L'Étoile du Nord · The keys that open the Bastille
Building tools for understanding how power works — how decisions get made, and how what institutions say compares to what they do. Made accessible. Made legible. Made useful.
If you trade time and labor for wages, you live with decisions made by others — and you've historically had limited access to the infrastructure the institutions making those decisions consider ordinary: research staff, intelligence functions, systems that keep track of what was promised and what was delivered.
The Bastille Keys Foundation exists to change that. The name means what it says: the keys that open the Bastille. Tools that unlock what was locked away.
It matters more now. The newsrooms that once watched power on working people's behalf have overwhelmingly been captured — bought, consolidated, or brought to heel. When the referees are owned, people need their own instruments.
One constraint is architectural, not aspirational: infrastructure that serves liberation work cannot itself be capturable by the institutions it analyzes.
The Foundation is built in Minneapolis. Over the past year, in this city, the gap between what power says and what it does turned deadly. This is the public record:
Minnesota's governor said Minnesotans are keeping a "log of evidence." Tools for keeping that kind of log — rigorous, receipted, in ordinary hands — are exactly what this Foundation exists to build.
Federal agents begin “Operation Metro Surge” in the Twin Cities — the government's own name for its largest immigration enforcement operation. More than 3,000 arrests follow.
Receipt: U.S. Department of Homeland Security statements; Associated Press; PBS News.
Renée Good, a U.S. citizen and mother of three, is shot and killed by a federal immigration agent in Minneapolis.
Receipt: Reuters; CNN.
Alex Pretti, a U.S. citizen and intensive-care nurse for the Department of Veterans Affairs, is shot and killed by federal agents after helping a woman an agent had knocked to the ground. Bystander video verified by Reuters, the BBC, and The Wall Street Journal contradicts the official account.
Receipt: The New York Times, Jan. 24, 2026; The 19th, Jan. 29, 2026.
Minnesota and Hennepin County sue the federal government over withheld evidence in three shootings; at one scene, state investigators say they were physically blocked.
Receipt: NPR, April 10, 2026.
A federal agent is criminally charged and arrested after video contradicts his sworn account of a fourth shooting.
Receipt: PBS News; CNN, May 2026.
Every photograph here is public domain or openly licensed, with its credit published. Empty frames stay empty until we have the real thing — no stock imagery, nothing generated.
One house, mission first. The Foundation leads; Relentless Delivery — its in-house consultancy, the day job that funds the passion — builds the instrument; working people walk in through the front door. ERDA — in formation — is being built to run alongside every layer and work with people directly.
It's the analysis engine the Foundation is building: who decides what, how decisions get justified, and where what people say diverges from what they do — traceable instead of vague. It was conceived for the 48-year question: making 48 years of institutional behavior traceable — navigable, searchable, and analytically computable.
Not what it says. Put stated commitments next to actual decisions and where the money goes — the gap between the two is the story.
Every decision leaves a trail. Trace it from the choice to its consequences, step by step, so the thread never gets lost.
A claim backed by original documents counts for more than something heard secondhand — and the system is designed to always show which one you're looking at.
The method, applied by hand to public documents — legislation, agency planning papers, and corporate securities filings. Stated positions are paraphrased except where quoted; every receipt is a primary source anyone can look up.
| Actor | Stated position | Revealed by the record |
|---|---|---|
| U.S. immigration law, 1965 | End the discriminatory national-origins quota system. | The Hart-Celler Act also imposed the first numerical ceiling on Western Hemisphere migration. Workers whose seasonal crossing had faced no numerical limit for generations became “illegal” — the work never changed, only the law. Receipt: Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, 79 Stat. 911; the 1976 amendments put Mexico under the same 20,000-a-year per-country ceiling as every other nation — Iceland included. |
| U.S. Border Patrol, 1994 | “Prevention through deterrence.” | The strategy's own planning document predicted traffic would be “deterred, or forced over more hostile terrain, less suited for crossing” — the rerouting into deadly desert was anticipated in writing, not an accident discovered later. Receipt: Border Patrol Strategic Plan: 1994 and Beyond (July 1994). |
| Private detention industry | Safe, humane detention services. | The industry's own investor disclosures warn that demand for its facilities “could be adversely affected by the relaxation of enforcement efforts.” Revenue depends on more people being detainable. Receipt: Corrections Corporation of America (now CoreCivic) Form 10-K risk-factor disclosures. |
Status: built by hand, not by the engine. COMPASS's public analysis engine is under construction — it does not yet ingest or analyze external institutions. The example above shows the method a person can apply to public documents today, and what the engine is being designed to make traversable at scale. A project whose purpose is exposing the gap between stated and revealed cannot itself overstate.
Liberation is a fight — read the news. Movements get deplatformed, defunded, and priced out. This infrastructure is built so that can't happen to it. That's the point of sovereignty:
Sovereign & self-hosted — no dependency on cloud vendors who can withdraw access.
Open source — PostgreSQL, NebulaGraph, Meilisearch, Caddy, Grafana. No black boxes.
Hard to kill — designed for continuity, not convenience. This page itself is static — it stays up even if everything behind it goes down.
~$40/mo is measured, end to end. Cloud figures are estimated from equivalent managed services.
Start with this page. It makes zero third-party requests — no analytics, no trackers, no ad pixels, no cookies. Nothing here watches you read.
The people this is for — people organizing, people asking hard questions about power — can be targeted for exactly that. So when COMPASS opens to users, their protection will be architectural, not a policy page: collect the minimum, keep it on sovereign infrastructure with no vendor to pressure, and treat rules like the GDPR as a floor, not a finish line.
Nobody can be forced to hand over what was never collected.
The COMPASS Reader — search and graph over hand-built records from the Immigration & Sanctuary case study — will live here. It's a design prototype, honestly labeled: the live engine is under construction, and the demo is not connected to it.
Founder of Relentless Delivery LLC and the Bastille Keys Foundation. Builds the infrastructure; holds the mission. Minneapolis.
The whole platform is built and operated by one founder and one AI agent. That leverage is part of the proof: this doesn't require an institution's budget to run.