Public reports, rebuilt so you can link to the sentence

¶"The Committee found that NASA's drive to achieve a launch schedule of 24 flights per year created pressure throughout the agency that directly contributed to unsafe launch operations." That is page 3 of the House Science Committee's report on the Challenger accident, October 1986. Until now the way to point someone at it was a PDF on govinfo.gov and the words "see page 3". Here it is with its own link:

¶https://reportsthatmatter.org/reports/challenger-accident?p=committee-found-nasa-s-drive

¶Public inquiries and investigations are the most careful fact-finding a country pays for, and they come out as PDFs that almost nobody reads past the summary. I started the Open Knowledge Foundation because public information should be usable, not just available. These reports are the clearest case I know. So I've rebuilt twenty-two of them as web pages. Every paragraph has its own link and its page number. Select any sentence and you get a link to exactly those words. One search runs across all of them. The official PDF is one click from every page.

What's here

¶In date order: the House Science Committee's Challenger report (1986); the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (2003); the 9/11 Commission (2004); United States v. Philip Morris (2006); the Lehman Brothers examiner's report (2010); the Saville Inquiry into Bloody Sunday (2010); the Deepwater Horizon commission (2011); the Senate's financial-crisis report (2011); the Hillsborough Independent Panel (2012); Leveson (2012); the Senate torture report (2014); the Litvinenko Inquiry (2016); Chilcot (2016); the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment of Russian election interference; Mueller (2019); the January 6th Committee (2022); Grenfell Phase 2 (2024); Jack Smith (2025); the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry (2025); the Covid Inquiry's Module 2 report (2025); the Southport Inquiry's Phase 1 report (2026); and the Thirlwall Inquiry's report on the Countess of Chester Hospital (2026).

¶Some are not whole yet. Chilcot is the executive summary only; Lehman is Volumes 1 and 3 (the introduction, the executive summary and selected sections); Grenfell, Jack Smith, the Post Office Inquiry and Southport are Volume 1 only; Columbia, Saville and the Covid Inquiry's Module 2 are Volume I. Thirlwall is the summary report; its three full volumes are to come. The Senate torture report is the declassified executive summary and findings; the full study of more than 6,700 pages remains classified. Each says so at the top.

¶Each report has a short introduction at the top. That is ours, not the report's: drafted with AI help, checked by me, and labelled as such. Below it is the report.

What we promise, and what we don't

¶
• The words are the report's. The text is extracted from the official PDF by deterministic software (the code is public) and compared against it. No language model wrote, summarised or rewrote any of it. AI coding agents wrote much of that software and this site, under my direction; the About page says exactly where.
• It is not perfect, and we say where. Each report's edition page says what has been checked and what is still wrong. The scanned older reports, Challenger above all, have noise in their tables. Where our copy and the official document differ, the official document is right. When you find something, tell us: we'll fix it and list the fix.
• If a report is about you, you can ask us to change or remove anything we made from it, a quote card, a post, a line of our introduction, and we'll do it within a day without asking why.
• We don't summarise, interpret or rank the findings. We choose which passages to highlight, and those are labelled as ours.
• No ads, no accounts, no tracking cookies.

Following along

¶The Bluesky account posts one passage a day, verbatim, with its page and link. The changelog and this blog say what has changed. Get a monthly email of passages and new reports at /newsletter.

¶Next are the later volumes of the reports that are only partly here, and whichever report people keep asking for. If there's one you need, write to contact@reportsthatmatter.org.

¶— Rufus Pollock