Short answers, pulled from the story.
TASS traces its origin to December 1902, when it began operations as the Commercial Telegraph Agency under Russia's Ministry of Finance. It was formally established as the Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union on the 10th of July 1925 by a decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet.
TASS is registered as a Federal State Unitary Enterprise and is owned by the Government of Russia. It is headquartered in Moscow and maintains 70 offices in Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States, along with dozens of bureaus around the world.
TASS was systematically used as a front organization by Soviet intelligence agencies including the NKVD and the Main Intelligence Directorate, with correspondents serving as informants abroad. Former Georgetown University professor James David Atkinson described TASS as concentrating more heavily on espionage than on other activities.
On the 27th of February 2022, following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the European Alliance of News Agencies unanimously voted to suspend TASS on the grounds that new Russian media regulations made the agency unable to provide unbiased news. A September 2023 vote to permanently expel TASS failed to reach the required majority, leaving it suspended but not expelled.
White TASS was a daily package of western news reports and potentially embarrassing domestic stories compiled for top journalists. Red TASS was a smaller, more restricted package of particularly sensitive news distributed only to senior political leaders.
The agency has changed its name several times since 1902, moving from the Commercial Telegraph Agency to the St. Petersburg Telegraph Agency in 1904, then the Petrograd Telegraph Agency in 1914, the Russian Telegraph Agency in 1918, and finally TASS in 1925. After the Soviet Union dissolved it became ITAR-TASS in 1992 before reverting to the single name TASS in October 2014.