Who's behind the news?
Who's behind the news?
A catalog of the efforts to protect public knowledge
Stronger Regulations, Safer Communities
The Coalition to Prevent Chemical Disasters is a multi-organization national alliance of health, labor, environmental justice, public health, and public interest organizations united around a single federal regulatory demand: that the Environmental Protection Agency implement and enforce strong chemical safety rules that prevent chemical disasters before they occur.
Advocacy/FEMA monitoring group focused on public safety policy and disaster readiness; runs press communications and public campaigns.
Tucker, Georgia
Nonprofit public health advocacy organization founded by former HHS employees.
Independent network of former and current HHS employees.
The Project On Government Oversight (POGO) is a nonpartisan, independent nonprofit watchdog organisation based in Washington, D.C. Founded in 1981 and operating as a US 501(c)(3) charity, POGO investigates corruption, abuse of power, and waste across the federal government, and champions commonsense policy reforms aimed at making that government more effective, accountable, and equitable.
Bolder, Colorado
MAP’s mission is to provide independent, rigorous research and analysis to accelerate equality and opportunity for LGBTQ people.
Community/campaign of off-duty, fired, and former/retired National Park Service employees advocating for protection of public lands and federal workers.
National Security, Law, and Policy
Lawfare is an American nonprofit multimedia publication dedicated to the intersection of national security, law, and policy — the space where the executive branch's powers to protect the country encounter the legal and constitutional limits on those powers, and where technology, geopolitics, and democratic governance intersect in ways that require both legal precision and policy intelligence to understand.
Washington, DC
A nonprofit research institute and archive at George Washington University, the National Security Archive preserves and publishes declassified U.S. government documents on national security, foreign policy, and intelligence, and advocates globally for open government.
Black & Pink is a U.S.-based nonprofit centered on prison abolition, LGBTQ+ advocacy, and mutual aid.
The Marshall Project is a nonprofit investigative newsroom that covers the U.S. criminal justice system.
The Vera Institute of Justice is a non-profit research and advocacy organization focused on the US criminal justice system and prison reform.
The Jail Data Initiative (JDI) is a project from New York University’s Public Safety Lab that scrapes daily county jail rosters.
The Prison Policy Initiative is a non-profit research organization that produces analyses of the US carceral system.
Washington
Nonpartisan think tank and invitational membership organization that "advances understanding of criminal justice policy choices and builds consensus for solutions that enhance safety and justice for all."
Princeton
Independent nonprofit of scientists and communicators producing research and climate-impact analyses, plus tools and content for journalists and the public.
San Francisco
Independent, nonprofit successor to Climate.gov focused on safeguarding public access to trusted climate data, tools, and information.
Washington
International nonprofit scientific association supporting a global community interested in advancing discovery in Earth and space sciences for the benefit of humanity.
Public Records for the Public Good
MuckRock is a nonprofit organization and public records platform founded in 2010 by Michael Morisy and Mitchell Kotler — two Cornell University graduates who looked at the Freedom of Information Act and saw not just a transparency mechanism but a broken process.
United States
The Data Rescue Project (DRP) is a volunteer-driven coalition of data librarians, archivists, and researchers, founded in February 2025, working to preserve and provide access to at-risk public US federal government data.
College Park, Maryland
The Public Environmental Data Partners (PEDP) is a volunteer coalition formed in 2024 to preserve and provide public access to at-risk federal environmental and climate datasets and tools in the United States.
Virtual
Safeguarding Research & Culture (SRC) is a distributed digital preservation initiative building open, redundant infrastructure to archive and disseminate publicly available cultural heritage and scientific data at risk of alteration or deletion.
Stanford
Stanford University–based program providing data, tools, collaborations, and an archiving service to help local journalists pursue accountability reporting at scale.
San Francisco
American research group focused on highlighting the public's Environmental Right to Know (ERTK).
San Francisco
The Internet Archive is an independent digital library. With a collection spanning billions of websites, books, movies, music and software, IA is among the largest digital repositories in the world. Its stated mission is to provide “Universal Access to All Knowledge.”
Science, Economics, and Law for the Planet
The Environmental Defense Fund is one of the world's most influential environmental organizations — founded in 1967 from the audacious act of ten scientists and an attorney incorporating in a borrowed conference room at Brookhaven National Laboratory, with no members, no staff, no office, and no bylaws, to pursue what was at the time a novel legal strategy: taking environmental protection to court.
Drexel University
The Environmental Collaboratory (TEC) is a joint interdisciplinary initiative of Drexel University and the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University — the oldest natural science research institution in the Americas, founded in 1812 and merged with Drexel in 2011.
Stronger Regulations, Safer Communities
The Coalition to Prevent Chemical Disasters is a multi-organization national alliance of health, labor, environmental justice, public health, and public interest organizations united around a single federal regulatory demand: that the Environmental Protection Agency implement and enforce strong chemical safety rules that prevent chemical disasters before they occur.
Independent initiative to publish the canceled National Nature Assessment
Nonprofit conservation and research organization
Independent news and film production outfit that documents US public lands
Global professional association for wildfire-related fields
Research organization that produces data and reports to inform conservation efforts
Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) is a San Francisco-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit organisation founded in 2012 to protect, defend, and empower public-interest journalism in the digital age.
Berlin, Germany
Tactical Technology Collective is a creative international nonprofit that has spent more than two decades investigating how digital technologies reshape societies and individual lives, and turning those investigations into practical resources for the people most affected.
Access Now is an international nonprofit organization dedicated to defending and extending the digital rights of people and communities at risk around the world.
Digital Defense Fund (DDF) is a US nonprofit technology organization that provides digital security support, training, and resources to organizations working in abortion access, reproductive healthcare, and —since 2023—a broader set of movements for autonomy and liberation including trans rights, disability rights, harm reduction, and pro-democracy work.
MediaJustice is a national nonprofit organisation based in Oakland, California, that builds grassroots power to challenge how corporations and governments use media and technology to shape public life—with particular focus on the harms these systems inflict on communities of colour, low-income people, immigrants, and others historically excluded from the digital economy.
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Tech Impact is a nonprofit organisation with a dual mission: to strengthen the technology capacity of other nonprofits, and to create economic mobility for individuals who face barriers to entering the technology workforce.
OffSec Services
The Exploit Database is a free, publicly accessible archive of exploits, shellcode, proof-of-concept code, and security research papers, maintained as a non-profit community service by OffSec, an information security training company.
The Tor Project, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) research-education nonprofit organization founded in 2006 to develop and maintain free, open-source software for anonymous internet communication. It is responsible for the Tor network—a decentralized overlay network run by more than 7,000 volunteer-operated relays worldwide—and the suite of tools built on top of it, including Tor Browser, Tails OS (merged into the Tor Project in September 2024), Snowflake, and onion services.
OpenDP is a community-driven initiative to build trustworthy, open-source software for differential privacy (DP) — a mathematically rigorous method for extracting statistical insights from sensitive data while providing provable privacy guarantees for the individuals represented in that data.
San Francisco, California, USA
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is the leading nonprofit organization defending civil liberties in the digital world.