Recently, we received our 1500th submission to the Great Hoover Hunt project, which aims to catalog all of the handwritten notes from longtime Federal Bureau of Investigation Director J. Edgar Hoover in the Bureau’s files. To commemorate the occasion, we put together a collection of some of Hoover’s choicest bureaucratic broadsides, ready to be copy-pasted into your office’s Slack debate over who forgot to pick up more toner.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has released more than 3,000 pages of its files on the activist and Earth First! organizer Judi Bari, with more on the way. We need your help going through it.

In July of 2016, following a series of high-profile police shootings, Black Lives Matter protests erupted in cities all over the country. Some local police departments, ostensibly fearing for the safety of both protestors and officers, reached out to the Federal Bureau of Investigation for help in monitoring upcoming demonstrations. According to documents recently obtained by MuckRock, the FBI provided assistance in the form of social media surveillance and on the ground threat monitoring.

Recently, in response to Emma Best’s 2017 FOIA request for files on former Federal Bureau of Investigation Deputy Associate Director Cartha “Deke” DeLoach, the FBI released an additional 137 pages. As fellow MuckRock user Paul Galante was quick to point out, those new pages include a 1998 letter by DeLoach to one of the producers of the “X-Files,” offering his thoughts on the script of the fifth season flashback episode “Travelers.” To put it mildly, he was not a fan.

More than 4,500 individuals at federal and local law enforcement agencies currently have access to a facial recognition database hosted by the Ohio Attorney General’s office, including at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

After dropping Axon, the city of Fontana, California faced a choice: Pay for cloud services its police department didn’t use or risk its credit score.

Algorithms and artificial intelligence are playing an ever-increasing role in the lives of all Americans. MuckRock, in collaboration with the the Rutgers Institute for Information Policy and Law is building a catalogue of the algorithms and AI being considered, used, and regulated by local, state, and federal governments. Your help is vital to our effort and only needs to take a few minutes!

Idaho legislators are the first in the nation to pass transparency protections addressing concerns about risk assessment tools in the criminal justice system.

The state of state public records laws continues to evolve as lawmakers discuss new legislation, court rulings clarify ambiguities in records law, and advocates press for better access. To get a sense of what’s happening, we’ve compiled a list of recent changes to access all across the country. If we missed news in your state, let us know by filling out the form below!

Three years ago, Massachusetts legislators revised the state’s public records law with the ostensible goal of increasing access. And yet, the law is still considered one of the most restrictive in the country - in no small part owing to the fact that the Bay State remains the only state in which all three branches of its state government are exempt from disclosure.

New proposed changes to FOIA law in Washington D.C. could block access to government emails dealing with “matters unrelated to public employees and officials’ work,” among other restrictions.

After stern opposition from transparency groups, Assemblymember Laura Friedman has decided to halt AB 700 for this year’s legislative session in California. The bill would have exempted information relating to a researcher or their research at a state university or community college.

In the only faceoff known to the field of FOIA, we pit 64 federal Freedom of Information Act offices against each other to win the ultimate prize in competitive records requesting, that most lofty label: Most Responsive Agency.

For more than a month, we’ve been watching our 64 federal agencies battle to #releasetherecords on their FOIA office employee counts, funding numbers, and the frequency with which they impose fees upon the various categories of records requester.

It’s a big week for FOIA March Madness: We’ve passed the 20-day deadline, and it’s time to declare our first batch of winners.

This year’s cohort of FOIA semifinalists features old favorites and fresh fan picks.