April 2026 a court found the bureau still violating the 2024 law.Surveillance & Privacy