Property of the People

Background

Property of the People was founded by activists Ryan Shapiro and Jeffrey Light in 2016. Its projects entail the collection of large amounts of documents that are usually only made public if formally requested under the Freedom of Information Act. ²

Property of the People website was developed by the Sparrow Project, a “public interest newswire focused on amplifying stories from struggles for social, economic, racial, and environmental justice.” The Sparrow Project publishes articles from Property of the People and shares them with left-leaning media outlets such as the New York Times, The Guardian, and Mother Jones. ^{3 4}

According to a 2013 Mother Jones article, the U.S. Department of Justice described Shapiro as the FBI’s “most prolific Freedom of Information Act requester.” ² He requested thousands of documents and pieced together sections to create a larger story that could be harmful. ^{5 6}

Projects

In 2017, Property of the People’s project Operation 45 was described as “the aggressive pursuit of governmental transparency in the service of democracy.” Co-founders Shapiro and Light obtained and analyzed government documents by suing the Trump administration and published them through the Sparrow Project which shares them with major left-leaning media outlets. ⁷

Operation 47 is a Property of the People project based on filing FOIA requests for “Trump-related documents” against the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the U.S. Department of Defense, the U.S. Department of Justice, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. Army, the U.S. Navy, the U.S. Department of State, the U.S. Department of Commerce, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the United States Election Assistance Commission, and other departments and agencies within the second Trump Administration. ⁸  The FBI has described animal rights activists as potential domestic bioterrorists, possibly causing the spread of bird flu as they trespass on farms to protest, and leading to a loss of profits for industry. ⁹ Some of the documents Property of the People unearthed have been used in a lawsuit filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights. ¹⁰

The Surveillance and the Policing of Dissent project focuses on “government surveillance and policing of dissent in the name of national security.” For example, Property of the People published a document from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Office of Intelligence and Analysis that describes a growing risk of unmanned aircraft system attacks due to the widespread availability of drones and the increasing occurrence of violent extremists promoting them as terrorist weapons. ¹¹

As of June 2025, Property of the People is working to obtain government information concerning maps created by civilians that track Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids. Intelligence agencies are investigating these as potential threats to ICE personnel. Shapiro describes the government investigations as “sounding the alarm over implausible, hypothetical risks.” ¹²

Property of the People has conducted a “multi-year quest” since 2017 to obtain FBI records of President Trump from 1946 to 2015, the years from his birth until his first presidential campaign. ¹³

Funding

Property of the People has filed one publicly disclosed tax return, in 2018, showing $52,259 in revenue and $87,069 in expenses. Its net assets were $3,584. ¹⁴

Property for the People appears to be primarily self-funded by co-founders Ryan Shapiro and Jeffrey Light. In 2018, Shapiro organized a GoFundMe account to raise funds for the FOIA requests and legal fees to support Property for the People’s project Operation 45. ^{7 15}  Shapiro’s post on Twitter stated, “Help us relentlessly file/litigate #FOIA requests against Trump/Pence admin.” ¹⁶

Leadership

Ryan Shapiro is the co-founder and executive director of Property of the People. Shapiro earned a Ph.D. from the Department of Science, Technology, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was a research affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, an organization that has criticized President Donald Trump. ^{17 18}

Jeffrey Light is Property of the People’s co-founder and lead counsel. He earned his law degree from Georgetown University Law School. Light is a member of the radical-left National Lawyers Guild. He has earned awards from the Bill of Rights Defense Committee and the Washington Peace Center. ¹⁹