About FinePrint
Philosophy
The devil is in the details. FinePrint looks for the undisclosed contracts, relationships, and technologies that try to remain hidden from the public eye. We focus on building accountable practices in the surveillance industry.
We are not anti-surveillance. Some of us have worked with many of the systems we cover, using them to investigate kidnapping, terrorism, money laundering, and weapons cases. Good surveillance technology, applied responsibly, makes communities safer. We promote accountable systems and transparent public safety practices.
The closer you work with these systems, the harder it becomes to ignore who else ends up in the data. When a hospital makes a mistake, there is a review: what happened, why, and what stops it from happening again. We hold surveillance systems to the same expectation.
Surveillance without transparency creates the conditions for abuse. Not because people intend harm, but because unchecked systems tend to drift toward it. FinePrint exists to close the gap between what surveillance systems do and what the public knows about them.
FinePrint is an independent investigative outlet. Our work is grounded in public records, FOIA requests, open-source intelligence, and primary-source documents. We publish our sources so readers can review them and draw their own conclusions.
FinePrint is self-funded. Operating costs come out of pocket, and we take no advertising and no money from vendors we cover. Our editor teaches security, privacy, and ethics at the graduate level at a major U.S. university, and that research background shapes how we approach the work here.
Our goal is to provide civic value to four groups:
The Public
FinePrint takes complex, obscure, and undisclosed topics and makes them approachable and compelling. If a reader can learn about a topic and is excited and able to tell a friend about it, we have succeeded.
Journalists
FinePrint covers long-burn, nuanced stories and publishes original research alongside its full source record. Journalists working on related stories are welcome to the material. We share documents, FOIA returns, and sourcing on request, and we work alongside the profession, not as a service to it.
Government & Law Enforcement
We track abuses, contracts, and trends in the industry so you can make informed decisions. If a specific product has poor accountability, we will find an example agency that has built strong transparency and audit processes and showcase their contract and configurations so they can be replicated. Our goal is to make accountability easy while highlighting bad practices, bad contracts, and problematic fine print.
Surveillance Vendors
As the public becomes aware of surveillance mechanics, their worries should be eased, not enhanced. FinePrint aims to showcase best practices in transparency and accountability while shining light on attempts to hide systems, tools, and processes from the public. If you are in our limelight, you are either doing something responsible or something averse to a healthy democracy.
The FinePrint Standard
Source everything.
Every claim links to a document, FOIA return, or primary source.
The fine print is often the story.
Contracts and handshakes drive the surveillance economy. We follow the paper trail: the addenda, the purchase orders, the data-sharing agreements that rarely see public scrutiny. The story is usually in the language most people never read.
Build the record, not just the story.
Articles are snapshots. Public trackers, FOIAs, and databases bring context, transparency, and long-term change that outlast individual pieces. It's easy to wait for an article to die down. It's harder to quell a movement tracking your behavior. When hiding becomes harder than behaving, building accountable systems gets easier.
Support journalism.
We collaborate with journalists on adjacent stories, sharing source documents, FOIA returns, and interview records on request. Our goal is contributing to the public record. We use AI tools for document analysis, research synthesis, and pattern recognition. Every finding that reaches publication is verified against primary sources by a human editor. AI-assisted research is labeled as unverified until independently confirmed.
Follow the SPJ Code of Ethics.
FinePrint follows the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics as our editorial standard. Every story is guided by the same four principles: seek truth and report it, minimize harm to sources and subjects, act independently without conflicts of interest, and be accountable and transparent about our methods, sourcing, and corrections.
Complexity is our jam.
Obscurity through complexity is a key theme we cover. Companies hide bad practices behind complexity, making bad outcomes seem far more convoluted than they need to be just to avoid responsibility. We turn that around. FinePrint hunts for topics that seem too tangled to report on cleanly. We file FOIAs and pull on threads until clear narratives appear, then make the data, the narrative, and the journey available to the public and to journalists.
We correct the record.
Errors are corrected promptly and noted in the original piece. For corrections that touch AI-assisted research, we go further: we review the prompts and research session that produced the error, run a retrospective on related findings from the same context, and note what the review turned up. If a model-produced claim was wrong, we check everything else that came out of the same session.
About the Editor
Shawn Segal
Shawn Segal is the editor of FinePrint. He has spent nearly two decades working in security at large U.S. and multinational companies, detecting and responding to surveillance threats targeting executives and employees. He has worked as an investigator across big tech, law enforcement, and banking, running homeland security, public corruption, terrorism, cybercrime, and money laundering cases using the same tools this publication covers: Accurint, Palantir, Flock, and others. That operational experience shaped the questions FinePrint asks. Not just whether the technology works, but who else ends up in the data, and whether anyone is watching the watchers.
Beats
Police Data Pipelines
The contractual networks through which local police data flows to private brokers and federal agencies, often bypassing sanctuary laws, public oversight, and community consent.
Surveillance Vendors
The commercial industry that builds, sells, and profits from surveillance capabilities: spyware, location tracking, facial recognition, social media monitoring, license plate readers, predictive policing tools.
FOIA & Records
Public records as primary investigative tool. Filed requests, returns, and the paper trail that connects public institutions to private industry.
Ad-Tech Data Pipelines
Apps, mobile networks, phone makers, and everyone in between are tracking us to earn a profit in an increasingly surveillance-reliant economy. These pathways are mapped, tracked, and reported on. Good privacy policies and practices are highlighted; shady surveillance practices are named and shamed.
Investigative Lenses
Across all our beats, we apply a consistent set of investigative frames: recurring patterns like chilling effects, mass surveillance, and obscurity through complexity that surface across many different stories.
Read: our investigative lenses →Contact
Tips and documents: tips@fineprint.report
For public records requests, use the FOIA tool.