BlackLeafwatch the watchmen

A BlackLeaf wire · Project Apollo

The wire, walked through.A wholesale feed of verified public-record digests — the facts inside the report, ready to run, with the hash to cite.

Apollo is the AP model applied to public finance: not the raw documents, but the digest of the report inside each — extracted facts, recomputed figures, provenance — packaged for a newsroom to run or build on without redoing the checking. Below is the wire itself, dispatch by dispatch, then how it's built.

Reports on the wire
704
Fact-verified
542
Enriched
162
Feeds
JSON · RSS
00On the wire now

Walk the dispatches

Eight real reports as a subscribing newsroom receives them. Step through with the controls — or the ← → arrow keys.

◈ DISPATCH21 verified facts01 / 08

CISA's 'Unique Talent' Incentive Reached Nearly Half Its Staff

U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Office of Inspector General

A pay bonus built to retain CISA's rarest cyber talent reached nearly half the agency. A DHS inspector general found $138.2 million paid since FY2020 — including $1.41 million in back pay to 348 people that no record explains.

Confirmed facts — blind-verified against the source

In 2015, CISA (then the National Protection and Programs Directorate) implemented the Cybersecurity Retention Incentive (Cyber Incentive) program under Tit…Background, p.1
The Cyber Incentive program has two tracks: the Cybersecurity Category Incentive Program pays a 10 percent group retention incentive based on NICE Framewor…Background, p.3-4
CISA paid more than $138 million (precisely $138,174,600) in Cyber Incentive payments between fiscal years 2020 through 2024 (through Q3 of FY2024), which…OIG Highlights, What We Found; Results of Audit, p.6; Table 2, p.10 (exact total $138,174,600)
In FY2020, 897 CISA employees received the Cyber Incentive, totaling $21,473,977 (average $23,940 per recipient).Table 2. OIG Calculated Cyber Incentive Recipients from FY 2020 through FY 2024 Q3, p.10
17 more confirmed in the full digest
GRADE A/1sha256 373ac94547f313b1sourcearchivefull analysis

Verified dispatches carry the confirmed facts; enriched dispatches carry a plain-English “why it matters” and a suggested angle. Every one carries its seal. Use ← → to step.

01The engine

A digest is a join, not a generation.

The build reads the sealed-document pool and the article verification records — both already on disk — and emits one digest per report, aggregating each story's sealed sources. Zero new cost for the whole corpus; the checking was already done upstream.

02The unit of trust

One report, its facts, its seal.

Each digest ties a report to the confirmed facts drawn from it — every load-bearing number blind-verified against the source — plus its Admiralty grade, a SHA-256 of the sealed original, and a Wayback mirror. That machine-checkable record is the product.

apollo/digests/<id>.json — trimmed
{ "tier": "verified", "verifiedFactCount": 21,
  "report": { "title": "CISA's 'Unique Talent' Incentive…",
    "publisher": "DHS Office of Inspector General" },
  "claims": [{ "text": "CISA paid $138,174,600 …",
    "locator": "Table 2, p.10", "verdict": "confirmed" }],
  "provenance": { "grading": {"reliability":"A","credibility":1},
    "sha256": "373ac94547f313b1…", "archiveUrl": "…" } }
03The faucet

Feeds a newsroom can already poll.

A read-only JSON feed (full claims payload, filterable by tier) and an RSS feedof the newest digests. No auth for the pilot — a shared token and static generation, per the wire's own MVP doctrine.

04The recurring touch

A per-beat email, sent by hand.

Each pilot gets a wire brief of the reports sealed since their last send that match their beat — jurisdiction, label, keyword. Watermarked so nothing repeats; the editor sends it, because the send is the touch.

05The margin

Machine help, only where the record is thin.

The reports with no article yet showed only a machine-written descriptor. A cheap model pass wrote each a newsroom “why it matters” and a suggested angle — grounded strictly in the report's own metadata, with no invented figures and no named individuals.

Pilot it free

We're opening the wire to newsrooms as a free pilot quarter — full access, no strings, in exchange for honest feedback. Fair warning so it's not a surprise: the analysis is AI-authored under disclosed bylines and human-edited; every number traces to a sealed source document, which is the point.

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