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Vol. 2026 · About the Paper · Special Edition

CivicRadar
About

Your radar on legislation.
Not theirs on you.

Four things you might want to know before you trust this with your ZIP code: why we built it, what we won't build, where our data comes from, and how we treat what little we see of you.

01The Why

Why CivicRadar exists.

Built by someone who got tired of writing letters that never got read. Most of us are more than one thing at a time: queer and a renter and on Medicaid all at once. The tools weren't built for that.

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One moment made the gap concrete. About a month ago, an influencer I follow asked her followers to go to 5 Calls and call their legislators about a state issue. I did. The site is good. Curated campaigns, real phone numbers, scripts that get the call done. What it didn't have was a way to start with me.

I work at a national LGBTQ advocacy org. I went to our site to look for Maryland bills next. We track LGBTQ bills, which is our job. But being queer is only one part of who I am. I'm also a green card holder, with family on Medicaid in New York. Most of us are more than one thing at a time, and the bills that affect our lives don't sort into one tab on one org's website.

That's the gap. The civic tools I found are organized either around editorial campaigns or single-issue advocacy. Both assume you already know what you care about, and that what you care about is one thing. Intersectional lives don't fit that container.

So we built it. The form is the form I wanted to fill out a month ago. The bill list is the list I could not find. Years as an organizer taught me how little spare time most people have to track what's moving in the legislature. We chose what we chose because the proto-user is the founder, and the founder is more than one thing at a time.

If you have values you trust and organizations you respect but no spare hours to track what's actually moving, this is for you. We built it for the version of us who has stopped opening the action emails. The information should be yours.

We tune the defaults for people whose lives are touched by more than one flavour of legislation at once: queer, immigrant, on Medicaid, disabled, undocumented, working a W-2 paycheck. Allies are equally welcome; the matching adapts to whichever identities and issues you pick.

02The Refusals

What we won't build.

No feed. No follows. No notifications you didn't ask for. No data sold. No account required. No engagement metrics. We will not optimize you back into politics.

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These choices are the product. A civic tool that quietly grew a feed, a follow graph, and a notification budget would stop being your radar and start being someone else's.

So, on the record, five things we won't do:

  1. 01 · No feed.

    You will not open this site to a scrolling river of legislation. You ask it one question: what's moving in my state that touches who I am. It answers. When you're done, you close the tab.

  2. 02 · No follows.

    There is nothing to follow here. No accounts to subscribe to, no creators, no influencers translating policy at you. The sponsors of a bill are public record; the advocacy groups tracking it speak for themselves on their own sites.

  3. 03 · No notifications you didn't ask for.

    We will never push you a tab badge, an email, or a phone buzz about a bill you didn't opt into. If alerts ever ship, they will be off until you turn them on, and the off switch will be one click away from the on switch.

  4. 04 · No data sold.

    We don't sell anything about you, because we don't have anything about you to sell. Your ZIP and your identity selections live on your device. There is no file with your name on it on any server we run.

  5. 05 · No account required.

    No sign-up, no email verification, no password to forget. The page works the first time you load it. If accounts ever ship, they will be optional and exist to sync your settings across devices, never to gate the bills.

None of this is a sacrifice on our end. It's the shape of a tool that works for the person reading it instead of the people measuring them.

03The Sources

Where the data comes from.

OpenStates and LegiScan for all 50 state legislatures, Congress.gov for federal bills. Claude (Anthropic) writes the plain-English summaries and letter drafts. We name every source so you can check it yourself.

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We don't scrape statehouse PDFs in a basement. The bills, the sponsors, the votes, and the summaries you read here all come from places you can verify yourself.

OpenStates
Where we read state legislatures: bill text, sponsors, vote rolls, and committee status across all 50 states.
LegiScan
A second state-legislation source we cross-reference against OpenStates, so a bill that's missing from one usually still shows up from the other. LegiScan also covers the DC Council, which is how we surface local legislation for the ~702,000 people in the District. Council bills are the first local-government coverage we've shipped. (Source: 2023 ACS 1-year estimate, US Census Bureau.)
Congress.gov
The federal government's own bill record. Every U.S. House and Senate bill we surface is the version Congress publishes, not a paraphrase.
Anthropic (Claude)
When you ask for a plain-English summary of a bill, or a draft letter to your rep, Claude writes it (that's Anthropic's AI). We send only the bill excerpt and the prompt. Anthropic doesn't see who you are, because we don't either.

We name our sources because your radar should show its sources. If something we report disagrees with the legislature's own site, the legislature's site wins. The freshness badge on every result links you straight there.

04The Privacy

Plain-English data terms.

Your ZIP and identity tags live on your device. There is no file with your name on any server we run. The bill cache knows only state + keyword, never who asked.

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Most privacy policies are long because the company has a lot to confess. Ours is short because we don't.

That's an architecture choice: your ZIP code and identity tags live in your browser's local storage, a place our servers can't read even if we wanted to.

There's no account. Nothing to log into, nothing to log out of, no password to forget. You can use this from a library computer and walk away clean.

When you search, your ZIP and tags travel to OpenStates, Congress.gov, and our LegiScan-backed bill cache so they can return matching bills. What lands in that cache is a state code plus a hashed keyword set, nothing that traces back to a person. Two people in the same state asking about the same issue look identical to it.

When you ask Claude to draft a letter, the bill excerpt, your selected tags, and any sentence you wrote about your situation are sent to Anthropic so it can write back. The draft never lands on our servers. When you close the tab, it's gone unless you saved it yourself.

We don't sell data. We don't run analytics that track you across the web. There's nothing to sell and nothing to track.

On your device

On our server

ZIP code
not stored
Identity and issue tags
not stored
Anything you typed about yourself
not stored
Letters you drafted
not stored
 
A bill cache keyed by state + keyword, no person attached

You can erase what we know in one move: clear this site's storage in your browser, and we're back to knowing nothing about you. The radar resets to zero.

→ Know your rights as a constituent