This week there have been some great examples of the impact public records requests can have, including how a three-year fight for records ended up overturning a murder conviction, while another long-running transparency effort is leading to reforms in civil asset forfeiture in Illinois.

When the Central Intelligence Agency released its CREST database online, it created a historical treasure trove of 13 million pages, more than any one researcher is likely to ever comb through. Fortunately, we’re able to have a computer do that for you, following various trends in what the Agency is paying attention to in a given year.

On January 17, 2016, the alt-right news site Breitbart found itself under siege: A number of IP addresses were sending a large amount of traffic its way, straining its servers. Writing to the FBI two days later with the subject line “Request for assistance,” someone (identity redacted) shared the source of the IP addresses and asked that the FBI “explore the possibility that the identity of the criminal … be identified from this fingerprint.” It turns out, it was an inside job.

Earlier this year, our lawsuit against the Central Intelligence Agency resulted in the release of 13 million pages of historical documents online - the CREST archives. That’s a lot to go through, so to help kick off CIA Week we put together a bot that tweets out documents created on this day in history: @TodayInCIA.

In a sweeping investigation, a team of Reuters reporters, editors, and data analysts raised serious questions about Taser’s manufacturer’s claim that no one has died directly from device’s shock. Reviewing the results of hundreds of autopsies, filing hundreds of public records requests around the country, and other painstaking open-source research made the investigation possible.