YunoBlog

Author: tio

  • Report and Survive: Ukraine’s Young Journalists Investigate Through the War’s Most Brutal Winter

    For Ukraine’s investigative journalists, the fourth year of full-scale war was the grimmest yet.

    It began with a blow from abroad, when Donald Trump dismantled the United States’ foreign aid agencies in early 2025. A key source of journalism funding was effectively extinguished overnight.

    The year ended in cold and darkness, as a relentless Russian bombing campaign has laid waste to Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, robbing millions of people of heat and light in a winter harsher than many can remember. The simplest daily chores have become a struggle.

    Through it all, Ukraine’s journalists have kept publishing investigative reporting that is resonating with local leaders and capturing international attention.

    Most of these journalists are women, and almost all are young. Despite juggling small children and worrying about husbands at war, they continue to interview sources, pore over leaked documents, and sift through data. 

    “No one in Ukraine has a lot of energy,” says Anna Babinets, editor-in-chief of Slidstvo.info, a long-time OCCRP partner. “But on the other hand, because we are journalists, we can fight… The energy sometimes comes when you discover something.”

    Even before the country froze this winter, Ukrainian newsrooms have dealt with challenges few others could imagine. 

    Babinets lost more than a fifth of her staff when her male colleagues were called to the front. “We’ll wait for them after the war,” she says.

    And after journalists from RFE/RL’s investigative Ukrainian unit, Schemes, exposed a Russian effort to recruit Ukrainian teenagers for sabotage, a menacing wave of bomb threats bearing reporters’ names were sent to institutions around the country.

    Then, of course, there are the actual bombings, which come almost nightly. (The Russian kamikaze drones, a recent investigation shows, are being mass-produced using European parts). For many, the months of alerts, blasts, and all-clears have become a kind of background noise that disrupts sleep but no longer prompts regular trips to the shelter. But some are less fortunate. OCCRP’s Ukraine coordinator Elena Loginova, a seasoned investigative journalist, had the bad luck of living next to an industrial facility in Kyiv’s Shevchenkivskyi neighborhood. One morning in the summer of 2024, a series of Russian rockets exploded nearby.

    “I was just writing in some work chats, and then one goes off,” she remembers. “When one rocket lands, you’re thinking, cool, I’m alive, and off you go. But then a second one comes very quickly, and you’re like — okay, my body doesn’t like this. And then it’s five times.”

    Her sense of safety shattered, Loginova could no longer sleep at home. Night after night, she tried to sleep in a nearby parking lot that doubled as a bomb shelter. Finally, she did the only thing that worked — leaving the city for the countryside.

    Those that remain in Kyiv have found their energy and mental faculties sapped by the daily grind of trying to survive with almost no power or heating. Electricity had been rationed before, usually on a set schedule. But as the Russian attacks intensified this winter, the repair crews could no longer keep up, making the outages unpredictable and nearly constant.

    “At my apartment I have an hour-and-a-half of electricity per day,” says Yanina Kornienko, a reporter at Slidstvo.info. “It’s enough to charge my phone, to charge my power banks … But I wouldn’t say that blackouts are the worst thing. I would say that no heating is much worse.”

    “You go to a cold shelter because you want to survive, and after a night with no sleep you wake up,” she says, “You can’t make hot coffee … You can’t take a hot shower. So you just go to work as you are.”

    In the offices of the Kyiv Independent, an English-language newsroom founded just before the invasion, temperatures have plunged as low as 8 degrees Celsius.

    “You can’t work at home, because at home it’s even worse. Here at least you have a generator, more stable internet,” says Yevheniia Motorevska, who leads the publication’s war crimes investigations unit. “But in the office it’s very cold … you get there, and the first few hours you’re just trying to warm up, you talk about last night’s bombings, and then gradually you can get to work.”

    Motorevskaya also left Kyiv after several Russian strikes on her central neighborhood, and now commutes from a suburb. Others find it difficult to get to the office at all. Babinets from Slidstvo.info describes a colleague with two small children who lives on the 24th floor of an apartment building. “When there’s no electricity, the elevators don’t work. And she doesn’t have water because the pumps don’t work. Bringing the children down is nearly impossible. For her it’s really, really hard.”

    These constant challenges create a mental fatigue that makes it difficult to focus on anything else.

    “Every day, you have to make decisions about what you’re doing with your work, what you’re doing with your kids, what is the best decision for this day,” says Babinets. “It might not be the best decision in two days.”

    “Your level of concentration is totally different,” Motorevskaya says. “I see this problem in our team, in the whole outlet — massive exhaustion.”

    Amid this relentless pressure, small comforts become victories. Reached by video call in her office, Valeriya Yegoshyna, an investigative journalist at RFE/RL’s Schemes, noted wryly that she was “waiting for an Oreshnik” — a newer type of Russian ballistic missile that carries multiple warheads. But she was pleased to have been able to wash her hair that morning. “It took some strength,” she said.

    Journalists described different techniques to keep warm: Kornienko slept in her ski pants and said colleagues erected tents in their apartments. Yegoshyna said she heats a brick on her apartment’s gas stove. “ChatGPT would say that you’re not supposed to do this,” she jokes, “but I’m like, I think it would be more dangerous to live in a home where it’s nine degrees.”

    Many journalists describe finding comfort in solidarity, texting each other late into the night as they brace for Russian rockets to land. Others take antidepressants or religiously attend therapy. But sometimes none of it is enough; and the breaking point can come at unexpected moments.

    Yegoshyna recalls the first time during the war that she didn’t make it to work. “Already in a bad mood about the blackouts,” she says, she was digging through gigabytes of data from a phone belonging to a Russian general. She withstood, not for the first time, seeing photos of dead bodies and other horrors. But then she came across a video of Russian soldiers torturing a mouse.

    “They crucified it. They were laughing and giving it cigarettes and questioning it, asking where are your comrades,” she says. “I saw this video and it broke me. I started crying, maybe for the first time in a year. And I texted my editors, I can’t work tomorrow. I just can’t. And they said, why? And I was like… mouse situation.”

    To stay sane, Yegoshyna says, she needs to work — a sentiment the others echoed. The result has been an abundance of investigative stories that will form a key part of the historical record of this war. For her part, Yegoshyna recently published the investigation into the Russian general’s messages, revealing gruesome banter and evidence of possible war crimes.

    Despite the hardships, a new crop of journalists is embracing the profession. “I’m really very happy that we have so many new journalists, young ones,” says Loginova. “They could have chosen something else. They’re choosing this profession. Probably they feel that this is something important.”

    Among these young journalists is Maksym Dudchenko, a reporter with KibOrg, a distributed group of activists and journalists that came together after the 2022 invasion. He lives in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, with the front lines just a few dozen kilometers away. But the city has not been struck as hard as Kyiv in recent months, and he says life is “much easier” than in the capital. “They’ve even just launched 5G service,” he says.

    Still, his building in the center lost heat after a nearby heating station was “smashed to smithereens.” When the electricity went dim, Dudchenko moved in with his mother on the city’s outskirts.

    His team does sometimes feel demoralized, Dudchenko says, citing the usual complaints about electricity and internet access. But they’re making progress. Initially working as volunteers, they registered their organization last year and have received several grants, including from OCCRP. 

    Dudchenko, who has just received a Masters degree, now works at KibOrg full-time. “I like investigations,” he says, “because this is a genre where you can really do something.”

    Another, even newer outlet is the Dnipro.media, which launched in 2024. The front-line in Dnipro, Ukraine’s fourth-largest city, is not as close as in Kharkiv — but it is getting closer. 

    Anna Matviienko, the outlet’s co-founder, said she was inspired to launch it after her husband joined the armed forces. Putting aside her dreams of moving abroad, she says, “I understood that I want to stay here and do something for my country.”

    Matviienko’s passion is tracking what happens with her city’s municipal budget, which she says is the second-largest in Ukraine. After the country’s 2014 Euromaidan revolution — the change of government that triggered Russia’s initial attacks — decentralization reforms ensured more revenue stayed in cities. But only a small percentage of Dnipro’s budget is devoted to supporting the armed services, Matviienko says, a state of affairs that drove her first to activism, then to journalism.

    Investigations are only part of Dnipro.media’s work. “People aren’t interested only in investigative journalism, because they don’t understand the basics,” she says, “Our mission is to politely educate them” — through explainers, service journalism, or even nostalgia — “to ruin stereotypes about Dnipro.”

    For Matviienko, the end of support from the United States came as a powerful shock.

    “We lost all the money and we worked for free for eight months,” she says. At one point, she and her colleagues set a deadline for themselves: if they couldn’t replace the support by summer, they would shut down. They ended up surviving on several other grants, including from OCCRP.

    Her newsroom’s journalism has prompted pushback. ”We’re becoming more and more visible for our local authorities,” she says, describing an encounter when a local official slapped her in the face.

    Amid the understandable focus on Russian brutality — “It’s our duty to investigate war crimes, to try to give a chance to justice to those who suffer,” Yegoshyna says — investigations into Ukrainian corruption haven’t stopped.

    “We understand that both [war crimes and corruption investigations] are very important for winning the war,” Babinets says. “It’s very difficult because we are a democratic country fighting with an authoritarian country. In a democratic country, we should talk openly about what’s going on. … This is what we’re fighting for.”

  • Meta Employee Deleted 9TB of Torrented Files, Adult Film Producers Claim

    Meta Employee Deleted 9TB of Torrented Files, Adult Film Producers Claim

    In July 2025, adult content producers Strike 3 Holdings and Counterlife Media filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Meta.

    The complaint accused the tech company of using adult films to assist its AI model training. Similar claims have been made by other rightsholders, including many book authors.

    This latest case, with over 350 million dollars in potential damages, specifically focuses on Meta’s BitTorrent activity that was recorded in detail through proprietary torrent tracking software. That’s no surprise, as plaintiff Strike 3 is the most active copyright litigant in the United States, known for targeting thousands of alleged BitTorrent pirates based on similar evidence.

    Meta responded in October by filing a motion to dismiss, arguing the sporadic downloads were consistent with ordinary ‘personal use’ by employees and visitors on the corporate network. It was certainly not a coordinated AI training effort, Meta countered.

    ‘Meta Employee Deleted 9TB of Torrented Files’

    The motion to dismiss remains pending and, meanwhile, the case is heating up in other areas. Last week, the parties filed their joint discovery plan, which Strike 3 used to raise a rather eye-popping allegation.

    Meta said that it prefers to delay written evidence discovery requests in this case until the court ruled on its motion to dismiss. However, Strike 3 would like to start gathering evidence right away, fearing that key data may otherwise disappear.

    Strike 3’s legal team points out that, at a February 5 hearing in the unrelated Kadrey v. Meta book-authors case, lawyers revealed that a Meta employee had recently deleted over nine terabytes of torrented files. Fearing more deletions, Strike 3 asks the court to allow discovery in the present case to begin immediately.

    “Because of the tangible risk that relevant evidence may be deleted by Meta’s employees, Plaintiffs respectfully request that they be allowed to conduct discovery immediately,” the plaintiffs write.

    Deleted?

    kadrey delete

    In the same filing, Meta’s legal team immediately tried to defuse the deletion claim. Meta says that no data was spoiled and clarified that it will preserve all evidence as it is legally obliged to do.

    “Plaintiffs mischaracterize the Kadrey record. There was no spoliation in Kadrey, which is an unrelated case, and in any event Meta has an appropriate hold in place and is abiding by its preservation obligations,” Meta writes.

    Torrent Evidence

    The discovery plan also provides the clearest picture yet of what Strike 3 actually wants to find. Among the targets is Meta’s Machine Learning Hub “ML Hub,” including downloaded digital media files, torrenting-related metadata, and labeling data for content acquired from BitTorrent.

    Strike 3 also wants logs of Meta servers communicating over “PySpark or Fairspark protocols,” suggesting it believes these tools were used to coordinate downloads across Meta’s infrastructure. Separately, the company is seeking records tying Meta’s alleged hidden “off-infra” IP addresses to Amazon Web Services instances.

    The discovery list is broad by design, and the above are just a few examples. In essence, Strike 3 wants all policies, directives, and algorithms related to torrenting. They hope that this information will help to back up their copyright infringement claims.

    Meta’s Defense & Trial Date

    While Strike 3 references thousands of downloads, Meta stresses that the complaint only mentions 157 downloads from Meta’s corporate IP addresses over seven years. They note that this is illustrative of personal use, rather than an organized data collection effort.

    Meta also explains that the alleged downloads began years before it started researching generative video AI, making a coordinated training effort even more implausible. In addition, Meta says that Strike 3 has “no facts whatsoever” linking it to the thousands of additional third-party IP addresses that are named in the complaint.

    While Meta’s motion to dismiss is still unresolved, both parties are also looking ahead. While they differ on the exact timing of various deadlines, both believe that an eventual trial can take place in the first half of 2028, if it gets to that.

    —

    A copy of the parties’ 26(f) discovery plan, filed at the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, is available here (pdf). We will add a copy of the transcript as soon as we notice that it is publicly posted.

    From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

  • Data science: bring the researchers to the data

  • Ukraine Detains Officer Over Alleged Draft-Evasion Bribe Scheme

    Ukraine detained on Tuesday an officer accused of taking bribes to remove two men from the draft list and shield them from liability.
    The country’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau and Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office said the officer from the Security Service of Ukraine in the Kyiv region took the equivalent of $68,000 from the two men in exchange for deferments obtained through false documents stating they had three children — a requirement for draft exemption in the country that is marking four years of war with Russia.

  • Somalia: Number of people going hungry nearly doubles in a year

    The number of people in Somalia facing acute food insecurity has nearly doubled to 6.5 million since last year as hunger levels rise due to worsening drought, conflict and soaring food prices. 

  • Ukraine wakes to more violence as Russia’s invasion enters fifth year

    The full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russian troops on 24 February 2022 shattered the peaceful aspirations of an entire continent, but war must never be the new normal, UN General Assembly President Annalena Baerbock said on Tuesday.

  • Concerns raised about ‘coercive’ repatriation of Burundian refugees from Tanzania

    Concerns have been raised about the “coercive” repatriation from Tanzania of Burundian refugees, many of whom do not want to return to their home country.

  • Moral Orders of Capitalist Legitimacy

    This post kicks off a symposium on Jason Jackson’s Traders, Speculators, and Captains of Industry: How Capitalist Legitimacy Shaped Foreign Investment Policy in India. Look forward to responses from Amy Cohen, Aditya Balasubramanian, and Noam Maggor. ** ** ** In today’s seemingly deglobalizing economy, policymakers across the world are in a quandary over how to regulate foreign firms.

    Source

  • Belarusian Companies Supply Chain Behind Russian Bomb Attacks

    Companies in Belarus exported components to Russian defense manufacturers involved in producing glide bombs used in attacks on Ukraine, according to a new investigation by the independent outlet Buro Media.

    The findings add detail about Belarus’s role as a crucial rear base for Russia’s war effort, providing industrial capacity, specialized components and geographic proximity.

    The report centers on a May 25, 2024 strike in Kharkiv, where aircraft dropped guided bombs on an Epicentr hardware hypermarket, killing 19 people and wounding dozens. 

    Ukrainian officials and open-source analysts linked the attack to the UMPB D-30SN, a glide bomb designed to be launched from a distance, allowing aircraft to remain beyond some air-defense systems.

    Drawing on customs records, the investigation found more than $150 million in exports from Belarusian military-industrial firms to Russia since Moscow’s full-scale invasion began. 

    Two manufacturers based in Minsk — Peleng, which produces optical and electronic systems, and OKB TSP, a private contractor — accounted for a large share of the shipments, the report said.

    Buro Media traced deliveries from OKB TSP, including electric drives and servo controllers, to the Typhoon plant in Kaluga. Ukraine’s military intelligence has said the facility manufactures warhead casings used in the production chain of the glide bombs.

    The investigation also identified shipments from Peleng to Vedaproekt, a firm listed by the War & Sanctions portal as supplying a terminal guidance system for the bomb family — a component that steers the weapon in the final stage of flight.

    Executives at OKB TSP acknowledged working with Russian defense contractors but said they did not know how their products were ultimately used. Peleng’s leadership declined to comment, the outlet reported.

  • Pluralistic: Socialist excellence in New York City (24 Feb 2026)

    Today’s links


    The NYC skyline by night; several buildings have been skinned with elaborate gearing.

    Socialist excellence in New York City (permalink)

    In her magnificent 2023 book Doppelganger, Naomi Klein describes the “mirror world” of right wing causes that are weird, conspiratorial versions of the actual things that leftists care about:

    https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not-that-naomi/#if-the-naomi-be-klein-youre-doing-just-fine

    For example, Trump rode to power on the back of Qanon, a movement driven by conspiratorial theories of a cabal of rich and powerful people who were kidnapping, trafficking and abusing children. Qanon followers were driven to the most unhinged acts by these theories, shooting up restaurants and demanding to be let into nonexistent basements:

    https://www.newsweek.com/pizzagate-gunman-killed-north-carolina-qanon-2012850

    And while Qanon theories about children being disguised as reasonably priced armoires are facially absurd, the right’s obsession with imaginary children is a long-established phenomenon:

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-53416247

    Think of the conservative movement’s all-consuming obsession with the imaginary lives of children that aborted fetuses might have someday become, and its depraved indifference to the hunger and poverty of actual children in America:

    https://unitedwaynca.org/blog/child-poverty-in-america/

    Trump’s most ardent followers reorganized their lives around the imagined plight of imaginary children, while making excuses for Trump’s first-term “Kids in Cages” policy:

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-44518942

    Obviously, this has only gotten worse in Trump’s second term. The same people whose entire political identity is nominally about defending “unborn children” are totally indifferent to the actual born children that DOGE left to die by the thousands:

    https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hundreds-of-thousands-of-deaths/

    They cheered Israel’s slaughter and starvation of children during the siege of Gaza and they are cheering it on still today:

    https://www.savethechildren.net/news/gaza-20000-children-killed-23-months-war-more-one-child-killed-every-hour

    As for pedophile traffickers, the same Qanon conspiracy theorists who cooked their brains with fantasies about Trump smiting the elite pedophiles are now making excuses for Trump’s central role in history’s most prolific child rape scandal:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relationship_of_Donald_Trump_and_Jeffrey_Epstein

    This is the mirror-world as Klein described it: a real problem (elite impunity for child abuse; the sadistic targeting of children in war crimes; the impact of poverty on children) filtered through a fever-swamp of conspiratorial nonsense. It’s world that would do anything to save imaginary children while condemning living, real children to grinding poverty, sexual torture, starvation and murder.

    Once you know about Klein’s mirror-world, you see it everywhere – from conservative panics about the power of Big Tech platforms (that turn out to be panics about what Big Tech does with that power, not about the power of tech itself):

    https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/13/khanservatives/#kid-rock-eats-shit

    To conservative panics about health – that turn out to be a demand to dismantle America’s weak public health system and America’s weak regulation of the supplements industry:

    https://www.conspirituality.net/episodes/brief-maha-is-a-supplements-grift

    But lately, I’ve been thinking that maybe the mirror shines in both directions: that in addition to the warped reflection of the right’s mirror world, there is a left mirror world where we can find descrambled, clarified versions of the right’s twisted obsessions.

    I’ve been thinking about this since I read a Corey Robin blog post about Mamdani’s campaign rhetoric, in which Mamdani railed against “mediocrity” and promised “excellence”:

    https://coreyrobin.com/2025/11/15/excellence-over-mediocrity-from-mamdani-to-marx-to-food/

    Robin pointed out that while this framing might strike some leftists as oddly right-coded, it has a lineal descent from Marx, who advocated for industrialization and mass production because the alternative would be “universal mediocrity.”

    Robin went on to discuss a largely lost thread of “socialist perfectionism” (“John Ruskin and William Morris to Bloomsbury Bolsheviks like Virginia Woolf and John Maynard Keynes”) who advocated for the public provision of excellence.

    He identifies Marx’s own mirror world analysis, pointing out that Marx identified a fundamental difference between capitalist and socialist theories of the division of labor. While capitalists saw the division of labor as a way to increase quantity, socialists were excited by the prospect of increasing quality.

    (There’s a centaur/reverse centaur comparison lurking in there, too. If you’re a centaur radiologist, who gets an AI tool that flags some diagnoses you may have missed, then you’re improving the rate of tumor identification. If you’re a reverse centaur radiologist who sees 90% of your colleagues fired and replaced with a chatbot whose work you are expected to sign off on at a rate that precludes even cursory inspection, you’re increasing X-ray throughput at the expense of accuracy):

    https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/#u-washington

    (In other words: the reverse centaur is the mirror world version of a centaur.)

    After the mayoral election, Mamdani doubled down on his pursuit of high-quality public services. In his inaugural speech, Mamdani promised a government “where excellence is no longer the exception”:

    https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/01/nyregion/mamdani-inauguration-speech-transcript.html

    Robin was also developing his appreciation for Mamadani’s vision of public excellence. In the New York Review of Books, Robin made the case that it was a mistake for Democrats to have ceded the language of efficiency and quality to Republicans:

    https://www.nybooks.com/online/2025/12/31/democratic-excellence-zohran-mamdani/

    Where Democrats do talk about efficiency, they talk about it in Republican terms: “We’ll run the government like a business.” Mamdani, by contrast, talks about running the government like a government – a good government, a government committed to excellence.

    Writing in Jacobin, Conor Lynch takes a trip into the good side of the mirror world, unpacking the idea of socialist excellence in Mamdani’s governance promises:

    https://jacobin.com/2026/02/zohran-mamdani-efficiency-nyc-budget/

    During the Mamdani campaign, “efficiency” was just one plank of the platform. But once Mamdani took office, he learned that his predecessor, the lavishly corrupt Eric Adams, had lied about the city’s finances, leaving a $12b hole in the budget:

    https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/01/mayor-mamdani-details–adams-budget-crisis-

    Mamdani came to power in New York on an ambitious platform of public service delivery, and not just because this is the right thing to do, but because investment in a city’s people and built environment pays off handsomely.

    Maintenance is always cheaper than repair, and one of the main differences between a business and a government is that a business’s shareholders can starve maintenance budgets, cash out, and leave the collapsing firm behind them, while governments must think about the long term consequences of short-term thinking (the fact that so many Democratic governments have failed to do this is a consequence of Democrats adopting Republicans’ framing that a good government is “run like a business”).

    The best time to invest in New York City was 20 years ago. The second best time in now. For Mamdani to make those investments and correct the failures of his predecessors, he needs to find some money.

    Mamdani’s proposal for finding this money sounds pretty conservative: he’s going to cut waste in government. He’s ordered each city agency to appoint a “Chief Savings Officer” who will “review performance, eliminate waste and streamline service delivery.” These CSOs are supposed to find a 1.5% across-the-board savings this year and 2.5% next year:

    https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/01/mayor-mamdani-signs-executive-order-to-require-chief-savings-off

    Does this sound like DOGE to you? It kind of does to me, but – crucially – this is mirror-world DOGE. DOGE’s project was to make cuts to government in order to make government “run like a business.” Specifically, DOGE wanted to transform the government into the kind of business that makes cuts to juice the quarterly numbers at the expense of long-term health:

    https://www.forbes.com/sites/suzannerowankelleher/2024/10/24/southwest-airlines-bends-to-activist-investor-restructures-board/

    But Mamdani’s mirror-world DOGE is looking to find efficiencies by cutting things like sweetheart deals with private contractors and consultants, who cost the city billions. It’s these private sector delegates of the state that are the source of government waste and bloat.

    The literature is clear on this: when governments eliminate their own capacity to serve the people and hire corporations to do it on their behalf, the corporations charge more and deliver less:

    https://calmatters.org/commentary/2019/02/public-private-partnerships-are-an-industry-gimmick-that-dont-serve-public-well/

    As Lynch writes, DOGE’s purpose was to dismantle as much of the government as possible and shift its duties to Beltway Bandits who could milk Uncle Sucker for every dime. Mamdani’s ambition, meanwhile, is to “restore faith in government [and] demonstrate that the public sector can match or even surpass the private sector in excellence.”

    As Mamdani said in his inauguration speech, “For too long, we have turned to the private sector for greatness, while accepting mediocrity from those who serve the public.”

    Turning governments into businesses has been an unmitigated failure. After decades of outsourcing, the government hasn’t managed to shrink its payroll, but government workers are today primarily employed in wheedling private contractors to fulfill their promises, even as public spending has quintupled:

    https://www.brookings.edu/articles/is-government-too-big-reflections-on-the-size-and-composition-of-todays-federal-government/

    Instead of having a government employee do a government job, that govvie oversees a private contractor who costs twice as much…and sucks at their job:

    https://www.pogo.org/reports/bad-business-billions-of-taxpayer-dollars-wasted-on-hiring-contractors

    There’s a wonderful illustration of this principle at work in Edward Snowden’s 2019 memoir Permanent Record:

    https://memex.craphound.com/2019/09/24/permanent-record-edward-snowden-and-the-making-of-a-whistleblower/

    After Snowden broke both his legs during special forces training and washed out, he went to work for the NSA. After a couple years, his boss told him that Congress capped the spy agencies’ headcount but not their budgets, so he was going to have to quit his job at the NSA and go to work for one of the NSA’s many contractors, because the NSA could hire as many contractors as it wanted.

    So Snowden is sent to a recruiter who asks him how much he’s making as a government spy. Snowden quotes a modest 5-figure sum. The recruiter is aghast and tells Snowden that he gets paid a percentage of whatever Snowden ends up making as a government contractor, and promptly triples Snowden’s government salary. Why not? The spy agencies have unlimited budgets, and will pay whatever the private company that Snowden nominally works for bills them at. Everybody wins!

    Ladies and gentlemen, the efficiency of government outsourcing. Run the government like a business!

    As bad as this is when the government hires outside contractors to do things, it’s even worse when they hire outside contractors to consult on things. Under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, the Canadian government spent a fortune on consultants, especially at the start of the pandemic:

    https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/31/mckinsey-and-canada/#comment-dit-beltway-bandits-en-canadien

    The main beneficiary of these contracts was McKinsey, who were given a blank cheque and no oversight – they were even exempted from rules requiring them to disclose conflicts of interest.

    Trudeau raised Canadian government spending by 40%, to $11.8 billion, creating a “shadow civil service” that cost vastly more than the actual civil service – the government spent $1.85b on internal IT expertise, and $2.3b on outside contractors.

    These contractors produced some of the worst IT boondoggles in government history, including the bungled “ArriveCAN” contact tracing program. The two-person shop that won the contract outsourced it to KPMG and raked off a 15-30% commission.

    Before Trudeau, Stephen Harper paid IBM to build Phoenix – a payroll system that completely failed and was, amazingly, far worse than ArriveCAN. IBM got $309m to build Phoenix, and then Canada spent another $506m to fix it and compensate the people whose lives it ruined.

    Wherever you find these contractors, you find stupendous waste and fraud. I remember in the early 2000s, when Dan “City of Sound” Hill was working at the BBC and wanted to try an experiment to distribute MP3s of a radio programme.

    The BBC – an organization with a long history of technical excellence – had given the exclusive contract for web delivery to Siemens, who wanted £10,000 to set up a web-server for the experiment. Dan rented a server from an online provider and put it all on his personal card, serving tens of thousands of MP3s for less than £10. It turns out that letting your technical personnel do your technology development costs 1/1000th of what it costs to have contractors do it.

    Running your public institution “like a business” is incredibly inefficient. Back when Musk and Ramaswamy announced their plan to cut $2t from the US federal budget, David Dayen published a plan to realize nearly that much savings just by attacking waste arising from running the government “like a business”:

    https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/27/beltway-bandits/#henhouse-foxes

    The US government’s own estimate of the losses due to contractor fraud comes out to $274b/year – roughly the size of the entire civil service payroll (the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which Musk sadistically destroyed, accounts for 0.012% of federal spending).

    Medicare “upcoding” – a form of fraud committed by companies like United Healthcare, the largest Medicare Advantage provider in the country – costs the public $83b/year:

    https://www.medpac.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Mar24_ExecutiveSummary_MedPAC_Report_To_Congress_SEC.pdf

    Congress has banned Medicare and Medicaid from bargaining for pharma prices, which is why the US government pays 178% more than other governments, for the same drugs, which are often developed at public expense:

    https://aspe.hhs.gov/reports/comparing-prescription-drugs

    The Pentagon is a cesspit of waste. It’s not just firing spies and rehiring them as contractors at a 300% markup – that’s just for starters. The Pentagon receives $840b/year and has failed its last three audits:

    https://thehill.com/policy/defense/4992913-pentagon-fails-7th-audit-in-a-row-but-says-progress-made/

    The conservative version of “efficiency” cashes out to “efficient at extracting value from public institutions, workers and customers.” Mamdani’s (good) mirror world “efficiency” means providing great public service through investing in public excellence.

    New York City is overdue for this kind of overhaul. Everywhere you look in the city, you find high price consultants making out like bandits and starving the city of the funds it needs to deliver. The Second Avenue subway spent more on consultants than it spent on digging tunnels:

    https://gothamist.com/news/mta-plans-to-hire-186m-consultant-to-oversee-second-avenue-subway-construction

    Mamdani has pledged to audit the Department of Education’s 25 largest contracts (the DOE spends $10b/year on outside contractors). He’s rolling out “fiscal training and certification” for any government employee involved in procurement.

    Mamdani isn’t pretending he can bridge the gap that Adams left in the city’s finances through efficiency alone: to make up the difference, he is going to tax NYC’s millionaires, and ask the state to “rebalance” its relationship with NYC’s taxpayers (NYC contributes 54.4% of the state budget, but only gets 40.5% in return).

    As Lynch writes, NYC was the birthplace of austerity-driven outsourcing, following from the city’s bankruptcy in 1975. 50 years later, Mamdani is bringing that age to a close.

    Mamdani knows what the stakes are, too. He called efficiency “the most paramount left-wing concern, because it is either the fulfillment or the betrayal of that which motivates so much of our politics”:

    https://www.derekthompson.org/p/what-speaks-to-me-about-abundance

    Mamdani is reviving the tradition of “sewer socialism,” a governing philosophy based on “bringing people into your politics by improving their lives in obvious ways”:

    https://jacobin.com/2025/12/digital-sewer-socialism-public-ownership

    Sewer socialism, public excellence, real efficiency: these are the (good) mirror world versions of the right’s obsession with “government efficiency.” On the conservative side of the mirror, “efficiency” is an excuse for hamstringing government employees and turning their budgets over to lazy, crooked contractors. On the left’s side of the mirror, “efficiency” is building capacity in democratically accountable institutions that care about helping every person, and who deliver tomorrow’s excellence by making long-term investments today.

    (Image: DAVID ILIFF, CC BY-SA 3.0, modified)

    Hey look at this (permalink)


    A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

    Object permanence (permalink)

    #20yrago UK anti-piracy officer assures Firefox she’ll catch the pirates who copy it https://web.archive.org/web/20060511105535/http://business.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,9075-2051196,00.html

    #20yrsago Diane Duane vows to finish trilogy as a reader-supported web-book https://web.archive.org/web/20060630094910/http://outofambit.blogspot.com/2006_02_01_outofambit_archive.html#114069083471800451

    #15yrago Order of Odd-Fish, a funny, mannered, hilariously weird epic romp https://memex.craphound.com/2011/02/23/order-of-odd-fish-a-funny-mannered-hilariously-weird-epic-romp/

    #15yrsago HOWTO make a batpole flip-top bust switch https://web.archive.org/web/20110218013400/https://www.thenewhobbyist.com/2011/02/wireless-light-switch-or-bust/

    #15yrsago Travel guide for American invalids, 1887 https://web.archive.org/web/20110225235315/http://www.butifandthat.com/guide-for-invalids/

    #15yrsago Archive.org and 150 libraries create 80,000 lendable ebook library https://archive.org/post/349420/in-library-ebook-lending-program-launched

    #15yrsago Scott Walker tricked into spilling his guts to fake Koch brother https://web.archive.org/web/20110226135536/https://www.salon.com/news/the_labor_movement/index.html?story=/politics/war_room/2011/02/23/koch_walker_call

    #10yrsago Bill Gates: Microsoft would backdoor its products in a heartbeat https://web.archive.org/web/20160223175618/https://recode.net/2016/02/22/bill-gates-is-backing-the-fbi-in-its-case-against-apple/

    #10yrsago Wikileaks: NSA spied on UN Secretary General and world leaders over climate and trade https://wikileaks.org/nsa-201602/

    #10yrsago Donald Trump They Live mask https://web.archive.org/web/20160224101815/http://www.trickortreatstudios.com/they-live-alien-donald-trump-limited-edition-halloween-mask.html

    #10yrsago Unicorn vs. Goblins: the third amazing, hilarious Phoebe and her Unicorn collection! https://memex.craphound.com/2016/02/23/unicorn-vs-goblins-the-third-amazing-hilarious-phoebe-and-her-unicorn-collection/

    #5yrsago German covid coinages https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/23/acceptable-losses/#Zeitgeist

    #5yrsago A voyage to the moon of 1776 https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/23/acceptable-losses/#Filippo-Morghen

    #5yrsago Malcolm X’s true killers https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/23/acceptable-losses/#deathbeds-r-us

    #5yrsago Private equity’s nursing home killing spree https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/23/acceptable-losses/#disposable-olds

    Upcoming appearances (permalink)

    A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.


    A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

    Recent appearances (permalink)


    A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

    Latest books (permalink)


    A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

    Upcoming books (permalink)

    • “The Reverse-Centaur’s Guide to AI,” a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026

    • “Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It” (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

    • “The Post-American Internet,” a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

    • “Unauthorized Bread”: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2027

    • “The Memex Method,” Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027


    Colophon (permalink)

    Today’s top sources:

    Currently writing: “The Post-American Internet,” a sequel to “Enshittification,” about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America ( words today, total)

    • “The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to AI,” a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

    • “The Post-American Internet,” a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

    • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

    This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

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