FOIA Files

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 […]

A letter requesting an extension for our request sent by Caitlin Q. Knutte, FOIA Officer & Assistant Attorney General in the Office of the Illinois Attorney General. See the full letter here: 22756 Extension Letter Transcription: January 10, 2013 RE: Freedom of Information Act Request 2012 FOIA 022756 Dear Mr. Loury [our president], Thank […]

Thanks for following our FOIA journey, folks! On Jan. 17, exactly two weeks after filing a FOIA request with the Office of the Illinois Attorney General requesting the names and contact info of the state’s FOIA officers, we got ’em, following a request for five more days to come up […]

Tracking our own FOIA debacles almost caused us to miss big transparency news in Illinois–a suit brought against Comptroller Judy Baar Topinka a week and a half ago over the office’s failure to produce the state’s checkbook under a valid FOIA request. Transparency advocates over at For the Good of […]

The FOIA Project will soon extend its tracking model to other agencies, starting with a test application applied to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. A grant awarded to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University, which hosts the project, by the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation will […]

The results of a FOIA request filed by MuckRock News investigating Federal Trade Commission complaints over questionable business practices uncovered 685 small business complaints filed against the business review site Yelp From The Daily Caller: Allegations against Yelp included spamming businesses that used its service, making harassing sales calls and […]