For almost every city around America, fines and fees are a useful law enforcement tool, offering a way to punish everyday infractions without the immediate threat of jail or a permanent mark on a criminal record.
But what happens when governments stop thinking of fines as a deterrent, but as a crucial source of funding? How does it change policing when the goal is neither to serve and protect, but to ensure that the budget doesn't take a hit?
The Sunlight Foundation and MuckRock are partnering to find out.
As journalists dealing with data and document sets, we find that the most interesting information is usually hidden in large, unstructured, and incomplete sets of documents. Especially information in public contracts: what the government is buying, how much money is being spent, and who are the suppliers. To answer these questions, four media organizations — La Nacion, CLIP, Ojo Público, and MuckRock — joined forces under the JournalismAI Collab and experimented with different machine learning tools and techniques in order to build a platform that helps investigative reporters understand and process unstructured documents to get useful insights.
Whether it's your first request or your first request *today,* it never hurts to go over the basics. MuckRock's compiled a lot of FOIA advice over the years, and with this project, it's all in one place.
A project to help plan, organize, and showcase the upcoming MuckRock.ca, a new organization making it easy to file, track, and share records requests throughout Canada.
Peter Thiel - co-founder of both PayPal and Palantir and an early Facebook investor - has profoundly reshaped industry after industry and, ultimately, remade the world to better fit his radical vision of the future. With MuckRock’s Thiel Fellowship, we want to help journalists and researchers better understand this pivotal figure’s work and share what they learn with the public.
Learn how to get started with contributing to MuckRock and FOIA Machine source code or just take a peek under the hood at how the site operates as well as the newest features.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation and MuckRock have a launched a new public records campaign to reveal how much data law enforcement agencies have collected using automated license plate readers and are sharing with each other. Follow along with the requests on this page.
In 2015, the Massachusetts legislature seriously took on the issue of reforming its woefully inadequate public records laws for the first time since the early '70s.
But change does not come easily to the Commonwealth, and open gov advocates found themselves faced with an up(Beacon)battle over even the mildest of fixes.
After our three-year lawsuit led to the public release of 13 million pages of declassified CIA records, we've begun a daily-deep dive into the depths of the Agency's seven-decade history.
In partnership with the Indigenous Investigative Collective and the Native American Journalists Association, we're building investigative journalism infrastructure in Indian Country by supporting networked reporting on COVID-19.