Setting up a relatively passive tip line for your audience is really easy with our new Assignment tool. Currently in a semi-public beta, it’s available to all Pro and Organizational users (and open to others who are interested; just send us an email!) - to help investigators and newsrooms, small and large, engage with their readers, current and future.

Mykola Lebed was sentenced to death in Poland in 1934. He died in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1998.

By various accounts, he was an assassin, a freedom fighter, a terrorist, a hero, a villain, a prisoner, a refugee, a Nazi collaborator, a Nazi target, a writer, and a war criminal. To the Central Intelligence Agency, which bankrolled his activities for close to half a century, he was known as “Uncle Louie.”

The Federal Bureau of Investigation files on James Baldwin, Ernest Hemingway, and Susan Sontag, and a dozen famous writers have a lot of stories to tell, and over the past eight years the MuckRock team has been digging through them. Today, we’re excited to tell those stories in a new format: a 400-page volume that brings the most funny, frightening, poignant, and provocative tales about the intersection of surveillance and freedom to life, as told through those primary source documents.

MuckRock is collect cola contracts throughout the country. Do we have yours?

The details of the negotiations and planning surrounding the Cuban Missile Crisis have long been the subject of some contention for historians, with some of the most influential and enduring accounts contradicting what the tapes of those planning sessions tell us. Almost immediately after the Cuban Missile Crisis resolved, rumors began floating around Washington D.C. that the narrative that emerged was the handiwork of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy in an effort to force the resignation of Adlai Stevenson, Kennedy’s Ambassador to the United Nations. A Central Intelligence Agency chronology, originally classified SECRET and recently released to MuckRock, confirms that the architect of this historical revisionism was, in fact, Kennedy - and reveals that denials of this were based on nothing more than word games.

This week, we released improvements to our request download tool so it works better with large requests and improved the language in follow ups. Here’s what’s new at MuckRock and how you can help out.

For this week’s FOIA round-up, we’re taking a look at FEMA cuts for ICE programming, a school leader’s spending habits, and Scott Pruitt’s money problems. Plus, open nominations for the FAC Free Speech and Open Government Award.

Back in August, MuckRock user Paul Galante requested the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s files on its wartime “Postal Censorship” program. This week, the Bureau responded, having located approximately 83,000 pages. Despite the fact that the files will be released electronically through the FBI’s supposedly cost-saving portal, the Bureau is insisting Galante pay $2,485 in duplication fees. Due to the important historical nature of these records, Galante has opened the request to crowdfunding.

Files recently released to MuckRock shed light on the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s investigation of the radical Ramparts magazine. Originally classified SECRET, the investigation described in the FBI files was an “internal security” matter relating to the magazine’s registration status. Paralleling and seemingly predicting some of the later investigations of WikiLeaks, the Bureau suspected that Ramparts “may currently be engaged in acts of distribution of propaganda, acting as a political agent, collecting information, forwarding information, et cetera, while acting as the agent of a foreign principal.”

A formerly SECRET report uncovered in the Central Intelligence Agency’s declassified archives shows that in the earliest days of the Cold War, the CIA took an interest in Soviet superstitions. The report, classified for 60 years, details familiar fears such as black cats with more involved customs, such as road bucket etiquette.