In this Week’s FOIA Roundup, documents show the Department of Homeland Security officials’ baseless concern that Black Lives Matter activists would join ISIS following Ferguson protests, Pentagon damage assessments on the 2012 WikiLeaks revelations spurred by Chelsea Manning are finally available after FOIA lawsuit and a public records request from Carbondale, Illinois undermines the mayor’s account of domestic disturbance.

The litigator-turned-commentator Nancy Grace’s decade-plus reign on cable news ended a year ago this summer. Beryl Lipton filed for the last batch of FCC complaints regarding her show on HLN. Amid more standard gripes about profanity and “butt flesh,” are the threads of an emerging conspiracy of “activist networks” to make the world go mad, one segment on #BabyForSale at a time.

In a democracy, the power of the people comes from the ability to hold their government accountable. We’re launching a project to provide a comprehensive list of FOIA resources that will help you to prepare, participate, and investigate protests. Today, we’ll be examining three pivotal protests of the past decade in America – Occupy Wall Street, Ferguson and NoDAPL.

In a democracy, the power of the people comes from the ability to hold their government accountable. We’re launching a project to provide a comprehensive list of FOIA resources that will help you to prepare, participate, and investigate protests. Today, we’ll be looking at what to look out for during a protest.

As much as journalists hate to admit it, FOIA is not really for them. FOIA is for the public, ensuring that voters have meaningful oversight of work done in their name. Giving a blanket exemption to emails, Slack chats, and other “conversational” communication tools would disastrously break that oversight — and undermine the ongoing American experiment of an informed democracy.