Jul 25
Michael MorisyUncategorized MuckRock
Curious which agencies people are curious about? Mitch recently ran the numbers and broke down the top agencies – well, all agencies really – receiving FOIA request from MuckRock users. The top ten are below, but there are a lot (104) of agencies that have received only a single request from MuckRock users. You can download the complete list after the top 10.
- Federal Bureau of Investigation 69 requests
- Central Intelligence Agency 57 requests
- Department of Homeland Security 23 requests
- Marines 18 requests
- Office of the Secretary of Defense 16 requests
- Department of State 16 requests
- Under Secretary Office of Intelligence & Analysis 15 requests
- National Security Agency 9 requests
- Federal Communications Commission 8 requests
- Army 8 requests
Download the full list of agencies and the number of requests they’ve received.
Jul 15
Philip HalinUncategorized Clarence Thomas, DHS, FBI, FOI, FOI Friday, FOIA, FOIA Friday, ICE, Morisy, MuckRock
This week, we have a whole host of links dealing with federal agencies and individuals and how they deal with FOIA disagreements. Here’s a hint: not well!
District Court Rejects DHS and ICE FOIA Withholdings That Conceal Misrepresentations and Embarrassment: In a bold move that strengthened the positions of plaintiffs Center for Constitutional Rights, the National Day Laborer Organizing Network and the Immigration Justice Clinic at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, a district judge in New York has ordered Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Executive Office of Immigration Review (EOIR) to release more information on communities’ options to “opt-out” of the Secure Communities program. This is part of an ongoing fight between the plaintiffs and specifically ICE and DHS, as originally outline in this FOI Friday post.
EPIC v. NSA: FOIA Suit for Cybersecurity Authority Will Move Forward, though National Security Council Remains a “FOIA-Free Zone”: After the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) filed a FOI request with the NSA for information relating to their cybersecurity measures, the agency forwarded the request to the National Security Council instead of answering it, passing it into the hands of an un-FOIA-able agency. However, while a judge recently upheld the NSC’s FOIA exemption, the ruling also stated that the NSA was still responsible to respond to EPIC’s request on their own.
FOIA request seeks details of Justice Thomas’ jet and yacht travel: Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has aroused a whole lot of controversy recently in the wake of a New York Times article that alleged Thomas had, after receiving $42,000 in gifts over six years prior to 2004, accepted as gifts the use of planes and yachts owned by real estate magnate Harlan Crow. Common Cause, a nonpartisan government watchdog, has filed a FOI request with the U.S. Marshals to determine if Thomas has traveled in Crow’s yachts or planes and, if so, if these trips have been properly reported.
Also, check out Muckrock’s Michael Morisy’s article on the failure of government transparency for Commonwealth Magazine here.
Jun 06
Philip HalinUncategorized cannabis, FDA, FOI, FOIA, MuckRock, NCI, NIDA, PDQ, pmocek
Most FOI requests make, at the most, one ripple. Someone writes an article, others spread it, and then it’s forgotten. Sometimes, requests have a wider impact, with major papers printing about them. And sometimes, as in the case of the request filed on March 30th by MuckRock user pmocek, spread across the ‘net like wildfire, with everyone and their cousin holding an opinion.
Phil Mocek’s request, asking for “all records of communications regarding the creation and modification of National Cancer Institute’s Physician Data Query (PDQ) ‘Cannabis and Cannabinoids’ section, including but not limited to any discussion of any ‘direct antitumor effect’ of cannabis or cannabinoids, along with associated metadata,” was fulfilled early this month, and the results were, to say the least, interesting. Included in the files released were correspondences between NCI doctors and researchers and concerned agencies such as the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and Food and Drug Administration (FDA), wherein the latter two agencies pressured the writers of the PDQ to omit information such as the potential tumor-reduction abilities of cannabanoids, as well as pushing for the addition of warnings about cannabis’ addictive potential and illegal status in the U.S. What made it into the final PDQ was still a good argument for the use of cannabanoids on chemotherapy patients—it relieves nausea and pain in such patients—but the internal politicking that led to omissions and edits is what makes this whole saga fascinating.
Cannabis falls into a sort of medicinal sweet spot where the FDA doesn’t approve its use because of lack of conclusive evidence of its supposed benefits (indeed, marijuana is a Class 1 restricted drug for individuals) but also refuses to approve the clinical trials of cannabis that would be required to prove such benefits. Much of the results used in the PDQ were from trials on animals, and therefore inconclusive when it comes to human benefit.
All of the cogent information (and much supposition) has been covered elsewhere, as you can see in the sidebar of the original request. What I find most interesting about what was released in response to Mocek’s request is how it reveals, essentially, the parts that make up a political machine. It’s all too easy to lose sight of the fact that governments are made up of people, and that those people have many differing viewpoints; from the outside, all we see is the party line. As such, the communications from people such as Donald Abrams at the NCI, who expressed sentiments such as “I am considering resigning from the Board if we allow politics to trump science!” are essential, because they remind us (and I use us to mean anyone who is for more government transparency) to see that there are indeed good people on the inside. There are those who want to edit the message, sure, but there are also the Abramses who resist the pressure of agencies like NIDA. And especially close to all our hearts here at MuckRock, there are the people like Phil Mocek, who ask the right questions of the right people.
May 26
Michael MorisyUncategorized MuckRock, Site Features, Site Updates
We’ve been pretty quiet lately (ok, extremely quiet) but that’s only because we’ve been hard at work behind the scenes to improve the MuckRock experience for you, and the past two weeks have seen a number of important features roll out. I’m highlight the biggest ones here, but there have been lots of smaller surprises that you’ll just have to come across yourself. We hope you enjoy, and huge kudos to Mitch for pushing these all through.
Instant Filing
While this has almost zero impact on the visible user experience, Instant Filing is probably the biggest new feature. Previously, every request submitted through MuckRock was hand copied-and-pasted into an e-mail program or fax software before being sent out. Now, that’s all automated. This means less downtime between when you want something and when it gets to the agency, and it covers about 96% of the agencies we have in our database. Those pesky remaining 4% only accept mailed-in requests, but since we have less administrative busy work, we can get to those faster, too. Better yet, replies to these instant requests go directly to the request page (each request now has its own secret e-mail address), speeding up the whole process by hours or, in some cases, days.
Tagging Requests
Working on a big story? Want to quickly see all the documents that the government used a particular exemption on? Want to share a collection of requests on a particular topic? Then are tagging tool is perfect for you. At the top of every request you’ve submitted will be our intuitive tagging tool, which lets you quickly just type in whatever category you want to place this request in and hit enter to start your collections.
Each tag also has its own landing page, giving you a new way to share or review multiple requests.
Improved Request Management
Speaking of reviewing multiple requests, we’ve vastly improved the “inbox” view of all your requests. Now, with one click you can see all of your completed requests, drafts, items needing attention and more. You can also pull up all of the requests you’ve sorted into a given tag, or tag multiple requests all at once. We’re pretty excited about this update: MuckRock made managing a few requests much easier right from the beginning, but for our power users juggling dozens of requests, things could get hairy. We think this puts much more power at your fingertips minus all the confusion, and we’d love to hear what you think.
Better Error Reporting
Previously, when you noticed something wrong on the site or if you wanted to perform an action the site wasn’t yet ready to handle, you had to fire up your favorite e-mail program and send us your request manually. No longer! Once logged in, every request page now has a “Submit Correction” link right next to it. Want to submit an appeal or clarification when the request is marked “Processing”? Worried your document is missing a page or two? Need some help crafting an appeal letter? Just click “Submit Correction”, tell us all your worries, and we’ll help you get back on the right track. Eventually, flagging typos and other errors will even earn you accolades, but for now you’ll have to settle for the warm fuzzies of making the site better and getting your own problem solved.
Follow Other Users’ Requests
See something you wish you’d filed? Or maybe it just piqued your interest? Happens to us all the time. Now, after you’re logged in, you can click “Follow” on any public request, and you’ll get instant updates as soon as there’s something new going on, just as if you’d filed it yourself. Never miss a breaking news flash again!
Improved Deadline Handling
Previously, our deadline handling was fairly “stupid”: We set the date 5, 10 or 20 days in the future after submitting your request, and simply counted down. This missed out on a lot of realities: Holidays, responses from the agency that required a “fix” and any other number of odd cases. We haven’t addressed them all quite yet, but we’re now a lot better about not counting holidays against the agency time frames and, when the requests require you to submit a fix or pay a fee, we put the timer on hold until you respond. This is very helpful when you later want to appeal onerous fees.
But wait, there’s more!
We don’t want to spoil all the surprises, but we’ve also added:
- Alternate embedding options if you can’t include IFRAMEs.
- Spam filtering on blog comments.
- Non-document files (Images, Excel databases, etc.) now get attached inline, instead of up top where it was hard to see where they came in, or that they came in at all.
- Unread updates are now highlighted when you check in on your requests page.
This is by far our biggest feature update in some time, and we’re already finding bugs to squash on it so please let us know if you come across some, either by using the “Submit Correction” button or simple e-mailing us at info@muckrock.com. We think the new tools go a long way towards our vision of empowering citizens to effectively ask the questions they want to, but if you have more ideas we’d love to hear from you.
In the meantime, keep digging up more great data! I can’t wait to see what you come up with next, particularly as we head towards to the 10,000 page mark.
Feb 18
Philip HalinUncategorized FOI, FOI Friday, FOIA, FOIA Friday, Metadata, MuckRock, Nepotism, VA, Virginia
We here at MuckRock are always keeping our eyes and ears open for interesting applications of FOI laws, potential FOI filings, and the use of FOI-acquired information. All of the stuff we’re looking at can be found here anytime you like, and if you have any suggestions, please send them on over to tips@muckrock.com.
Now to the news:
Prince William Seeks Investigation of ICE: The supervisors of Prince William County, VA, are considering litigation against DHS after the department failed to respond to their FOI request of over a year ago, wherein they requested information of how ICE has been handling the almost 3,000 illegal immigrants that the county has reported. More specifically, the county also sought information on why one Carlos A. Martinelly-Montano, an illegal immigrant with a long criminal record, was still a resident of the county despite being reported to ICE. As the request was not fulfilled, county officials are considering asking Congress to look in to DHS’ handling of illegal immigrants.
Loose Lips Daily: Give My Kid A Job Edition: A FOI request by American University radio (WAMU)’s Patrick Madden reveals that DC mayor Vince Gray’s administration has just hired the children of two of his closest advisors: his best friend Lorraine Greene and his new chief of staff Geri Mason Hall. While there is no evidence of nepotism—which is governed severely in DC—the city is supposedly in a hiring freeze and running low on money, and these hirings of close friends of the mayor are at least a little suspicious.
Federal judge orders release of document metadata: The Reporters’ Committee for Freedom of the Press (RCFP) reports that a New York State federal judge has ordered that the metadata—”information related to the history, tracking or management of an electronic document”—of government documents must be released under FOI requests. The ruling came in response to ICE’s release of an unsearchable PDF to the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, which had requested the electronic documents in their “native formats”. The court ruled, in part, that “metadata maintained by the agency as a part of an electronic record is presumptively producible under FOIA, unless the agency demonstrates that such metadata is not ‘readily producible,’” a decision that the U.S. Attorney has declined to comment on.
A Condensed User Guide for FOIA Requests: Unredacted, a blog that analyzes and makes more clear information from the National Security Archive (NSA), has released this simple, useful guide for filing your own FOI requests. With plenty of links to other guides—primarily the NSA’s—this informative blog post is useful for anyone with questions about the FOIA process.
Nov 05
Michael MorisyUncategorized MuckRock, Somerville, Spot.us
We’ve been really late in this post, but it’s just a factor of our efforts to actually get the documents rather than a sign of any ungratefulness: We owe a HUGE thank you to the 22 people who helped fund our request for the 2009 Somerville Campaign Finance Reports. Each and every one of you rocks in ways you cannot imagine. We’d like to give special thanks and recognition to PostSomerville.com’s Tom Nash, who originally filed the request and agreed to un-embargo it so we could try this crowdsourcing experiment; to SomervilleVoices’ Barry Rafkind, who not only donated but helped promote the fundraising; to Ward5Online’s Courtney O’Keefe who also helped promote the assignment; and particular to Spot.us and David Cohn, who encouraged us to try the program.
In all, the Spot.us experience was a resounding success and we look forward to helping fund similar, local FOI requests many times again in the future.
We also hit a minor milestone we’ve been celebrating: Our hundredth FOI request filed. So far, in response, we’ve received 15 completed requests, over 4,000 pages of documents, several spreadsheets and database and only three out right rejections. We’re looking forward to pushing all of those numbers up, with your help and direction, over the next few months.
Thanks again for helping us hit both these milestones.
Aug 16
Michael MorisyUncategorized FOI, MuckRock
The mission of MuckRock is to make it as simple as possible to file your freedom of information requests, and we’ve been working hard to make it easier than ever to navigate creating, tracking and sharing your requests. We have big announcements coming up soon on the “sharing” front, but right now, we wanted to give you a better look at the “creating” portion: We’ve broken the wizard down into tabbed categories with better descriptions helping you figure out exactly what kind of request you need to make to get the information you want.
You can also see a progress bar up top that shows you how far you are along in actually getting that request finished up. You’ll actually find a similar progress bar on all request pages now (see here for a sample). That gives you a quick, visual way to see how far along your request is: Whether it’s waiting for a response, hasn’t been sent out yet, or is even still just a draft in your inbox. There’s also a new color-coding system for tracking these responses, so that if a response is coded green, everything’s smooth sailing; if it’s coded red, the request has been denied, the government has failed to respond within the statutory limits, or something else has gone wrong; and if it’s coded yellow, a user response is needed, such as finishing up a draft or OK’ing some proposed compromise that the government agency is requesting. You can even quickly see the status of all current requests with this system on the FOI request homepage, which is right now almost entirely green.
Mar 13
Michael MorisyUncategorized About Us, Freedom of Information Law, MuckRock
Welcome to MuckRock, the site that lets you discover what your government is really up to through an easy to use freedom of information filing system. Curious about how much your local representatives are spending on jetting around town? Want to know if your toll taker is just nasty to you, or if the state is getting inundated with complaints? Worried that contractors are getting padded paydays from crooked pols? We’re here to help you get the answers to all of those questions, and we’ll share those results with the rest of the world.
Right now, we’re in a private beta, but we’re looking for early users, particularly in the greater Boston metro area. If you’re interested in helping bring to light government data and don’t mind the occasional hiccup, please send an e-mail to Michael@MuckRock.com, and I’ll be in touch shortly.
Thanks, and keep digging up the dirt!
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