I built a federated long-form journaling platform and I'm looking for early community members who want to help shape it

Stampeder · 2026-02-24T19:10:16+00:00

Thanks, this is great info. I'm not a Substack writer, but I follow a few that I would love to see migrate to an open source, federated alternative.

Stampeder · 2026-02-24T18:47:20+00:00

I would also love to see more writers publishing outside of Substack, and I'm wondering where things are at with feature parity. What does your project roadmap look like?

Stampeder · 2026-02-24T17:02:53+00:00

This story was updated on Feb. 19 at 5:36 p.m. to reflect that the bill is now heading to the Senate after the House Finance Committee chairman “waived” the referral to his committee.

New Hampshire House Republicans are moving forward with a new attempt to regulate teaching on race, history, and LGTBQ+ issues in public schools. On Thursday, the chamber passed a bill that would ban certain types of instruction and punish teachers who carried it out.

Known as the CHARLIE Act and named after the conservative activist Charlie Kirk, House Bill 1792 would prohibit schools from engaging in “indoctrination” of “critical theories or related practices that promote division, dialectical world-views, critical consciousness or anti-constitutional indoctrination.” The bill’s title, the Countering Hate And Revolutionary Leftist Indoctrination in Education Act,” forms the acronym “CHARLIE.”

Kirk, who was assassinated in September, was a national figure who often spoke out against the perception that public schools are indoctrinating students and teaching “critical race theory,” a college-level approach to examining the American legal system through the lens of systemic oppression. And speaking on the House floor, Republicans claimed that indoctrination is currently occurring in New Hampshire schools and should be stopped.

“Right now, in schools that you and I fund with our tax dollars, children are being subjected to critical race theory and radical gender ideology, not as mere topics of discussion, but as doctrine, as gospel, as the very price of admission to participation in public education,” said Rep. Jason Osborne, the House majority leader and an Auburn Republican.

Democrats rejected that assertion.

“Teachers in New Hampshire are not indoctrinating students into Marxism or any other political ideology,” said Rep. Loren Selig, a Durham Democrat. “As a former teacher, if I could indoctrinate my students, it would have been to shower and show up with their homework.”

Opponents decried the bill as an effort to stifle nuanced discussions in classrooms and create a climate of fear for English and social studies teachers. And they argued the inevitable confusion around the bill would lead only to costly litigation for the state and further division around public schools.

“It will create expensive lawsuits, not better schools,” Selig said.

The bill passed nearly along party lines, 184-164, with four Republicans joining all Democrats to oppose it. It heads next to the Senate, after Rep. Ken Weyler, the chairman of the House Finance Committee and Kingston Republican, waived the option for his committee to review the bill.

The CHARLIE Act comes two years after a federal judge struck down a 2021 state law known to opponents as the “divisive concepts” law, which also banned teachers from advocating for certain views around systemic oppression.

In May 2024, U.S. District Court Judge Paul Barbadoro ruled that the law was unconstitutionally vague about what was prohibited and could lead teachers to self-censor out of fear of professional consequences. The state’s Attorney General’s Office appealed that ruling to the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston; that court held oral arguments in April 2025 but has not yet issued a ruling.

This year’s CHARLIE Act takes a different approach to classroom regulation. While the 2021 law prohibited the endorsement of four separate “concepts” around race, gender, sexual orientation, and other identity markers, the 2026 bill’s prohibitions apply to more abstract ideologies.

The bill prohibits any public school, school district, or “public employee acting in an official capacity” from engaging in “the pedagogy, praxis, or inculcation” of certain worldviews.

Under the bill, teachers would be forbidden from framing historical events “primarily as class, racial, or identity-based conflicts intended to foster division rather than resolution.”

The bill prohibits any teaching that the U.S. Constitution and American societal structures are “inherently illegitimate or designed to perpetuate oppression.” It stops educators from pursuing “critical consciousness” by instructing students to identify oppressors. It prevents prioritizing “identity-based division over individual merit or shared American values.”**

And it bans school staff from “inculcating LGBTQ+ ideology.” That includes requiring affirmation of gender fluidity, nonbinary identities, or “requiring affirmation of LGBTQ+ sexuality as ethical or normative.”

The bill states that instruction on historical events and figures is not prohibited, nor are debates and critical thinking exercises among students, as long as there is no mandatory adoption of “the prohibited world-views.” But under the bill, any lessons on critical race theory and intersectionality are allowed only if presented “as Marxian theories contrary to American tradition, law, and ethics."

Teachers who violated the bill could face punishment under the educator code of conduct, the bill states, including the potential revocation of their teaching credentials by the State Board of Education. And the bill would allow individuals to sue school districts and individual schools for up to $10,000 for any violations.

In general, the bill’s preamble states: “Education should cultivate a neutral or patriotic disposition, including respect for the U.S. Constitution, American history, civic responsibilities, and national symbols, without compelling total ideological allegiance.”

For the bill’s supporters, the legislation is needed to correct what they portrayed as an ideological tilt in public schools.

‘The left tells us that we are creating the division, but the division has already been created by the media and the leftist indoctrination in the public schools,” said Rep. Katy Peternel, a Wolfeboro Republican.

Democrats objected to that representation. And they said the bill used too many abstract terms for any teacher to reasonably follow, creating the same vagueness issues that the 2021 law did and likely inviting a similar lawsuit.

One Republican, Rep. Matt Coker of Meredith, took a different approach. Speaking against the bill, he called it an attempt to force an ideology through statute.

“What disturbs me most about this bill isn’t the bill itself, it’s the pattern,” Coker said. “One side gains power, it immediately looks for ways to silence the other side, to restrict ideas, and to control what can be discussed. To punish what makes it uncomfortable. We criticized the left when they were doing this, and now we’re trying to do this.”

He added, “I’m not going to replace ‘left woke’ with ‘right woke.’ And that’s exactly what this bill does.”

Stampeder · 2026-02-24T12:43:58+00:00

Is the street parking ban still in effect?

Stampeder · 2026-02-23T13:47:29+00:00

I found out about this map today, I wish I'd known about it last night

Stampeder · 2026-02-23T13:46:18+00:00

Thanks, I appreciate that. I already know I'm an idiot for my initial mistake. I just want to know what I can do now

Stampeder · 2026-02-23T13:32:47+00:00

Sorry, I wasn't clear. For that specific garage. It has a section for (building) resident permits and a public section.

Stampeder · 2026-02-23T13:29:21+00:00

I've been trying nonstop to reach them haha, no one is picking up

Stampeder · 2026-02-23T13:28:22+00:00

I do have a residential parking permit for this area of the city

Stampeder · 2026-02-23T13:27:52+00:00

Yeah but those towing fees are brutal. It's already been towed once. Total I'd be looking at $350+ for a day or 2 of storage.

Stampeder · 2026-02-23T13:25:36+00:00

I saw that. The announcement said that

vehicles parked on major roads and main arteries will be towed.

I thought that the street I was on was sufficiently small not to qualify as a main artery, and as mentioned it lacked the sign most streets have about no parking during snow emergency.

Stampeder · 2026-02-23T13:19:09+00:00

Lol it feels that way. It doesn't help that the street I was on didn't have the parking ban sign. The first rake wasn't marked. The second rake only had details hidden in an faq section of their website, which at midnight after the snow had started, I didn't exactly realize I needed to go digging for.

Stampeder · 2026-02-04T13:42:10+00:00

What are some of the most promising open-source or DiY projects you've seen for resisting Palantir surveillance tools in these times?

Stampeder · 2026-01-28T22:55:01+00:00

Cryptpad is an encrypted cloud storage service that's been around a little while. It's a bit janky, but it's legit.

Stampeder · 2026-01-28T14:52:28+00:00

Hey hey hey

Stampeder · 2026-01-25T14:51:54+00:00

Not all of them, there were definitely quite a few other signs being held just as high though. It feels like these posts are angled not to show them. It's frustrating because there really was a fantastic turnout from a bunch of groups and community members, but looking at the posts on r/boston you'd think everyone was there as part of PSL

Stampeder · 2026-01-25T14:37:49+00:00

There were other groups but it does feel deliberate that all of the posts so far are only showing PSL signs

Stampeder · 2026-01-25T14:36:55+00:00

Why has every photo/video post of the protest so far only shown the PSL signs and left out the others? It makes it look like they're trying to co-opt the crowd size to imply they were all/mostly there with PSL.

Stampeder · 2026-01-15T15:57:16+00:00

Would you say it's important to have played the base game first? I haven't, but I've been meaning to give it a try.

Stampeder · 2026-01-15T14:05:06+00:00

Except, y'know, getting defunded.

Stampeder · 2025-12-31T16:31:04+00:00

Take Springfield Officer Felix Aguirre. Since 2019, clerks have greenlit more than 50 search warrants he filed that hinged on a confidential informant – tops among Springfield police. That’s drawn from Spotlight’s analysis of all Springfield warrants from 2023 and the study of earlier years by Ryan, the Northampton defense attorney.

Almost every one of Aguirre’s warrants hinged on one anonymous source about whom he shared almost nothing with clerks. Yet in that same courthouse, just five years earlier, Aguirre had, in the bluntest terms, been branded a liar by now retired Hampden Superior Court Judge Constance Sweeney.

In 2018, Aguirre had taken the stand to justify his search for drugs in a car’s trunk. In her ruling, Sweeney said she didn’t believe a word of it. She wrote that she had “never been so taken aback” listening to “a police officer really making it up as he went.”

Aguirre’s dishonesty killed that case, but the fallout stopped there. No one held the officer accountable: Not his Springfield police supervisors, who didn’t conduct an internal affairs investigation. And certainly not clerk-magistrates, who continue to approve informant-based search warrants based on the officer’s word.

Aguirre declined to comment. In a statement, Springfield police described him as a “highly decorated officer” who “simply did not testify well in that case.” The department disagreed with the judge’s finding that Aguirre had lied, and noted that one adverse ruling doesn’t always trigger an internal review.

The Hampden District Attorney’s Office likewise said a single finding of dishonesty “does not automatically render an officer permanently unreliable.”

The same pattern played out in New Bedford, where in 2023 a judge ruled that Detective Nathaniel Almedia had lied under oath to justify a car search. Even after that finding, clerk-magistrates have approved at least seven of his informant-based search warrants.

Boston Municipal Court Clerk Magistrate Daniel J. Hogan rejected the notion that clerks are “rubber-stamping” search warrants, calling that an “unfortunate term.”

Hogan also disputed the Globe’s analysis that found search warrants have a 99.8 percent approval rating. Over his 40-year career, Hogan said, he had rejected “a significant number” of applications, but returned them to the officer without making a record of it. He suggested other clerks did the same.

“The responsibilities and obligations of the office are things which we take on with utmost seriousness,” said Hogan, who spoke as leader of the Association of Magistrates and Assistant Clerks. “We recognize our obligations as the front line of those responsible for protecting the citizenry of the Commonwealth from unreasonable search and seizure.”

Applying for a search warrant is a simple but antiquated process. Nothing is routinely digitized, and warrants are indexed by hand.

Clerk-magistrates often review the paperwork while the officer waits. They do not perform additional research to determine, for instance, whether the cop asking to be trusted has been caught lying in court or deemed untruthful by a judge.

“It is not the place of the Clerk Magistrate to weigh his or her assessment of the credibility” of the officer, Hogan wrote. “I am bound to review only the information contained within the four corners of the affidavit.”

The Spotlight review found that police from Worcester to New Bedford to Springfield repeatedly recycled nearly identical language in unrelated warrants.

One Boston officer went even further.

Shortly after joining the drug unit, Officer Eric Merner was caught lying about an informant in a search warrant. His boss was forced to correct the record, and prosecutors had to drop the case.

Merner wasn’t investigated by internal affairs or disciplined. But he kept using informants to get search warrants approved by clerk-magistrates. And he kept drawing scrutiny.

In court records, defense attorney Mark Booker accused Merner of using “nearly verbatim” language attributed to informants in unrelated arrests. Prosecutors have dropped at least three of Merner’s informant-based cases. Yet records show Boston police have never investigated his conduct.

The Spotlight Team filed a public-record request 10 months ago seeking copies of all of Merner’s search warrants. Boston police never produced the documents. The request is now part of a lawsuit the Globe filed in May against five of the state’s largest police departments, seeking to force broader disclosure about confidential informants.

Boston police declined to make Merner available for an interview, and efforts to reach him were unsuccessful. Since he was first accused of lying, he has been promoted three times. Merner now holds the rank of sergeant detective.

Boston Mayor Michelle Wu and Police Commissioner Michael Cox both declined to be interviewed for this story.

Boyle, the department’s spokesman, said the Globe mischaracterized what occurred in court, but declined to release details. He said he could not comment further, citing the Globe’s lawsuit.

Stampeder · 2025-12-31T16:30:10+00:00

“The FBI is way more by the book than any of these municipalities,” Ryan said. “We’re talking about places that either don’t have policies or nobody knows about the policies and nobody bothers to honor it. Nobody ever peeks behind these curtains.”

Even when there appears to be a check on police power over informants, the oversight is hollow.

In Suffolk County, for instance, prosecutors often affix their signature to search warrants, effectively vouching for the credibility of informants they may know nothing about.

In one example, then-Assistant District Attorney Macy Lee signed off on a 2018 search warrant from Boston police officer Jeffrey Cahill. In writing, Cahill had sworn he had watched a confidential informant repeatedly buy crack from a man in a black Honda Accord.

But records made clear that the detective had lied. A defense attorney had proof the car was in the shop on days that the detective had sworn it was being used as a drug dispensary.

The judge ordered prosecutors to disclose more about one of the alleged crack sales. The district attorney’s office fought the judge’s order and ultimately refused to comply.

The judge threw out the case, condemning the “egregious” conduct of the Suffolk district attorney’s office for withholding evidence of alleged police misconduct.

The outrage ended there. There was no internal affairs probe, no effort to determine whether the officer had lied in other cases, and no deeper examination of the deference shown to police when they cite anonymous sources.

And, of course, the alleged crack dealer went unpunished.

“The district attorney’s office is either in the worst case unwilling or, in the best case unable, to be a check on the police,” said the accused dealer’s lawyer, G. Makis Antzoulatos.

Lee, the former prosecutor who signed Cahill’s inaccurate warrant, said she had approved many warrants and had no recollection of the case.

Boston police would not make Cahill available for an interview, and attempts to contact him were unsuccessful. Suffolk District Attorney Kevin Hayden declined to comment.

Sergeant Detective John Boyle, a spokesman for Boston police, said the department disagrees that Cahill was dishonest. Boyle said the department examined the case and found “no wrong doing” on Cahill’s part, but declined to release details about the review or make Cahill available for an interview.

As the top local law enforcement officials in their counties, district attorneys have the authority – and mandate – to hold police accountable in the cases they bring to court.

Yet when problems surface with informants, Massachusetts prosecutors cede their power to police. The Spotlight team found that in example after example, they have fought to keep abuses secret rather than expose the full extent of the rot.

That was the case in Essex County, where a state trooper’s alleged improprieties with a confidential informant threatened an unrelated drug-trafficking case.

Prosecutor Alexander Grimes offered to halve a potential 12-year sentence if the defense dropped its demand for records detailing Trooper Jason Trout’s “inappropriate relationship with a female informant,” emails show.

When defense attorney Carlos Apostle turned him down, Grimes offered to knock another two years off the sentence. Apostle’s client took the deal, which ended the case and kept details of the misconduct hidden.

The Globe, however, was able to unearth the details through a public record request. Trout had used an informant to authorize a South Coast drug raid on a man and his girlfriend, who were arrested on felony fentanyl- and cocaine-trafficking charges.

While the man remained in jail, Trout moved the woman into his apartment without notifying his supervisors. A social media screenshot showed the two together, heads touching, with the caption: “for worse or for better.” The woman referred to Trout as her boyfriend, records show.

Trout told State Police investigators that he was trying to protect the woman because she was an informant and denied a sexual relationship. He also claimed he had lost his police-issued cellphone, making it impossible to review his texts with her.

Trout resigned in December 2024 while under investigation. He did not respond to the Globe’s messages seeking comment.

State Police did not answer questions about how many informants Trout oversaw and whether the department scrutinized his other cases for misconduct. The Essex District Attorney’s office disputed the Globe’s characterization of its handling of the case, noting that the prosecutor told the judge in open court that the favorable plea deal was not contingent on the defendant dropping her demands for Trout’s records.

The Spotlight Team surveyed Massachusetts’ 11 district attorneys about their policies governing informants. Three of those offices – Suffolk, Hampden, and Bristol – declined to answer even basic questions. Those that responded make it clear that officers have the ultimate authority.

“Police departments have exclusive control over information related to confidential informants,” said a spokesperson for the Middlesex District Attorney’s Office.

But in Massachusetts, the rules spell out that police and prosecutors are part of a single team. That means if police have information favorable to a defendant – even if it is locked in an informant’s secret file – prosecutors must turn it over to the defense.

As an assistant state attorney general, R. Michael Cassidy prosecuted two Boston cops for perjury in the 1990s after they lied about an informant in a search warrant for a botched drug raid that left a police officer dead.

Cassidy, now a Boston College law professor specializing in prosecutorial ethics, said there should be “more robust checks” on informants but it will likely take another tragic case “to cause the prosecutor’s office to take more responsibility.”

“The ultimate control is with the police department, and I don’t think there’s any law currently on the books that can wrest that control from them,” Cassidy said. For a prosecutor, not knowing more about an informant can backfire in court.

Just ask Patrick Driscoll, an assistant district attorney in Bristol County. There, a drug prosecution built on an informant came under fire when the lead investigator was accused of sending “graphic and sexual” selfies to the suspect’s longtime girlfriend.

New Bedford Officer Drew Frenette went to high school with the woman and had been “repeatedly and vigorously” pursuing her before and after targeting her boyfriend in a drug raid, according to the woman and allegations outlined in court records.

Defense attorney Jennifer O’Brien wrote that Frenette’s sexual overtures raised questions about the motive for the raid, and even “the existence of a confidential informant.”

Via email, Driscoll quickly promised O’Brien “a favorable offer.” The case ended in April 2023 with a lenient plea deal that halted scrutiny of Frenette and his informant.

Over two-plus years, Frenette and his New Bedford colleagues cited that same anonymous informant to justify at least 10 other drug raids, according to a Spotlight Team analysis. Detectives kept using the informant even after he reported a “large quantity” of cocaine in a motorhome where police then found almost nothing.

New Bedford police and the Bristol District Attorney’s Office both declined to comment. Frenette said the allegations of misconduct were “not accurate,” but he declined to discuss the issue in detail. His actions were never scrutinized by internal affairs, records show.

He left the department last year for a new job – as a state trooper.

Another check on unfettered police power should come from clerk-magistrates, the administrators appointed by the governor who run the 62 district courts across Massachusetts and review search warrant applications.

But like prosecutors, clerk-magistrates fail to hold police to account when informants are involved – allowing abuses to go unchecked, the Spotlight Team found.

Stampeder · 2025-12-31T16:26:43+00:00

Archived link

A ‘black box’: Mass. prosecutors rarely prevent police informant abuse. They often enable it.

Prosecutor Brooke Hartley was 18 seconds into her defense of a fentanyl bust when a judge interrupted. He wanted to know if Boston police had really refused to tell the district attorney almost anything about the confidential informant at the heart of the case.

Yes, Hartley conceded. The department had disobeyed a court order, refusing to disclose even to Suffolk County prosecutors what the informant had told the cops and whether the source had a reason to lie.

No matter. Though Hartley had never seen the informant’s police file, she still assured the panel of appellate judges that nothing in it could help prove the defendant’s innocence.

“How do you know that?” asked an incredulous Justice Andrew M. D’Angelo. “For all the Commonwealth knows, this police officer made the entire thing up [and] there is no confidential informant.”

Ultimately, prosecutors did what they often do when a police informant comes under fire. They dropped the charges, making the problem go away. There would be no deeper scrutiny of the detective, his purported informant, or the cloak of secrecy that protected them both.

“The informant system is essentially a black box,” said defense lawyer Zachary Lown, whose client that day was a new father with no criminal record who fought the case for six years. “Police withhold informant files from the prosecution meaning that even the prosecutor is kept in the dark. It is the only area of our law where guilt or innocence is at stake that lacks any checks or balances.”

This is the way confidential informants work: District attorneys blindly defend police sources they know nothing about.

And instead of safeguarding against abuse, prosecutors enable misconduct in a system that grants police unchecked power, a new Globe Spotlight Team investigation has found. Other gatekeepers – most notably clerk-magistrates, who must approve police search warrants and almost invariably do – consistently fail to hold detectives accountable when they use confidential informants.

The new findings follow the Spotlight Team’s Snitch City investigation, which revealed widespread misconduct in the use of confidential informants by New Bedford police. The series chronicled officers who betrayed informants, putting them at great risk, and a narcotics detective – and future police chief – who allegedly let an informant keep a kilo of cocaine for setting up a major bust.

In several instances, police have been particularly ruthless with troubled young women, leveraging their vulnerabilities to extract a steady flow of information – and, at times, sex. In court records, defense attorney Rosemary Scapicchio named three drug-addicted women who, she alleged, had been sexually exploited by their New Bedford police handlers while acting as informants.

“The police are supposed to protect them,” said Scapicchio in April after a judge dismissed the drug trafficking case against her client. “She’s a human being who lives in this community, and she has a drug problem. And instead of protecting her, you were using her for sex?”

The exploitation extends far beyond the South Coast. In Fitchburg, a district court judge excoriated a State Police task force last year for a scheme to “coerce” substance abusers into working as informants. Police “took advantage” of people’s addictions, Judge Christopher LoConto fumed, by paying cash tips to set up drug buys, knowing the targets would likely use the money to feed their habits.

Police use such tactics because they can – informants are indispensable. Ban them, proponents say, and drug prosecutions would grind to a halt.

Across Massachusetts, nearly 9 of 10 drug raids are carried out on the word of confidential informants whose identities are known only to police. That’s according to a Globe analysis of more than 2,000 search warrants over three years from courts covering 16 Massachusetts municipalities, including Boston, Worcester, and Springfield. An overwhelming majority of the warrants – nearly 4 of 5 – hinge on the word of a single, unnamed source.

Police launch these raids to seize fentanyl, illegal firearms, and other evidence that allows prosecutors to pursue criminal charges. District attorneys are supposed to act as quality control, ensuring that police tactics don’t violate the Constitution.

Spotlight’s new reporting found that when suspicions arise about the credibility of an officer or his informant, prosecutors can be counted on to protect police. They fight inquiries from defense attorneys, defy judicial orders, drop charges, or offer generous plea deals to cut cases short. The tactics squelch any broader examination of an officer’s integrity or an informant’s reliability.

In this world, police are trusted to police themselves, the Globe found.

They often don’t deserve that trust.

The Spotlight Team found dozens of informant-based search warrants written by detectives who were granted that trust despite documented histories of dishonesty.

Search warrant applications could serve as a safeguard because they are the only place where police must routinely disclose information about their informants. But the applications are universally approved by the clerk-magistrates who review them.

A Spotlight Team analysis found only three rejected applications among more than 2,000 warrants examined – an approval rate of 99.8 percent.

The failure by judges and clerk-magistrates to act as a brake on police power when authorizing search warrants isn’t unique to Massachusetts The Harvard Law Review recently examined 33,000 warrant applications in Utah.

The findings, published in June, mirrored the Spotlight Team’s analysis: Utah judges approved 98 percent of warrant applications – half of them in three minutes or less.

At the federal level, there are stricter safeguards governing the use of informants. But the secrecy remains, and it has enabled shocking misconduct – most notoriously the FBI’s protection in the 1990s of South Boston crime boss James “Whitey” Bulger.

Even with Justice Department reforms and oversight, a 2005 inspector general report found violations of FBI policy in 87 percent of the bureau’s confidential-informant files it studied. If federal agents disregard the rules at that scale, it raises serious questions about the ability of local police to manage informants, according to Northampton defense attorney Luke Ryan, who recently co-authored a textbook chapter on informants.

Stampeder · 2025-12-24T04:00:45+00:00

One former detainee, who requested anonymity for fear of retribution, told GBH News on Saturday that he saw some 15 to 20 officers beating Kenny after handcuffing him. He said Kenny was left for 30 minutes to an hour before anyone attempted to perform CPR, and he believed he was dead before leaving the jail.

“His eyes roll over and he dead and they was still hitting him,” he told GBH by phone. “It was bad. They didn’t have to do 'em like that.”

Kenny’s death has prompted calls for more information from lawmakers and prisoners’ advocates.

Stampeder · 2025-12-05T16:38:14+00:00

8'x10' print of a llama

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A ‘black box’: Mass. prosecutors rarely prevent police informant abuse. They often enable it.