The Electronic Frontier Foundation unveiled a new project this week that represents a big step in the right direction for free and open access to public data. The organization’s Transparency Project will include a searchable database of documents it has acquired through Freedom of Information Act requests, and easy-to-follow guides […]
Months after Northeastern Illinois University’s student radio station was shut down by administrators in June, the argument continues over the plug was pulled to censor students, or to halt alleged resource mismanagement. That issue came up in a Board of Trustees meeting last week, according to the Chicago Reader, as […]
Transparency victory in Delaware: a county judge ruled Wednesday that a city water authority must fulfill a FOIA request from a town council member to disclose employee salary data. From the Associated Press: After the authority refused to release its records, saying it is not a public body under state […]
Joel Campbell of the Salt Lake Tribune brings us a story of one woman who found closure following her grandparents’ mysterious deaths thanks to the Freedom of Information Act. Leslie Randle never trusted the succinct sequence of events provided by military officials that led to the death of her grandparents, […]
A Tennessee death row inmate will be granted access to some records related to the murder investigation that put him in prison, but information within the report can be redacted by the FBI, a federal appeals court ruled. Inmate Michael Dale Rimmer FOIA’d information on photo lineups where a witness […]
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 […]
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