Robyn Dexter, a journalism major at Eastern Illinois University, wrote a column for The Daily Eastern reflecting on her first encounter with FOIAs in a Computer-Assisted Reporting class. Her conclusion? Among many other things, we’ve learned that persistence is the ultimate key to acquiring desired information. Amen, sister. [Read the […]
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, an agency within the Department of Homeland Security, must release more documents in response to a FOIA request from the American Immigration Council, a federal judge has ruled. USCIS took almost a year to release a portion of the data requested by the watchdog group, […]
Sad news today for transparency advocates in Chicago. We’ve just received word that the Center for Open Government, a legal support network based at the IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law that has provided FOIA support to since 2009, has lost funding for next year and is currently wrapping up operations. […]
Fighting big-ticket Freedom of Information fights could be costly if a recent federal court ruling is foreshadowing a trend. Sharif Mobley won a recent FOIA lawsuit that required the federal government to turn over an email exchange he had previously been denied access to, and U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell […]
Sixty two out of 99 government agencies still have outdated FOIA regulations on the books that leave them miles behind the federal government’s 2009 discretionary memorandum, issued by US Attorney General Eric Holder in March of that year, which urges them to disclose documents that are entitled to exemption on […]
A nomination on Bloomberg’s web editor 2012 best-of roundup is a good occasion to revisit the audit they conducted of the Obama administration by filing and tracking FOIA requests with 20 cabinet-level agencies. Of those, 19 failed to respond to requests for travel cost information completely or in the prescribed […]
President Obama’s administration has fielded more FOIA-related complaints than former President George W. Bush did during his second term, according to multiple year-end reports. Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse reports that the Obama administration has received 28 percent more Freedom of Information Act requests during the previous two years […]
A lawsuit brought against the government by the American Civil Liberties Union was decided in the Obama administration’s favor Wednesday. The ACLU filed suit after the White House denied a FOIA request they filed with two New York Times reporters seeking any documents pertaining to justifications for the classified “targeted killing” […]
A group of preservationists reached a settlement with a federal agency confronting the buffalo in the room–the Department of Agriculture, Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service’s “pattern of practice” of failing to respond to FOIA requests. A settlement filed in Montana federal district court last week will require the agency […]
We talk a lot about the FOIA request process, and the transparency victories that follow, on this blog, but we have yet to get into the nitty-gritty of what the experience is like, the steps that need to be taken to file a FOIA request, and the responses one can […]
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