War on Democracy

By Thom Hartmann We just watched the final fulfillment of a 50 year plan. Louis Powell laid it out in 1971, and every step along the way Republicans have follow it. It was a plan to turn America over to the richest men and the largest corporations. It was a plan to replace democracy with oligarchy. A large handful of America’s richest people invested billions in this plan, and its tax breaks and fossil fuel subsidies have made them trillions. More will soon come to them. As any advertising executive can tell you, with enough money and enough advertising — particularly if you are willing to lie — you can sell anybody pretty much anything. Even a convicted felon, rapist, and friend and agent of America’s enemies. America was overwhelmed this fall by billions of dollars in often dishonest advertising, made possible by five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court, and it worked. Democrats were massively outspent, not to mention the power of the billionaire Murdoch family’s Fox “News” and 1500 hate talk radio stations. Open the lens a bit larger, and we find that it goes way beyond just this election; virtually every crisis America is facing right now is either caused or exacerbated by the corruption of big money authorized by five corrupt Republicans on our Supreme Court. They are responsible for our crises of gun violence, the drug epidemic, homelessness, political gridlock, our slow response to the climate emergency, a looming crisis for Social Security and Medicare, the situation on our southern border, even the lack of affordable drugs, insurance, and healthcare. All track back to a handful of Supreme Court justices who’ve sold their votes to billionaires in exchange for extravagant vacations, luxury yachts and motorhomes, private jet travel, speaking fees, homes, tuition, and participation in exclusive clubs and billionaire networks that bar the rest of us from entry. For over two decades, Clarence Thomas and his wife have been accepting millions in free luxury vacations, tuition for their adopted son, a home for his mother, private jet and megayacht travel, and entrance to rarified clubs. Sam Alito is also on the gravy train, and there are questions about how Brett Kavanaugh managed to pay off his credit cards and gambling debts. John Roberts’ wife has made over $10 million from law firms with business before the court; Neil Gorsuch got a sweetheart real estate deal; Amy Coney Barrett refuses to recuse herself from cases involving her father’s oil company. None of this is illegal because when five corrupt Republicans on the Court legalized members of Congress taking bribes they legalized that same behavior for themselves. As a result, we have oligarchs running our media, social media, and buying our elections, while the Supreme Court, with Citizens United, even legalized foreign interference in our political process. Our modern era of big money controlling government began in the decade after Richard Nixon put Lewis Powell — the tobacco lawyer who wrote the infamous 1971 “Powell Memo” outlining how billionaires and corporations could take over America — on the Supreme Court in 1972. In the 1976 Buckley v. Valeo decision, the Court ruled that money used to buy elections wasn’t just cash: they claimed it’s also “free speech” protected by the First Amendment that guarantees your right to speak out on political issues. In the 200 preceding years — all the way back to the American Revolution of 1776 — no politician or credible political scientist had ever proposed that spending billions to buy votes with dishonest advertising was anything other than simple corruption. The “originalists” on the Supreme Court, however, claimed to be channeling the Founders of this nation, particularly those who wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, when they said that “money is the same thing as free speech.” In that claim, Republicans on the Court were lying through their teeth. In a letter to Samuel Kercheval in 1816, President and author of the Declaration of Independence Thomas Jefferson explicitly laid it out: “Those seeking profits, were they given total freedom, would not be the ones to trust to keep government pure and our rights secure. Indeed, it has always been those seeking wealth who were the source of corruption in government.” But Republicans on the Supreme Court weren’t reading the Founders. They were instead listening to the billionaires who helped get them on the Court in the first place. Who had bribed them with position and power and then kept them in their thrall with luxury vacations, “friendship,” and gifts. Two years after the 1976 Buckley decision, the Republicans on the Supreme Court struck again, this time adding that the “money is speech and can be used to buy votes and politicians” argument applied to corporate “persons” as well as to billionaires. Lewis Powell himself wrote the majority opinion in the 1978 Boston v Bellotti decision. Justices White, Brennan, and Marshall dissented: “The special status of corporations has placed them in a position to control vast amounts of economic power which may, if not regulated, dominate not only our economy but the very heart of our democracy, the electoral process.” But the dissenters lost the vote, and political corruption of everything from local elections to the Supreme Court itself was now virtually assured. Notice that ruling came down just two years before the Reagan Revolution, when almost all forward progress in America came to a screeching halt. It’s no coincidence. And it’s gotten worse since then, with the Court doubling down in 2010 with Citizens United, overturning hundreds of state and federal “good government” laws dating all the way back to the late 1800s. Thus, today America has a severe problem of big money controlling our political system. And last night it hit its peak, putting an open fascist in charge of our government. No other developed country in the world has this problem, which is why every other developed country has a national healthcare system, free or near-free college, and strong unions that maintain a healthy middle class. It’s why they can afford pharmaceuticals, are taking active steps to stop climate change, and don’t fear being shot when they go to school, the theater, or shopping. It’s why they are still functioning democracies. The ability of America to move forward on any of these issues is, for now, paralyzed with the election of Trump and the GOP taking over the Senate. This is not the end, though; hitting bottom often begins the process of renewal. Many Americans will continue to speak out and fight for a democracy uncorrupted by the morbidly rich. And so will I.

Trump can't travel to these 38 countries now that he's a convicted felon

 Felons lose various rights upon being convicted, from their right to own a firearm to serving on a jury or voting — and former presidents aren't excluded from those restrictions.

Former President Donald Trump was found guilty of 34 counts of falsifying records in his New York hush money trial, making him a convicted felon. Now he'll have to navigate what that status means for his rights as any other American felon — but also as one worldwide.

That's because traveling is another right affected by felonies, with 38 nations — including the U.S. — either denying felons entry upfront or denying them if their criminal record is discovered, according to World Population Review. And with the public stage that Trump is on, that latter scenario would probably occur few and far between.

This may affect the Republican presidential front-runner's ability to fulfill his foreign duties if he's reelected come November. And although worldly leaders could make an exception in their travel bans for Trump, it's unclear which countries would be willing to do so, particularly as some of them have been on rocky ground with the former president.

For example, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and former President Trump clashed publicly, and Canada reserves the right to refuse entrance to felons upfront. Similarly, with Ukraine, felons are denied if discovered, and Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's tumultuous relationship escalated into the former's impeachment.

Countries that don't allow convicted felons to enter:

1. Argentina
2. Australia
3. Canada
4. China
5. Cuba
6. India
7. Iran
8. Israel
9. Japan
10. Kenya
11. Macau
12. New Zealand
13. South Africa
14. Taiwan
15. United Kingdom
16. United States

Countries that will deny entry to felons if discovered:

1. Brazil
2. Cambodia
3. Chile
4. Dominican Republic
5. Egypt
6. Ethiopia
7. Hong Kong
8. Indonesia
9. Ireland
10. Malaysia
11. Mexico
12. Morocco
13. Nepal
14. Peru
15. Philippines
16. Singapore
17. South Korea
18. Tanzania
19. Tunisia
20. Turkey
21. Ukraine
22. United Arab Emirates

Norway hits pause on controversial deep-sea mining

Norway has shelved plans to open a vast ocean area at the bottom of the Arctic for commercial-scale deep-sea mining. The decision, which was confirmed late Sunday, comes after the country’s Socialist Left Party said it would not support the minority government’s budget unless it dropped the first licensing round, initially scheduled for the first half of next year. Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre said the move was a “postponement,” while environmental campaigners hailed what they described as a “huge win”.

27-year old Bremda Acosta has had four jobs in six years

27-year old Bremda Acosta has had four jobs in six years. Courtesy of Bremda Acosta Story by ehopkins@insider.com (Ella Hopkins) Bremda Acosta has worked for four different organizations since she graduated in 2018. She told Business Insider she is not loyal to a company if its benefits and pay don't work for her. Having been a job-hopper in her 20s, she says she expects to stay in jobs longer in her 30s. This as-told-to essay is based on a transcribed conversation with 27-year-old New Yorker Bremda Acosta about job-hopping. The following has been edited for length and clarity. I'm a job-hopper. It doesn't make sense to be loyal to a company that isn't loyal to you. I understand why sticking to a job was important for previous generations. For my mom, for example, she'd get benefits at work, such as a pension. I've never been offered a pension. It's much harder now to purchase a home with our salaries than for previous generations. If you can leave for a higher salary rather than waiting for a raise, you should. If the economy were better, I'd have stayed in roles for longer. I started working as a teacher after college I graduated in May 2018, majoring in sociology and public health. Since then, I've worked in four places. I'm a program manager for a nonprofit organization based in New York City. I focus on community organizing for schools in the area. I've been in this position for eight months. Money Talks News 9 Top Remote Jobs for Retirees: Leverage Your Experience and Skills I found the job on Indeed. Before that, I worked in schools and other jobs. Working in schools helped me get the job I have now. I left my first job after 7 months After college, I decided to become a teacher. I was born and raised in the Dominican Republic and spoke Spanish. I landed a job as a Spanish teacher for 11th grade at a charter school in Brooklyn in June 2018. I didn't go to school to train as a teacher because it was a charter school. I was 22 and felt very inexperienced. It was the hardest job I've had. My days started at 7:30 a.m. I'd often not finish until 7.30 p.m. I left after seven months with no plan about what to do next. I quit my 2nd job because I couldn't see a future there I started searching for jobs in the nonprofit sector. I'd always wanted to work with immigrant communities. After two months of being unemployed, I found a position at a cancer charity. I worked as a program associate, offering support groups to Spanish-speaking women who had breast cancer and ovarian cancer. The job was good for me. Talking to people helped me come out of my shell. But I felt micromanaged and didn't see a path for professional growth. I went back to studying But, in the back of my mind, I started to feel as though I wanted to go back to teaching. I decided I wanted to become a sociology professor but knew I'd have to do a Ph.D. for that. I left my job in 2019 to pursue a master's in sociology at Syracuse University in 2020. I loved learning. I didn't have to pay my tuition and got a stipend for my rent and utilities. I finished my master's, but I left before I completed a Ph.D. because I was worried that I wouldn't have control over where it was based. I'd have had to apply for grants based on available positions in the country. I didn't want to be in isolated places like Montana or Iowa. I wanted to be in New York. I got a job as a business operations coordinator at another charter school in Brooklyn. The school only taught kindergarten to third grade. I learned a lot in the role, but when I asked for a salary raise, they couldn't offer me more. I worked additional days on the weekends, sometimes alone, without extra pay. I felt like I was doing so much. The job wasn't giving me the benefits I wanted, so I started looking for something else after 19 months. My mantra is to leave a job when it no longer works for me An employer wants to get what they can out of you. As an employee, you should focus on what you want. If something happening at your job isn't beneficial for you, you should move on. Get all the experience you can and then move forward. But you should be careful not to burn any bridges. I always leave on good terms. I was asked why I had moved jobs so often in an interview I think job-hopping is good for your 20s. But moving around so much at a certain point makes you look unreliable. In an interview once, I was asked why I had had so many jobs. They asked me to walk through why I left each one. I didn't want to be in that position where I had to explain that. I worry about people looking at my résumé and thinking I'm not going to stay for a long time. Job-hopping doesn't work forever I'm only job-hopping because I'm able to take more risks at this stage in my life. I've learned that if you're thinking of leaving a company, make sure the next place is aligned with the salary and values you're looking for. In my 30s, I'll want more consistency and for people to see me as reliable. I'm planning on staying longer in future roles and plan to be more cautious when accepting new roles in the future. But I'm grateful I explored many different organizations and had experience in different sectors, teams, and managers. I'm glad I stepped out of my comfort zone.

Trump SELLS OFF His PRESIDENCY Before He Steps Foot in Office

Trump threatens 100% tariff on the BRIC bloc of nations

President-elect Donald Trump on Saturday threatened 100% tariffs against a bloc of nine nations if they act to undermine the U.S. dollar. His threat was directed at countries in the so-called BRIC alliance, which consists of Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates. Turkey, Azerbaijan and Malaysia have applied to become members and several other countries have expressed interest in joining. While the U.S. dollar is by far the most-used currency in global business and has survived past challenges to its preeminence, members of the alliance and other developing nations say they are fed up with America’s dominance of the global financial system. The dollar represents roughly 58% of the world’s foreign exchange reserves, according to the IMF and major commodities like oil are still primarily bought and sold using dollars. The dollar’s dominance is threatened, however, with BRICS’ growing share of GDP and the alliance’s intent to trade in non-dollar currencies — a process known as de-dollarization. Trump, in a Truth Social post, said: “We require a commitment from these Countries that they will neither create a new BRICS Currency, nor back any other Currency to replace the mighty U.S. Dollar or, they will face 100% Tariffs, and should expect to say goodbye to selling into the wonderful U.S. Economy.” At a summit of BRIC nations in October, Russian President Vladimir Putin accused the U.S. of “weaponizing” the dollar and described it as a “big mistake.” “It’s not us who refuse to use the dollar,” Putin said at the time. “But if they don’t let us work, what can we do? We are forced to search for alternatives.” Russia has specifically pushed for the creation of a new payment system that would offer an alternative to the global bank messaging network, SWIFT, and allow Moscow to dodge Western sanctions and trade with partners. Trump said there is “no chance” BRIC will replace the U.S. dollar in global trade and any country that tries to make that happen “should wave goodbye to America.” Research shows that the U.S. dollar’s role as the primary global reserve currency is not threatened in the near future. An Atlantic Council model that assesses the dollar’s place as the primary global reserve currency states the dollar is “secure in the near and medium term” and continues to dominate other currencies. Trump’s latest tariff threat comes after he threatened to slap 25% tariffs on everything imported from Mexico and Canada, and an additional 10% tax on goods from China, as a way to force the countries to do more to halt the flow of illegal immigration and drugs into the U.S. He has since held a call with Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, who said Thursday she is confident that a tariff war with the United States can be averted. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau returned home Saturday after meeting Trump, without assurances the president-elect will back away from threatened tariffs on Canada. Read More

Exploiting Meta’s Weaknesses, Deceptive Political Ads

Exploiting Meta’s Weaknesses, Deceptive Political Ads Thrived on Facebook and Instagram in Run-Up to Election

by Craig Silverman, ProPublica, and Priyanjana Bengani, Tow Center for Digital Journalism

ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

Reporting Highlights

• Deceptive Political Ads: Eight deceptive advertising networks have placed over 160,000 election and social issues ads across more than 340 Facebook pages in English and Spanish.
• Harmed Users: Some of the people who clicked on ads were unwittingly signed up for monthly credit card charges or lost health coverage, among other consequences.
• Spotty Enforcement: Meta removed some ads after first approving them, but it failed to catch others with similar or identical content — or to stop networks from launching new pages and ads.

These highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story.

In December, the verified Facebook page of Adam Klotz, a Fox News meteorologist, started running strange video ads.

Some featured the distinctive voice of former President Donald Trump promising “$6,400 with your name on it, no payback required” just for clicking the ad and filling out a form.

In other ads with the same offer, President Joe Biden’s well-known cadence assured viewers that “this isn’t a loan with strings attached.”

There was no free cash. The audio was generated by AI. People who clicked were taken to a form asking for their personal information, which was sold to telemarketers who could target them for legitimate offers — or scams.

Klotz’s page ran more than 300 of these ads before ProPublica contacted the weather forecaster in late August. Through a spokesperson, Klotz said that his page had been hacked and he was locked out. “I had no idea that ads were being run until you reached out.”

Klotz’s page had been co-opted by a sprawling ad account network that has operated on Facebook for years, churning out roughly 100,000 misleading election and social issues ads despite Meta’s stated commitment to crack down on harmful content, according to an investigation and analysis by ProPublica and Columbia Journalism School’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, as well as research by the Tech Transparency Project, a nonpartisan nonprofit that researches large tech platforms. The organizations combined data and shared their analyses. TTP’s report was produced independently of ProPublica and Tow’s investigation and was shared with ProPublica prior to publication.

The network, which uses the name Patriot Democracy on many of its ad accounts, is one of eight deceptive Meta advertising operations identified by ProPublica and Tow. These networks have collectively controlled more than 340 Facebook pages, as well as associated Instagram and Messenger accounts. Most were created by the advertising networks, with some pages masquerading as government entities. Others were verified pages of people with public roles, like Klotz, who had been hacked. The networks have placed more than 160,000 election and social issues ads on these pages in English and Spanish. Meta showed the ads to users nearly 900 million times across Facebook and Instagram.

The ads are only a fraction of the more than $115 billion Meta earns annually in advertising revenue. But at just over $25 million in total lifetime spend, the networks collectively rank as the 11th-largest all-time advertiser on Meta for U.S. elections or social issues ads since the company began sharing data in 2018. The company’s failure to block these scams consistently highlights how one of the world’s largest platforms struggles to protect its users from fraud and deliver on its nearly decadelong promise to prevent deceptive political ads.

Most of these networks are run by lead-generation companies, which gather and sell people’s personal information. People who clicked on some of these ads were unwittingly signed up for monthly credit card charges, among many other schemes. Some, for example, were conned by an unscrupulous insurance agent into changing their Affordable Care Act health plans. While the agent earns a commission, the people who are scammed can lose their health insurance or face unexpected tax bills because of the switch.

The ads run by the networks employ tactics that Meta has banned, including the undisclosed use of deepfake audio and video of national political figures and promoting misleading claims about government programs to bait people into sharing personal information. Thousands of ads illegally displayed copies of state and county seals and the images of governors to trick users. “The State has recently approved that Illinois residents under the age of 89 may now qualify for up to $35,000 of Funeral Expense Insurance to cover any and all end-of-life expenses!” read one deceptive ad featuring a photo of Gov. JB Pritzker and the Illinois state seal.

More than 13,000 ads deployed divisive political rhetoric or false claims to promote unofficial Trump merchandise.

Meta removed some of the ads after initially approving them, the investigation found, but it failed to catch thousands of others with similar or even identical content. In many cases, even after removing the violating ads, it allowed the associated Facebook pages and accounts to continue operating, enabling the parent networks to spawn new pages and ads.

Meta requires ads related to elections or social issues like health care and immigration to include “paid for by” disclaimers that identify the person or entity behind the ads. But its rules for verifying advertisers and publicly disclosing who paid for such ads are less stringent than those of its main competitor, Google, ProPublica and Tow found. Many of the disclaimers on Facebook ads listed nonexistent entities.

A Meta spokesperson said it invests heavily in trust and safety and uses a mix of humans and technology to review election and social issues ads.

“We welcome ProPublica’s investigation into this scam activity, which included deceptive ads promoting Affordable Care Act tax credits and government-funded rent subsidies,” spokesperson Margarita Franklin said in an emailed statement. “... [A]s part of our ongoing work against scams, impersonation and spam, our enforcement systems had already detected and disabled a large portion of the Pages — and we reviewed and took action against the remainder of these Pages for various policy violations.”

Our analysis showed that while Meta had removed some pages and ads, its enforcement often lagged or was haphazard. Prior to being contacted by ProPublica and Tow, Meta had taken action against roughly 140 pages affiliated with these eight networks, representing less than half of the total identified in the investigation.

By then, the ads on those pages had been shown hundreds of millions of times, resulting in financial losses for an untold number of people.

Meta ultimately removed a substantial portion of pages flagged by this investigation. But after that enforcement, ProPublica and the Tow Center found that four of the networks ran more than 5,000 ads in October. Patriot Democracy alone activated two pages a day on average in the first half of this month.

“Their enforcement here is just super spotty and inconsistent, and they’re not actually attacking root problems,” said Jeff Allen, the chief research officer of the Integrity Institute, a nonprofit organization for trust and safety professionals.

He said networks like Patriot Democracy exploit the fact that a single Facebook page can be connected to multiple ad accounts and user profiles, creating a complex challenge for enforcement. “But these cracks have existed for the past eight years,” said Allen, a former Meta data scientist who worked on integrity issues before departing in 2019.

“There are a lot of gaps in the system, and Facebook’s overall strategy is to play Whac-A-Mole.”

Franklin noted that scammers use a variety of tactics to conceal their activity. Meta constantly updates its detection and enforcement systems and works with industry and law enforcement partners to combat fraudulent activity, she said.

“This is a highly adversarial space, and we continue to update our enforcement systems to respond to evolving scammer behavior,” Franklin said. She added that Meta has taken legal action against several operators.

Meta’s Rules

Misleading election ads have posed a challenge for Meta since at least 2016, when Russian trolls purchased thousands of Facebook and Instagram ads targeting Americans ahead of the 2016 presidential election.

Amid public outcry and pressure from Congress, Meta has created special rules for political and social issues advertisers, launched a public Ad Library to archive such ads and hired additional people to review ads. An integrity team has been tasked with enforcing Meta’s community and advertising standards.

In 2022 and 2023, Meta laid off over 20,000 employees, including members of its integrity team. The company said it has more than 40,000 people working on safety and security around the world, an increase since 2020. It declined to say whether it has more people working on election ad reviews this cycle compared with the last presidential election.

One of the team’s key responsibilities is to verify that election and social issues advertisers are who they say they are, and that their ads adhere to the company’s rules. Since 2019, Meta has required political and social issues advertisers to submit an Employer Identification Number, a government or military website and an associated email address, or a Federal Election Commission registration number.

Meta also allowed state and local organizations and candidates who aren’t federally registered to run ads by providing a corresponding website and email address, a “valid” phone number and a mail-deliverable address. It later relaxed the rules to allow advertisers to simply display the name of their Facebook page as the entity that paid for the ad.

Google, Meta’s main U.S. election ads competitor, doesn’t have similar carve-outs for ad disclaimers. It accepts only an FEC registration number, state elections ID or EIN to verify an organization. Google’s political ad disclaimers list the organization name or the name of a person who completed the ID verification process.

Franklin said Meta has rules to ensure that page name disclaimers aren't abused. The company’s guidelines say that regardless of how much information advertisers disclose, the ads must “Accurately represent the name of the entity or person responsible for the ad.” But more than 100,000 ads identified by ProPublica and the Tow Center did not.

Patriot Democracy

The “paid for by” disclaimers on the ads that mysteriously started appearing on weather forecaster Klotz’s hijacked page listed “Klotz Policy Group” as the advertiser. Klotz Policy Group is not affiliated with Adam Klotz, and the email and website address in the disclaimer do not point to a dedicated website. The group is also not listed in OpenCorporates or other business registration databases.

The advertiser disclaimer information for Klotz’s page listed the email admin@patriotdemocracy.com and the website patriotdemocracy.com/klotzpolicygroup. That URL led to a page that promoted dental coverage for Medicare recipients and used the branding of a site called Saving Tips Daily. Similar URLs with the patriotdemocracy.com domain appeared across other pages in the network, which enabled ProPublica, Tow and the Tech Transparency Project to link them to the same network. (For more details on how the ads and networks were identified, see the methodology section at the end of this story.)

Patriot Democracy is the biggest of the eight networks identified during the course of the investigation and has been active on Meta’s platforms for nearly five years. It includes 232 pages that have spent more than $13 million on more than 110,000 ads.

Allen said operations like Patriot Democracy spend millions on Meta ads because it helps them find victims.

“If they gave over $10 million to Facebook, then they may have extracted $15 million from American seniors with this garbage,” he said. “The harms add up.”

The pages often have official-sounding names such as “Government Cash Program,” “US Financial Relief” and “USA Stimulus Fund,” and their ad disclaimers list organization names that do not correspond to registered entities or websites.

Meta also allowed the page owners to falsely identify themselves as affiliated with the federal government. If a user looked up the page details of “Government Cash Program,” they would see a notation showing that it’s a “Government Website.” US Financial Relief is listed as a “Government organization.” More than 20 pages claimed to be a “Public Service.”

One of the most common types of ads run by Patriot Democracy pages is for Trump merchandise, including coins, flags and hats.

One of these ads ensnared Sam Roberson, a 57-year-old Texas resident, last month. While browsing Facebook, Roberson was drawn to an offer for a Trump coin from a page called Stars and Stripes Supply. The coin was embossed with an image of the former president raising his fist after the assassination attempt in Pennsylvania. One click took him to the site patriotprosnetwork.com, where Roberson paid $39.99 for 11 coins that he planned to give to his grandkids. He received the coins. But two weeks later, his card was charged another $29.99.

Roberson told ProPublica that he didn’t realize that he had signed up for a subscription. He contacted customer support to request a refund, but is skeptical the company will follow through.

“With these knuckleheads and how deep they are dug in, I may end up having to cancel the card,” he said.

When ProPublica called the site’s customer service line, a person who did not give their name said that customers who choose the “VIP” checkout option receive a discount on their purchases and are automatically enrolled in a monthly membership. The spokesperson said that customers are informed on the site and by email “how they got involved [in the membership] and how they can cancel.”

They said that someone else from the company could answer questions about advertising but hung up when asked how often they receive customer complaints about the membership fee.

ProPublica also sent an email with detailed questions about the coin offer and the subscription but did not receive a response.

The Stars and Stripes Supply page spent over $700,000 on Meta ads for Trump merchandise and ran ads as recently as Sept. 28 before it was removed by Meta. The page and the store have received onlinecomplaints about the billing scheme. It’s unclear who controls the page or the store, or how they are connected.

In addition to the billing schemes, the Trump merchandise ads often draw clicks with false claims and divisive language. Stars and Stripes Supply ran ads for Trump and JD Vance yard signs that falsely claimed “liberal activists are ripping Trump-Vance yard signs from the ground, sparking a wave of controversy across the nation.”

A page called Truly American ran a video ad for a “free” Trump flag and coin offer that was narrated by a female voice claiming to be Melania Trump. “Today we see free thinkers and independent voices like gay conservatives and Log Cabin Republicans silenced, censored and bullied by cancel-culture mobs. Donald stood against this and they tried to silence him for good,” the voice intoned, as the ad showed an image of Trump with his bloodied ear.

It’s unclear who ultimately controls the Patriot Democracy pages and associated Instagram accounts or who paid for the ads. Along with listing fake advertiser names, Patriot Democracy ad disclaimers show addresses that often correspond to WeWork co-working spaces or UPS stores. And the phone numbers, which are shared among multiple pages, led to generic voicemail messages — with one exception.

A man who answered one number said he’d never run ads on Meta and didn’t know why his phone number was listed. He said he was on his way to court and asked the reporter to call back later. He did not answer a subsequent call, and the phone number was soon disconnected.

The ownership information for patriotdemocracy.com and its related domains is also private, making it impossible to know who registered the domain. Meta did not answer specific questions about the network.

Before ProPublica and Tow reached out, Meta had removed less than half of Patriot Democracy pages for violating its advertising standards. It also failed to take action against the larger network, even after some of its pages were exposed in earlier reports by Forbes and researchers at Syracuse University.

Of the more than 110,000 ads on Patriot Democracy pages identified by ProPublica and Tow, Meta stopped just over 7,000, or roughly 6%, from running for violating standards. These ads were shown nearly 60 million times before Meta took action. Meta also consistently failed to detect and remove copies of ads it had previously banned due to policy violations, according to the analysis.

Franklin said Meta uses a variety of automated approaches to detect and remove duplicate ads. This includes training systems to recognize the images and videos used in previously removed ads in order to prevent them from running again. It also looks at a variety of signals, including user and payment information and the devices used to access accounts, to restrict or ban people who break its rules, she said.

One of the most popular lures used by Patriot Democracy and other networks is the promise of free government cash.

More than 30,000 ads across the networks identified by ProPublica and Tow falsely claimed that nearly all Americans could receive government subsidies or are eligible for a “FREE Health Insurance Program.” People who clicked were often directed to unethical insurance agents who altered their existing ACA plan details or signed them up for plans they weren’t eligible for, pocketing a commission in the process. These ads were shown to users at least 38 million times.

The scheme has caused victims to lose their existing ACA health insurance or to be hit with unexpected tax bills from the IRS. In those cases, the agent falsely reported a lower income to enroll clients and secure a commission. In response to the surge in fraudulent enrollments, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the federal agency that administers the ACA, implemented stricter rules this summer for insurance agents.

A CMS spokesperson declined to comment on specific ads or platforms. But insurance marketers and other industry experts told ProPublica that Facebook ads are a scammer’s preferred method for ensnaring victims. Meta declined to comment on whether it’s in touch with CMS.

“It’s clear from speaking with a lot of different consumers that were ripped off that the Facebook ads played a big part,” said Jason Doss, an Atlanta lawyer who filed a class-action suit against a group of companies and individuals who allegedly used online ads, high-pressure insurance call centers and other methods to commit mass ACA enrollment fraud. The companies have moved to dismiss the case, citing a lack of jurisdiction and failure to show that any laws were broken, among other defenses. “We deny the allegations made and will be defending the case,” the CEO of one company named in the suit told ProPublica. The suit is ongoing.

Since 2021, Google has required U.S. health insurance advertisers to verify their identity and license status prior to running ads. Meta does not have this requirement. The company did not respond to questions about health insurance advertisers.

Taking on a Network

Meta’s failure to stop deceptive ads about government programs has forced some state and local officials to step in.

In January 2023, investigators in the Alaska Division of Insurance received complaints from consumers who said they were shown misleading ads on Facebook.

The ads used the state seal of Alaska and in some cases a photo of the governor to falsely claim that the state was offering new funeral and burial benefits. “The State of Alaska approved NEW affordable Funeral programs, designed to cover 100% final expenses up to 25,000 or more. Not just a portion,” read one ad.

As with other types of deceptive ads, the burial ads tricked people into filling out a form. In this case, they often ended up on the phone with someone trying to sell life insurance.

Alex Romero, Alaska’s chief insurance investigator, was alarmed. There weren’t any “new” state benefits. It’s also illegal in Alaska, and just about every state, to use a state seal without permission.

Searching the Meta Ad Library, he found hundreds of deceptive ads that used state seals. Romero warned his fellow state insurance investigators on a scheduled conference call soon after his discovery. “There was a proliferation of advertising using the same deceptive marketing,” Romero told ProPublica.

Around the same time, officials in Ventura County, California, were alerted to the unauthorized use of its county seal in Facebook ads. A local news outlet sent the county examples of burial insurance ads that used the Ventura County seal. Tiffany North, the county counsel, began an inquiry. She and Romero connected last spring and realized the same person was connected to the Facebook ads: a lead-generation marketer and insurance broker named Abel Medina.

Public records show that Medina, 35, owns companies such as Heartwork Global and Kontrol LLC, which have run election and social issues ads on several Facebook pages.

Romero said his research showed that Kontrol LLC was a key source of Facebook ads with state seals and images of governors. “Practically every state, a bunch of counties, several cities, they’re all getting tagged by this guy Medina,” he said.

Two other companies, Final Expense Authority LLC and American Benefits & Services LLC, ran similar ads on some of the same Facebook pages, ProPublica and Tow found. Their websites had text that was nearly identical to text on Heartwork Global’s site.

Corporate records show that Final Expense Authority LLC is registered to Tiffani Panyanouvong, a 24-year-old former insurance broker. She told ProPublica that Medina registered the entity in her name without her permission when they were dating.

American Benefits & Services LLC is registered in Delaware and does not publicly list an owner. Panyanouvong said that Medina used that company and Final Expense Authority to run ads on Meta and that she “had nothing to do with his lead-generation services.”

“This is all because of him, and I was just his girlfriend at the time,” Panyanouvong told ProPublica in a WhatsApp message. “And he used me as another person to hide behind to get through the Facebook advertising loop holes.”

On his LinkedIn profile, Medina touts his Facebook ad expertise. He says he generated “$1.6 Million in sales in under eight months with only Facebook Final Expense Media Buying and growing other verticals.”

He’s also teaching others how to do it — for a fee. His profile points to a website, Scale Kontrol, which promises to help clients create a “cash cow advertising machine” by using Facebook ads to generate customer leads. The site also assures customers that it knows “work arounds” to avoid having ads “flagged, banned, restricted.”

Medina did not respond to phone messages or to a detailed list of questions sent to three email addresses, his Facebook account and a home address.

ProPublica and Tow found that the four companies have operated at least 40 Facebook pages and spent $2.1 million on more than 21,000 election and issues ads. Thousands of ads reviewed by ProPublica and Tow across pages linked to the companies made deceptive claims and appeared to break one or more Meta rules.

The pages used deepfake audio of Biden to make false claims about government subsidies, ran deceptive auto insurance ads that promoted nonexistent “Biden Gas Relief Checks” using images of a U.S. Treasury check, and falsely claimed that “The State has approved a NEW Mortgage Protection Plan that protects your home and family in the event of an unexpected tragedy.” No such state plan exists.

Prior to being contacted by ProPublica, Meta had removed about half of the pages. Ten pages connected to these companies ran ads in the last three months.

In March 2023, North sent a cease-and-desist letter to Final Expense Authority. “Your use of the County’s official seal and your actions in misleading the public are unauthorized and unlawful,” she wrote.

The following month, Romero sent a similar letter to Medina, Panyanouvong and three of the companies. It cited five criminal and civil statutes that the state of Alaska believed they had violated and demanded they stop running ads with the state seal and images of the governor.

North and Romero said the ads with their respective seals stopped soon after the letters were sent. (Neither contacted Meta directly, telling ProPublica they focused on the companies running the ads.)

Final Expense Authority, the company registered to Panyanouvong, is the subject of an ongoing investigation by the Monterey County district attorney’s office over its use of the California county’s seal. Emily Hickok, Monterey County’s chief deputy district attorney, confirmed the investigation to ProPublica and said her office reported the ads to Meta in February. She declined to comment further, citing the ongoing investigation.

Panyanouvong’s California insurance license was revoked in January. An attorney for the state Department of Insurance cited the use of Ventura County and Alaska seals in ads, among other alleged violations, state records show. Due to a prior criminal conviction for petty theft, records show that in 2019 Medina received a California insurance license on a probationary basis. It has been inactive since last November. He holds an active license in Texas.

Panyanouvong, who now works as a waitress, said she hopes to get her license back. “I’m pretty disheartened about this matter constantly haunting me,” she said.

The California Department of Insurance declined to comment on any investigations into the companies. “While we do not comment on open investigations, deceptive advertising on social media platforms can be a cause for licensing action or criminal prosecution,” it said in a statement to ProPublica.

Meta removed all of the active pages linked to the four companies after ProPublica and Tow shared them. It declined to say whether it had taken additional action. But as recently as early October, an ad from American Benefits & Services offered $100K to homeowners: “Claim cash back with these new home owners benefits programs that just became available.”

Still Locked Out

After ProPublica emailed Klotz, the meteorologist, in August to ask about the ads running via his page, his employer, Fox News, contacted Meta to get the ads removed and to restore his access. His verified page continued running ads promising easy money to Americans until early October. As of this week, he still doesn’t have access to his page.

“As far as I know the account is still hacked and in their control,” Klotz said.

Methodology

The pages and networks included in this investigation were identified by searching Meta’s Ad Library for keywords including “benefits,” “subsidy,” “stimulus,” “$6400” and “burial.” The initial keywords were chosen based on examples sourced from reports, FTC investigations and lawsuits. Each page added to the initial seed set was vetted by viewing its ads, advertiser disclaimer information, and page content and manager information.

Using this initial set, we expanded the list of keywords based on ads run by the pages and by searching the Ad Library for websites that the ads linked to. We then used the Ad Library Report interface to identify all pages for each advertiser. We also looked for pages that ran ads using the same advertiser disclaimer information.

Patriot Democracy

In the case of the Patriot Democracy network, we connected the pages and ads together via three domains that were used in “paid for by” ad disclaimers: informedempowerment.com, tacticalempowerment.com and patriotdemocracy.com. The disclaimers that used these domains often used the same phone numbers or addresses. Additionally, a Domain Name System analysis showed that all three domains resided on the same server.

Determining Metrics

To determine the total number of ads, ads removed and impressions, we relied on the Meta Ad Library application programming interface. For each page identified using the above methodology, we pulled all the ads via the API. To ascertain which ads had been removed, we filtered out ads that had the text “This content was removed because it didn’t follow our Advertising Standards.” However, if Meta had taken action at the page level, this ad text would not update.

Meta’s Ad Library does not offer exact numbers for impressions of individual election and social issues ads. Instead, it offers ranges. We used the most conservative number offered by Meta, the “lower bound.” This means that cumulatively, these ads likely had tens of thousands more impressions.

The Ad Library provides the total spending for election and social issues ads run on a page, which is the source of all of the dollar amounts cited in this investigation.

Mariam Elba contributed research.

Data collection and analysis for this story was done in conjunction with the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School.

Harper Government Phoenix payroll cost taxpayers 4 Billion

 The Government of Canada has settled out of court to compensate non-unionized and casual federal employees impacted by payroll issues caused by the Phoenix pay system.

The class-action suit against the federal government was authorized by a Quebec judge in April 2018.

If approved by Quebec Superior Court, the agreement will provide individual payments to members of the suit, calculated by the number of eligible years they worked in one of the affected categories of employment, according to Quebec city law firm Saraïlis Avocats, which handled the case.

"The negotiations have resulted in a fair and equitable settlement for class members to compensate for the moral damages they endured," lawyer Christian Saraïlis said in a news release.

"This is, in our view, a compelling example of justice achieved."

The suit alleged some employees were paid too much before being forced to reimburse the difference, while others were not paid at all or did not receive the proper remuneration.

It did not include the majority of public servants who have a union process for grievances, but did include students, retirees and occasional workers who aren't covered under those collective agreements.

Lawyers sought a base amount of $500 for all those allowed to join the lawsuit, and an additional $1,000 for those who experienced mistakes in their pay, regardless of whether they received too much money or not enough.

The amount would be higher for anyone who did not receive at least half of their pay during at least two consecutive pay periods.

Launched in 2016, the Phoenix pay system — which cost taxpayers nearly $4 billion — has failed regularly to deliver public servants' paycheques on time, or in the right amounts.

Donald Trump pay for play

 

Watchdog groups are warning that the Cabinet that President-elect Donald Trump is assembling is already showing signs of being a pay-for-play arrangement in which his biggest backers are rewarded with the ability to shape government policy in their favor.

According to a Tuesday report in the Guardian, the president-elect is raising red flags with several of his Cabinet picks, who are slated to oversee agencies regulating the industries in which they have a significant financial stake. In one example, Interior Secretary-designate Doug Burgum – the current Republican governor of North Dakota with close ties to fracking magnate Harold Hamm — will be in charge of issuing oil and gas drilling licenses.

Iconic Gun-Makers Gave out Sensitive Customer Information

Iconic Gun-Makers Gave Sensitive Customer Information to Political Operatives — ProPublica

by Corey G. Johnson

ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

For years, America’s most iconic gun-makers turned over sensitive personal information on hundreds of thousands of customers to political operatives.

Those operatives, in turn, secretly employed the details to rally firearm owners to elect pro-gun politicians running for Congress and the White House, a ProPublica investigation has found.

The clandestine sharing of gun buyers’ identities — without their knowledge and consent — marked a significant departure for an industry that has long prided itself on thwarting efforts to track who owns firearms in America.

At least 10 gun industry businesses, including Glock, Smith & Wesson, Remington, Marlin and Mossberg, handed over names, addresses and other private data to the gun industry’s chief lobbying group, the National Shooting Sports Foundation. The NSSF then entered the gun owners’ details into what would become a massive database.

The data initially came from decades of warranty cards filled out by customers and returned to gun manufacturers for rebates and repair or replacement programs.

A ProPublica review of dozens of warranty cards from the 1970s through today found that some promised customers their information would be kept strictly confidential. Others said some information could be shared with third parties for marketing and sales. None of the cards informed buyers their details would be used by lobbyists and consultants to win elections.

The gun industry launched the project approximately 17 months before the 2000 election as it grappled with a cascade of financial, legal and political threats. Within three years, the NSSF’s database — filled with warranty card information and supplemented with names from voter rolls and hunting licenses — contained at least 5.5 million people.

Jon Leibowitz, who was appointed to the Federal Trade Commission by President George W. Bush in 2004 and served as chair under President Barack Obama, reviewed several company privacy policies and warranty cards at ProPublica’s request. The commission has enforced privacy protections since the 1970s.

Leibowitz said firearms companies that handed over customer information may have breached federal and state prohibitions against unfair and deceptive business behavior and could face civil sanctions.

“This is super troubling,” said Leibowitz, who left the commission in 2013. “You shouldn’t take people’s data without them knowing what you’re doing with it — and give it or sell it to others. It is the customer’s information, not the company’s.”

The undisclosed collection of intimate gun owner information is in sharp contrast with the NSSF’s public image.

Founded in 1961 and currently based in Shelton, Connecticut, the trade organization represents thousands of firearms and ammunition manufacturers, distributors, retailers, publishers and shooting ranges. It is funded by membership dues, donations, sponsored events and government grants. While not as well known as the chief lobbyist for gun owners, the National Rifle Association, the NSSF is respected and influential in business, political and gun-rights communities.

For two decades, the group positioned itself as an unwavering watchdog of gun owner privacy. The organization has raged against government and corporate attempts to amass information on gun buyers. As recently as this year, the NSSF pushed for laws that would prohibit credit card companies from creating special codes for firearms dealers, claiming the codes could be used to create a registry of gun purchasers.

As a group, gun owners are fiercely protective about their personal information. Many have good reasons. Their ranks include police officers, judges, domestic violence victims and others who have faced serious threats of harm.

In a statement, the NSSF defended its data collection. Any suggestion of “unethical or illegal behavior is entirely unfounded,” the statement said, adding that “these activities are, and always have been, entirely legal and within the terms and conditions of any individual manufacturer, company, data broker, or other entity.”

The gun industry companies either did not respond to ProPublica or declined to comment, noting they are under different ownership today and could not find evidence that customer information was previously shared. One ammunition maker named in the NSSF documents as a source of data said it never gave the trade group or its vendors any “personal information.”

ProPublica established the existence of the secret program after reviewing tens of thousands of internal corporate and NSSF emails, reports, invoices and contracts. We also interviewed scores of former gun executives, NSSF employees, NRA lobbyists and political consultants in the U.S. and the United Kingdom.

The insider accounts and trove of records lay bare a multidecade effort to mobilize gun owners as a political force. Confidential information from gun customers was central to what NSSF called its voter education program. The initiative involved sending letters, postcards and later emails to persuade people to vote for the firearms industry’s preferred political candidates. Because privacy laws shield the names of firearm purchasers from public view, the data NSSF obtained gave it a unique ability to identify and contact large numbers of gun owners or shooting sports enthusiasts.

It also allowed the NSSF to figure out whether a gun buyer was a registered voter. Those who weren’t would be encouraged to register and cast their ballots for industry-supported politicians.

From 2000 to 2016, the organization poured more than $20 million into its voter education campaign, which was initially called Vote Your Sport and today is known as GunVote. The NSSF trumpeted the success of its electioneering in reports, claiming credit for putting both George W. Bush and Donald J. Trump in the White House and firearm-friendly lawmakers in the U.S. House and Senate.

In April 2016, a contractor on NSSF’s voter education project delivered a large cache of data to Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm credited with playing a key role in Trump’s narrow victory that year. The company later went out of business amid a global scandal over its handling of confidential consumer data.

The data given to Cambridge included 20 years of gun owners’ warranty card information as well as a separate database of customers from Cabela’s, a sporting goods retailer with approximately 70 stores in the U.S. and Canada.

Cambridge combined the NSSF data with a wide array of sensitive particulars obtained from commercial data brokers. It included people’s income, their debts, their religion, where they filled prescriptions, their children’s ages and purchases they made for their kids. For women, it revealed intimate elements such as whether the underwear and other clothes they purchased were plus size or petite.

The information was used to create psychological profiles of gun owners and assign scores to behavioral traits, such as neuroticism and agreeableness. The profiles helped Cambridge tailor the NSSF’s political messages to voters based on their personalities.

GunVote is in full swing this year, but it is unclear what role, if any, the database is playing in the election.

The pro-gun candidates the NSSF helped send to the White House and Congress in the last two decades have secured major political victories for the industry. They blocked Congress from extending a ban on assault weapons sold to civilians and granted gun companies sweeping legal immunity from lawsuits related to the misuse of firearms.

As the body count from mass shootings at schools and elsewhere in the nation has climbed, those politicians have halted proposals to resurrect the assault weapons ban and enact other gun control measures, even those popular with voters, such as raising the minimum age to buy an assault rifle from 18 to 21.

In response to questions from ProPublica, the NSSF acknowledged it had used the customer information in 2016 for “creating a data model” of potentially sympathetic voters. But the group said the “existence and proven success of that model then obviated the need to continue data acquisition via private channels and today, NSSF uses only commercial-source data to which the data model is then applied.”

The NSSF declined to elaborate or answer additional questions, including whether the trade group notified people in its database about how it was using their information.

In 2022, Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., sent the NSSF a list of questions after reading leaked documents that made a passing reference to the database. In its answers, the NSSF would not acknowledge the database’s existence.

“The hypocrisy of warning about a governmental registry and at the same time establishing a private registry for political purposes is stunning,” Blumenthal said after learning about the program from ProPublica. “Absolutely staggering.”

It started with a school shooting.

On Jan. 17, 1989, a man armed with a Chinese-made AK-47 walked onto the campus of an elementary school in Stockton, California. He fired more than 100 rounds in approximately two minutes, killing five children and injuring more than two dozen others.

The shooter had an extensive criminal history but had no trouble buying the weapon from an Oregon gun store. Oregon and federal laws didn’t require background checks for purchasing semiautomatic rifles like an AK-47.

The rampage shocked the nation.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives suspended imports on foreign made semiautomatic weapons. President George H.W. Bush, an avid hunter and NRA member, made the suspension permanent, blocking 43 types of internationally made weapons from being sold in the U.S. California banned more than 50 brands and models of rifles, shotguns and pistols. Chief among them was the TEC-9, a semiautomatic pistol popularized in TV shows like “Miami Vice” that had become the weapon of choice for gangs and drug dealers. New Jersey passed legislation forbidding the sale of TEC-9s in the state.

A young lobbyist representing the weapon’s small Miami-based manufacturer, Intratec, watched gun executives testify at a hostile congressional hearing in the early 1990s. He wondered how the industry could fight back. “We didn’t have any friends in that room,” Richard Feldman recalled recently. “I thought if the people who actually used and liked the TEC-9 were here, maybe we could have an impact.”

After the hearing, Feldman said, he asked Intratec for the firm’s warranty cards. Almost immediately, Intratec sent him boxes upon boxes for his review. They contained more than 90,000 names of owners across the country. Building a database would be a monumental task, one beyond the resources of the lobbying organization Feldman worked for. But Feldman said he saw the idea’s potential for the gun industry. About 4 in 10 households nationwide owned guns, and only a small fraction of those people belonged to the NRA. If the massive numbers of gun enthusiasts could be mobilized, Feldman thought, the fight over gun control would be fairer. (Intratec went out of business in 2001.)

Then on July 1, 1993, a failed businessman, armed with two TEC-9s and a grudge, killed eight people and injured six inside a law office in San Francisco. At the time, the tragedy was the deadliest shooting in Bay Area history, and again the nation’s attention was focused on high-powered guns.

With the support of President Bill Clinton’s White House and over the vehement protests of the gun industry and the NRA, Congress banned the sale of assault weapons for 10 years and required background checks on firearms purchasers. In a sign of bipartisan support, dozens of Republican lawmakers voted for the assault weapon ban, and it was endorsed by former Presidents Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.

Worried about the gathering momentum of gun control, Feldman said sometime in the mid-1990s he shared the warranty card idea with James Jay Baker, a lawyer who had been the chief lobbyist for the NRA. Baker at that time represented the firearms industry and reported directly to the president of the NSSF.

Feldman flew to Washington, D.C., and met Baker at his small office. As Feldman explained the political benefits of an industrywide warranty card project, Baker became excited, Feldman remembered.

“He loved the idea,” Feldman said. (Baker didn’t respond to messages and hung up when a ProPublica reporter reached him by phone.)

By June 1997, Bushnell, which makes rifle accessories, had given the NSSF a list of customers who had filled out warranty cards, according to an NSSF monthly report to its members. (A spokesperson for Vista Outdoor, which acquired Bushnell in 2014, said the firm has “no evidence that such information was shared under prior ownership” and that the “NSSF reports that no such information was ever shared by Bushnell.”)

In a letter sent to gun industry executives two months later, Baker complained that only two companies had provided data. The letter, sent to the leaders of Marlin, Remington, Smith & Wesson, and 17 other major companies, urged manufacturers to join the warranty card sharing and stressed the need for more tools to politically mobilize gun owners.

“This as-yet-uncompiled database will be our single greatest resource for both grassroots work and PAC [Political Action Committee] development,” Baker wrote. “Anything you can do to assist in the compilation effort would be greatly appreciated.”

It was another school shooting that accelerated gun control reforms in the late 1990s and propelled a dramatic change in the way the industry would respond.

On April 20, 1999, two teenagers stalked the halls of Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. They wore black trench coats and were armed with a TEC-9, a carbine rifle, two shotguns and pipe bombs.

The pair sprayed 188 rounds of ammunition, killing 13 people and injuring 24 others, before ending their murderous spree in suicide.

The news roiled the titans of America’s gun companies. They were already panicked over a succession of cataclysmic threats. Domestic production sagged throughout the decade as the ranks of their prime customer base, hunters, grew older and fewer.

Two months before the Columbine massacre, a federal jury for the first time held 15 firearms makers liable for shootings in New York. The verdict came in a lawsuit that used a novel theory arguing that manufacturer negligence was a key contributor to the violence. A procession of cities, aided by gun control groups and high-powered law firms, filed similar suits that threatened to force much of the industry into bankruptcy. Two companies — including one of the nation's largest handgun makers — closed.

Now, in the wake of the Colorado school shooting, congressional leaders were calling for tighter gun restrictions and expanded background checks. Vice President Al Gore would make gun control a central part of his presidential campaign the next year.

For weeks, firearms industry executives from as far as Oregon and New York flew into NSSF meetings held in Bridgeton, Missouri; Dulles, Virginia; and Phoenix to hammer out an action plan. They eliminated the NSSF’s self-imposed prohibition on campaigning and agreed to hire lobbyists for a Washington, D.C., office, according to internal NSSF board records.

The lurch toward electioneering represented a seismic shift for the NSSF. Since 1961, the organization’s bylaws blocked any involvement in politics. For most of that time, gun companies had been content to allow the NRA and other groups to speak publicly on behalf of firearms interests.

In late 1999, 22 executives were tapped to oversee a new group created by the NSSF, the Hunting and Shooting Sports Heritage Foundation. The foundation’s purpose was to defend the gun industry from the legal onslaught and transform its public image, according to NSSF records.

In an interview with ProPublica, Larry Keane, senior vice president of the NSSF since 2000, downplayed the scope and significance of the database. Only two manufacturers provided warranty cards to the NSSF, he said. The trade group, he initially claimed, did not keep the information but simply converted the warranty cards into data that was returned to the manufacturers.

But internal organization records paint a different picture.

“Initial participation in the database has been very positive and we will have 400,000 names on file and available by year’s end,” said a November 1999 NSSF board document. Five manufacturers had already turned over data from warranty cards. One state conservation agency had offered hunting license information, according to the document, which didn’t name the agency.

“We also propose to sell the database to NSSF members, as well as non-shooting related companies and organizations to offset the cost of data entry and maintenance,” the record said.

A draft copy of the policies and procedures for the Hunting and Shooting Sports participant database said purchasers of the list could buy a segment or all of it.

“At no time will any outside party be provided with any information relating to the source of the names,” the draft said. The document did not address customer consent or privacy issues.

The NSSF did not respond to a ProPublica question asking whether it had ever sold the data.

The database drew on warranty cards, hunting licenses and NSSF mailing lists, the draft of the policies and procedures said. The customer items captured included first and last names, addresses and dates of birth. Additionally, it would include age of the gun owners, gender, income, education, email addresses, profession, number of firearms, household size, dates of gun purchases, whether they were a hunter or target shooter, and average days at the gun range or on the hunt.

Nearly 100 companies committed a percentage of their sales to the Hunting and Shooting Sports Heritage Foundation. The foundation raised about $10 million in the months before the 2000 election, according to NSSF documents, and spent $6 million on direct mail, TV and radio ads for the presidential and congressional races. The NSSF’s first-ever election campaign, Vote Your Sport, was born.

The goal was to galvanize gun owner, shooting sports enthusiast and hunter support for George W. Bush and the Republican ticket. The NSSF picked 11 states — Arkansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Washington. If turnout was successful in those areas, Bush would pick up nearly half of the 270 electoral votes needed to win.

Vote Your Sport received a boost when retailer Cabela’s decided to help. Founded in 1961 and headquartered in Sidney, Nebraska, the company specialized in selling guns and related accessories to hunters, shooters and outdoor enthusiasts. On its website, the Hunting and Shooting Sports Heritage Foundation publicly listed manufacturers, dealers and other contributors; Cabela’s was not included. But an NSSF summary of its electioneering said the retailer shared data on 356,000 customers.

Cabela’s privacy policies in 2000 told customers their information would not be shared for commercial purposes but their postal addresses could be given to “reputable companies” in “order to keep you informed of other outdoor products and manufacturers.” There was no mention of using the information for political purposes.

Bass Pro Shops, which bought Cabela’s in 2017, said in a statement that the company had been unable to find evidence that Cabela’s had taken any action “that would violate our long-standing policy of protecting our customers’ privacy.”

Less than two weeks before the 2000 election, the Vote Your Sport campaign used Cabela’s names and a list of hunters purchased from a data broker company to send mail to more than 2.5 million people in the targeted states.

It’s difficult to assess Vote Your Sport’s impact. But the NSSF claimed in a public report the next year that it was a “critical component” of Bush’s victory.

“Given the closeness of the election, it’s easy to imagine a different outcome” without the gun industry’s get-out-the-vote effort, the report said.

About 3 million more people in the targeted states voted than in 1996. Seven million hunters and shooters lived in the 11 states, the NSSF estimated. An overwhelming majority of those voters nationwide favored Bush, according to the report, which cited a survey of hunters and shooters. Fifty-two percent of respondents said they received a Vote Your Sport letter and supported the message.

The NSSF was now fully in the election business.

Mark Joslyn, a professor of political science at the University of Kansas who has studied the influence of gun ownership on political behavior, said voter surveys show a massive shift occurred in 2000. Although registered Democrats and independents together account for the majority of gun owners, Bush won 66% of the gun owner vote, he said. And in every election since — even in 2008 and 2012 when the national electorate picked Barack Obama as president — the top choice of firearm owners remained the Republican Party, Joslyn said.

Ken Strasma, former national data director for John Kerry and Barack Obama, said rumors had swirled for years in Democratic circles that Republican campaigns were aided by some special database.

“There hasn’t been a publicly available list like that. We certainly haven’t gotten anything from the NSSF,” Strasma said. “They want to keep their advantage by only sharing it with the Republican side.”

Six months after the 2000 election, more than 100 executives from gun-makers and shooting sports organizations gathered for an invitation-only lunch in Kansas City, Missouri.

Addressing the crowd was Chris LaCivita, then the political director for the National Republican Senatorial Committee who now serves as campaign manager for Trump. LaCivita praised the industry’s election work but warned the executives they would “face ferocious opposition” if they didn’t intensify.

“Without the support of the [industry] I think it’s safe to say that we would be suffering through a continuation of the most anti-gun administration in the history of our nation,” LaCivita said. “If you can repeat your success in 2002 and 2004, there will be no looking back.”

(In response to questions from ProPublica, LaCivita did not say whether he knew about the database when he gave his speech but said he does not support “a database of gun owners, but rather 2nd Amendment supporters. There is a difference.”)

In the months after Bush’s razor-thin victory, the NSSF expanded the database. Boxes of warranty cards were regularly delivered to NSSF headquarters at the time in Newtown, Connecticut, a white colonial-style, multilevel building that rested on top of a hilly road, according to interviews with several former NSSF employees who worked on the project.

On the first floor was a huge stuffed bear, shot and killed by an NSSF president during an Alaskan hunt. A vault that once belonged to a bank doubled as a records room and a shrine to guns, displaying a vast assortment of old and new pistols, rifles and shotguns.

At times, the NSSF hired college-aged temporary workers to enter data. Posted up in a small, nondescript room on the second floor, they sat at flashing LCD computer screens on long tables. Nearby, boxes full of aged, fading warranty cards were stacked high. An NSSF staffer sometimes watched to ensure the temps didn’t goof off.

Violating their promises of strict confidentiality on warranty cards or failing to mention that consumer information could be given to the NSSF may qualify as a deceptive practice under the Federal Trade Commission Act, privacy and legal experts said. Under the law, companies must follow their privacy policies and be clear with consumers about how they will use their information.

Typically, the FTC focuses enforcement on companies that profit from their misuse of consumer information. Leibowitz, the former chair of the commission, said gun-makers could claim they didn’t share the data for a commercial purpose or to make money. But, he said, sharing the information with a third party in a way that would mislead a reasonable person could still violate the law, regardless of the motive.

The database contained 3.4 million records by May 2001, according to an NSSF board document. Of those, 523,000 came from warranty cards supplied by the group’s members. The additional names were acquired from lists of voters and hunting licenses.

By February 2002, the database, now called Data Hunter, had grown to include 5.5 million names of hunters, shooters, outdoor enthusiasts and other voters, according to another NSSF board record. Manufacturers contributing names included Glock, Marlin Firearms, Mossberg, Savage, Sigarms and Smith & Wesson. The document said other sources included Remington, Hornady, Alliant Powder and USA Shooting, which has trained Olympic sharpshooters since the 1970s and oversees local, state and national rifle, pistol and shotgun competitions.

Alliant Powder said it had “not provided personal information to the NSSF or any of its vendors.” Glock, Mossberg, Savage, Smith & Wesson, Olin Winchester and Hornady did not respond to requests for comment. Neither did Sig Sauer, which now owns Sigarms. An executive with Sturm, Ruger & Co., which bought Marlin Firearms in 2020, said “we cannot, and will not, comment on something Marlin may or may not have done 20 years ago.”

Remington has since been split into two companies and sold. Remarms, which owns the old firearms division, said it was unaware of the company’s workings at the time. The other portion of the company is now owned by Remington Ammunition, which said it had “not provided personal information to the NSSF or any of its vendors.” Two other gun companies identified in the NSSF board document either no longer exist or did not respond to a request for comment.

The records reviewed by ProPublica do not say where the NSSF focused its Vote Your Sport campaign in 2002 or provide exact insight about how the customer data was deployed.

But an email written by a Cambridge Analytica executive in 2016 mentioned that an NSSF contractor had been running the trade group’s voter education campaign “since 2002 and it has been almost entirely direct mail.” The contractor, he wrote, “was leveraging a database of fire arms manufacturing warranty cards (collected by the fire arms companies) to determine his targeting in key states (millions of people, if they bought a gun, and what kind of gun they bought).”

The 2002 midterm elections saw Republicans pick up seats in the Senate and House to control both chambers. Two years later, Bush won reelection and Republicans gained another four seats in the Senate as staunch supporters of the gun industry were swept to victory.

The new Congress and the White House rolled back many of the gains gun control advocates had made in the 1990s.

Despite preelection promises to support a renewal of the assault weapons ban, Bush took no action as the ban expired in 2004 and was silent as Republicans stymied reauthorization attempts.

His appointment of John Ashcroft — an ally of the gun industry and the NRA — as attorney general led to a reversal of the federal government’s philosophy and regulatory approach toward guns. Under Ashcroft, the Department of Justice for the first time interpreted the Second Amendment as guaranteeing an individual right to gun ownership, and not a state militia privilege, as had been its position since the 1970s.

Ashcroft stopped FBI agents investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks from comparing the names of suspected terrorists against federal gun purchase records. And citing the privacy of law-abiding gun purchasers, he reduced how long the FBI could retain background check records from 90 days to a single business day.

Bush and Republican leaders in Congress also championed and passed a landmark bill that gave the gun industry broad immunity from the litigation that threatened its survival. The Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act wiped out virtually all of the remaining city lawsuits filed against the industry in the late 1990s.

In the years since, lawmakers backed by the gun companies have squashed attempts to ban assault-style weapons and expand background checks, even after high-profile mass shootings. Emboldened by legal immunity, some manufacturers aggressively marketed assault weapons like the AR-15. In the last decade, AR-15-style rifles have generated more than $1 billion in sales, according to a 2022 review by the House Committee on Oversight and Reform.

Assault weapons are used in less than a third of mass shootings but account for a much higher portion of their deaths and injuries.

In 2012, less than 3 miles from the NSSF’s Connecticut headquarters at the time, a 20-year-old man armed with an assault rifle killed 26 people, including 20 children, at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Four years later, 49 people were slain and 53 wounded at a Florida nightclub by a man shooting an assault rifle who had pledged allegiance to the leader of the Islamic State group.

The next year, a gunman at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino in Las Vegas opened fire on a crowd attending a country music festival, killing 60 and wounding more than 400. Authorities said he used 14 assault rifles to carry out the slaughter.

On Valentine’s Day 2018, a former student of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School walked onto the Parkland, Florida, campus armed with an AR-15-style rifle and murdered 14 students and three faculty members. He had legally purchased the weapon a year earlier at the age of 18.

The mass killing — the deadliest shooting at a U.S. high school to this day — focused a spotlight on federal law and the laws in many states allowing teenagers to buy rifles modeled on weapons of war. Within weeks, two congressional bills proposed raising the federal minimum age to buy an assault weapon from 18 to 21. Federal law already requires that handgun buyers be 21. Both proposals died quietly in committee.

Over the next few years, at least three more attempts in Congress to raise the minimum age failed to make it as far as a floor vote. Polls taken at the time show an overwhelming majority of Americans supported such a proposal.

Then, in May 2022, an 18-year-old white supremacist who had legally bought an AR-15-style assault rifle killed 10 Black Americans at a market in Buffalo, New York. At the time, the state restricted owning or buying a handgun to people 21 or older, but the law didn’t apply to rifles.

Ten days after the mass killings in Buffalo, another 18-year-old slaughtered 19 students and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. The shooter had purchased two AR-15-style rifles and carried out the attack within days of his 18th birthday.

A Pew Research Center survey last year again found overwhelming support among both Democrats and Republicans for raising the minimum age to buy a firearm. But since 2022, at least five more proposals to enact such a change in Congress have gone nowhere.

Last month at a high school in Georgia, a 14-year-old used an assault rifle to kill two students and two teachers and wound seven more people. Law enforcement sources told news outlets that the child’s father purchased the weapon for his son as a gift. Georgia law generally forbids anyone under 18 from possessing a handgun, but the age limit does not apply to rifles. Federal law similarly sets the minimum age to possess a handgun at 18 but has no restriction for possessing long guns.

Today’s gun landscape looks nothing like it did in 1994. Then, Americans owned 192 million firearms. The most recent best estimate now puts the number at 393 million, more than one firearm for every person in the U.S.

For the first time in history, guns are the No. 1 killer of children and teens. And, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more people died from gunshots in a single year in 2021 than ever before.

In June, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy declared gun violence a public health crisis. He recommended assault weapon bans and universal background checks as strategies to bring down the death toll.

Collage image of Trump: Photo by Brooks Kraft/Getty Images. Collage image of Bush: Photo by John Edwards. Warranty cards obtained by ProPublica.

Gun images and other magazine archival imagery: Shooting Industry Magazine (August 1999); The Small Arms Review (April 2000, October 2001); Guns & Ammo (May 2000); Shooting Times (February 2000, April 2000, June 2000, August 2000, October 2000, November 2000).

Design and development by Anna Donlan.

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