For this week’s FOIA round-up, the Department of Defense releases more details on a late ‘00s program concerning fringe science theories, an Arizona congressman wants to challenge the Department of Interior’s proposed FOIA changes, and Minnesota law enforcement is gearing up for Enbridge Line 3 pipeline protests.

This year saw our 10,000th completed FOIA request, a grant that allowed us to finally hire our founders full time, and the release of millions of pages of Central Intelligence Agency records as a result of our lawsuit. Here are the stories, big and small, you helped uncover this year.

Thanks to a generous grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism, Curtis Waltman was able to return to the Dakotas as part of his ongoing project on the impact of police militarization. Here’s a short travelogue of what he heard, saw, and did.

Over the past few years, many Freedom of Information Act offices have worked hard to better engage requesters and help guide requests down the right path. A recent DAPL-related rejection shows why that kind of dialog makes everyone’s life easier.

Looking to build off our reporting on the National Sheriffs’ Association and their help with linking North Dakota law enforcement with the public relations firms Delve and Off the Record Strategies during the #NoDAPL protests, we filed a request with the Cass County Sheriff’s Office, which took on a central role in law enforcement’s response to Standing Rock. Their reply was shocking: over nine thousand documents were responsive, resulting in a bill of over $19,000.

This Sunday, I will board a plane and fly to Bismarck, North Dakota once again. I am asking readers of MuckRock to contribute either their own voices to my research, or to connect me with folks in either of the Dakotas that may be willing to speak with me - particularly people who live either on Reservations or are connected to the Indigenous communities that protested for their water source and their continued survival.

Flimsy threat assessments issued by North Dakota fusion center regarding the Standing Rock protests reinforce much of the criticsim that’s been leveled against fusions over the last decade and a half: namely, that fusion centers are not very good at their job, do not produce intelligence which is actionable or particularly useful, and are instead used to gain intelligence about activist groups, and members of the public who are not a crime risk, violating their civil liberties for basically no reason at all.

A threat assessment by a local fusion center on the Standing Rock protests recently released to MuckRock presents a lopsided view of the conflict, with guards and law enforcement subject to unfair treatment on social media for their use of dogs as “protection,” and retaliatory public shaming for racist Facebook posts about Native Americans.

Behind the scenes, as law enforcement officials tried to stem protests against the Dakota Access pipeline, alumni from the George W. Bush White House were leading a crisis communications effort to discredit pipeline protesters. This revelation comes from documents obtained via an open records request from the Laramie County Sheriff’s Department in Wyoming.

This month, Louisiana entered into the Emergency Management Assistance Compact (EMAC), which last year gave out-of-state cops the legal authority to flood into North Dakota during the protests against the Dakota Access pipeline. Tellingly, this agreement coincides with the state’s finalization of the Bayou Bridge pipeline proposal, itself an extension of DAPL.