Legal & Commitments

TrackBack is and will remain free, open source, and non-commercial. No advertising. No paywall. No paid data access. Ever.

TrackBack is open source on GitHub. The code is MIT-licensed; underlying government data is public record and not subject to copyright.

Individual donor names and employers are from public FEC filings (contributions over $200). Per 52 U.S.C. § 30111, this information is displayed for public accountability only — not for solicitation or commercial use. TrackBack does not sell, rent, or use this data to contact donors.

We display donor names, employers, and amounts from FEC bulk filings. We do not display mailing addresses. PAC and committee names are not subject to the individual-contributor sale/use restriction.

Purity Scores are analytical interpretations of public FEC and GovTrack data — not official government ratings, legal findings, or accusations of corruption.

A 0–100 measure of how independent a politician is from special interest money. Higher is cleaner.

Labels such as “Cleanest” and “Most Compromised” reflect our scoring formula applied to public filings — not moral judgments or legal conclusions.

Stock trades are from legally required Periodic Transaction Reports (PTR) filed with the House Clerk or Senate Office of Public Records. Amounts are reported as ranges per federal form — not exact values. TrackBack displays parsed public filings; verify via the linked official PDF.

House Periodic Transaction Reports are published by the House Clerk. Senate filings are searchable at efdsearch.senate.gov. TrackBack currently ingests House PTR trades; Senate automated ingestion is on the roadmap.

Lobbying data is retrieved from LDA.gov. Senate Office of Public Records cannot vouch for analyses derived after retrieval. Name matches in LDA filing text are heuristic — verify in the source filing.

LDA data in the current dataset was last retrieved on August 16, 2026 (FEC 2024 cycle).

When a member appears in an LDA match, it means their name was found in lobbying filing text — not necessarily that a meeting occurred. Check the original filing at LDA.gov.

TrackBack is an independent accountability tool. It is not affiliated with the FEC, Congress, any campaign, or any lobbying organization. Organization names (e.g. AIPAC, PhRMA) appear descriptively from public records — no endorsement is implied.

Campaign finance and lobbying data may contain errors from source filings. Always verify amounts and connections via linked FEC, LDA.gov, and OpenSecrets records.

• LD-203 lobbyist contributions to officials (LDA.gov)
• STOCK Act House PTR trades (disclosures-clerk.house.gov)
• Transparency hub — official .gov resource directory

Staying non-commercial allows us to publish public accountability data without FEC commercial-use concerns. Planned additions — all from legal public sources:

• Automated weekly GovTrack vote refresh (GitHub Actions)
• FEC 2026 election cycle bulk ingestion
• Senate PTR trade ingestion (efdsearch.senate.gov)
• FEC Schedule B committee disbursements
• Congressional financial disclosure forms
• DOJ FARA foreign lobbying registrations

We will never email donors from FEC data, sell contributor lists, or scrape sites that prohibit automated access.