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As a young adult, Anne Frank stated, “How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.” Though many American teenagers are aware of this concept, few have truly put it into practice. However, at only twenty years old, Texas native Hannah Giles has learned to embody this ideal. Starting with a simple conviction, Giles transformed her hunch into an expose of American corruption that has taken the country by a storm.

Giles, a Miami surf girl with a penchant for adventure, packed her bags and moved to Washington D.C. in 2009, excited to fill an internship position at the prestigious National Journalism Center. Anticipating a fast paced summer, Giles was disappointed to find she felt lost in the Capitol. “I had no idea what I was doing there. I didn’t want to do the internship anymore,” she stated. Giles even considered a change to a career as a dietician. “But,” she explained, “I knew I wanted to do something exciting, but I didn’t know what. My prayer was for God to use me.” Giles patiently waited for God to reveal to her the next step - but she had no idea that he would literally place it in her path.

The next week during a brisk jog through the capitol, Giles passed the local Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) Housing office along her route. As she ran past dilapidated buildings, she realized that her run had taken her farther than she intended. She looked around and saw, “a couple of drug deals, a couple of street ladies,” Giles described, “and then realized I was in the wrong part of town.” Retracing her path, she again saw the ACORN office. “That’s when the wheels in my head started turning. ACORN was right there, and I said, ‘how, in this impoverished part of town, is this helping? They are in this neighborhood with all this crime and poverty.’”

At that moment, an idea began to piece itself together in her head. She had heard of undercover investigators - journalists who will do anything to learn the truth and who are willing to enter possibly dangerous situations. For fearless Giles, fear was hardly a factor. Once the idea of secret exploration of the community organization tactics of ACORN had entered her mind, there was no going back. Unfortunately, she had only one problem. “I had the idea,” explained Giles, “but I didn’t know what to do with it.” Fortunately, God kept His hand on her life, trusting the twenty year old with a task bigger than she could imagine.

Later that week as Giles haphazardly checked her Facebook, a picture of James O’Keefe appeared on her news feed. James O’Keefe is a twenty-five year old amateur activist filmmaker. Before the famous ACORN videos, he was best known for his work exposing the hidden agenda and illegal activities of Planned Parenthood by having a young woman pose as a pregnant teenager. O’Keefe secret filmed a conversation between the girl and a Planned Parenthood employee as she was advised to lie about her age in order to attain an illegal abortion without parental consent. These investigations occurred in 2006, with a few subsequent projects in 2007 and 2008. “I knew James had gone undercover at Planned Parenthood,” explained Giles, who was vaguely aware of the young man’s work, “He’s sort of zany and creative, and he has surveillance equipment.” As a newcomer to the world of investigative journalism, Giles felt the experienced O’Keefe would be the perfect partner as she planned her ACORN report. Giles sent him an email, which evolved into a conversation on his latest ideas and projects. Finally, Giles emailed him with a simple message: “I have an idea...” She continued to give him a brief description of her proposal, explaining the suspicious ACORN office she had recently discovered. She quickly received a response from O’Keefe: “...this could work.”

After a few weeks of constant emailing and detailed planning, Giles and O’Keefe decided to go undercover. Giles would pose as a prostitute with O’Keefe playing her pimp. Though they had formulated a detailed outline of how they hoped their first undercover experience would unfold, the night before their first report on a Philadelphia ACORN office, they felt the urge to completely regroup. What resulted was seemingly ridiculous. The duo, dressed in over-the-top pimp and prostitute attire, would enter the ACORN housing office with a dilemma - they were attempting to open a brothel which would house underage girls from South America and they had only one problem: how could they hide this from the government?

In the early summer of 2009, Giles and O’Keefe secretly filmed as they sauntered up they stairs and into the Philadelphia ACORN office, fully in character and leaving their fate in the hands of God. What followed was an explosion of scandal and exposure government corruption that has captivated Conservative America and left the populous wondering: What exactly are our tax dollars funding?