In 1981, a group of Brown University students found a creative way of protesting a lecture by Central Intelligence Agency Director William Casey. Then, in keeping with the CIA’s campus fixation, the Agency kept tabs on the students as they defended their free speech rights.

Before this month, if you won your public records lawsuit in Ohio you would get your records, but not necessarily win any attorney fees or statutory damages. Now, a new revision to the law overrules the outdated provision.

We’ve made a small fix to eliminate a search bug from some profile pages. More importantly, you can help us set our 2019 priorities by taking our user survey — and get a chance to win free MuckRock swag.

In this week’s FOIA round-up, public records reveal the shady associations of President Donald Trump’s newly-appointed acting attorney general, tax preparation companies use FOIA to target a university professor, and surveillance video tells the story of police abuse in Indiana.

New York City has battled it out among the other 19 finalist cities for #AmazonHQ2, with Governor Andrew Cuomo saying he’s done “everything he can” to win. But the details of that “everything” is being kept from the public.

Following a historic midterm election, two ballot measures in western states passed, granting each jurisdiction new laws governing transparency and access to records.

Last month’s court decision in Virginia ruled that the state’s judiciary is exempt from the Virginia Freedom of Information Act. The state joins 18 others in blocking transparency to this branch of government.

In late September, the Newport Beach Police Department in California released a podcast titled Countdown to Capture detailing the open case against Peter Chadwick. The podcast was written, recorded, and produced by NBPD spokeswoman Jennifer Manzella with help from her colleagues in the police department. Emails obtained by MuckRock showed the department’s months-long production process.

A State Department cable in the Central Intelligence Agency’s Kissinger archive claims that pending revelations from the Church Committee would rock the Netherlands, potentially forcing it to leave NATO. Even more drastically, the memo warned that this scandal could lead to “the restructuring of the Dutch political system.”

Washington D.C. has a lot of the leading qualities Amazon wants in its HQ2 - a large and diverse population, a central location, a tech concentration. But what sets it - and its proposal - apart from other finalists?