While a not-insignificant percentage of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s activities under Director J. Edgar Hoover were driven by personal vendettas, few were as well-known – or as publicly vicious – as Hoover’s feud with civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. That clash quite literally came to a head on December 1, 1964, when, at the urging of President Lyndon Johnson, Hoover invited King to FBI headquarters for their first - and only - face to face meeting, captured in a ten-page memo in King’s file.

For this week’s FOIA round-up, a new report shows over 40,000 immigration hearings have been cancelled due to the government shutdown, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service pushed to have activists providing migrants with water prosecuted on environmental grounds, and recently released photos reveal that the New York Police Department might be in violation of its guidelines on protest surveillance.

For years, quasi-government agencies have operated under grey areas in oversight and accountability. After a number of reports of embezzlement, financial malpractice, and misuse of funds, state governments have started to keep a closer watch on them.

Citing fears about massive errors and invasions of privacy, 85 organizations sent letters Tuesday imploring Amazon, Google, and Microsoft to end sales of facial recognition technology to government agencies.

Today is the second anniversary of the Central Intelligence Agency’s declassified archives being published online after a lengthy legal battle. While we’ll be examine some of the larger impact the release has had in a little bit, we also wanted to share what’s hands down the weirdest thing we’ve found so far.

While most states have clear guidelines over whether out of state requests can be rejected, others aren’t so clear - in New Jersey, the Open Public Records Act and governing entities often have contrasting views.

Over 100 additional requests related to police departments’ use of automated license plate recognition technology have been submitted to government agencies identified by MuckRock readers as needing further scrutiny.

Does your right to know which companies are receiving your tax dollars outweigh those companies’ rights to competitive secrets? That’s the question at stake in an upcoming Supreme Court case set to be heard in April, and the result could either cement the public’s right to know or severely restrict the ability to track the flow of tax dollars into private companies.

Secretive federal agencies such as the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation are notorious for refusing to confirm or deny the existence of their records. The issue becomes trickier when local law enforcement agencies, tasked with serving their communities, reply to public records requests in similar fashion. The New York Police Department has used the infamous “Glomar response” in the past to keep records secret, but this week a New York court ruled that the NYPD can’t use it this time.

A little more than a month after MuckRock launched The Secret Scandals of the Trump Administration project, we’ve submitted dozens of FOIA requests, and received a handful of excellent tips from our readers. A number of these tips have been especially helpful: we’ve even heard from former government employees with first-hand knowledge of potential scandals in some government agencies.