For 17 years, state employee Charles Burroughs ran a golf tournament held in conjunction with the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation’s annual environmental conference. He used his state email account to solicit sponsorships for the event from companies regulated by his employer, set up a (now suspended) website for golfers to register for the tournament, and paid expenses from a bank account established solely for this event. However, the TDEC refused a public records request for emails regarding the tournament, maintaining the event was a private affair.

Amazon investors introduce two votes limiting company’s facial recognition technology, contracts reveal that the “trade secret” of ransomware firms is to pay off hackers directly by charging clients extra, and Chicago’s City Council legislative committees fuel a system of patronage and cronyism.

In a first for Georgia, a City of Atlanta employee is facing criminal charges following an order to delay a local tv-station’s public records request.

Government investigations into California’s electricity shortage, ultimately determined to be caused by intentional market manipulations and capped retail electricity prices by the now infamous Enron Corporation, resulted in terabytes of information being collected by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. This included several extremely large databases, some of which had nearly 200 million rows of data, including Enron’s bidding and price processes, their trading and risk management systems, emails, audio recordings, and nearly 100,000 additional documents. That information has quietly disappeared, and not even its custodians seem to know why.

For this week’s FOIA round-up, the Central Intelligence Agency won’t tell the family of a tortured suspect where his body is, journalists file over 500 public records request to track police use of force in New Jersey, and the University of Arizona spends big money on NCAA corruption investigations.