Today, MuckRock’s Beryl Lipton and Open the Government’s Freddy Martinez will be featured in a training session hosted by the Project on Government Oversight. In coordination with that event, we’ve compiled some fast thoughts on how federal oversight and resources can complement local and state research and policy developments.

In this week’s FOIA round-up, the Department of the Interior staff emails show employees were interested in the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s “500-page per month” policy, the Associated Press created a new dataset by collecting information from each state to see why people wanted a medical marijuana card, and an Arkansas judge rules that a clerk broke state public-records laws, but cites as extenuating circumstances the clerk was acting on advice that they had received from state judicial authorities.

Steven Rich, the database editor for the investigations team at The Washington Post, recently gained access to a database that traced every pain pill distributed across the US between 2006 and 2012. The database provides a look at where opioids have been distributed by which pharmaceutical companies, and shows that the federal government has long been aware of the scope of the opioid crisis. Rich spoke to MuckRock about taking advantage of a lawsuit to gain access to the Drug Enforcement Administration pain pill database and how to use public records to report on private companies.

Last week our development team took off to celebrate the Fourth of July (and most importantly, FOIA’s birthday). We’re still plugging away at our latest community effort at Code for Boston, however, and you’re welcome to join us Tuesday night.

Palantir, a data mining startup based in Silicon Valley, will be handling initial delivery of the U.S. Army’s battlefield intelligence network, the Pentagon confirmed earlier this year, positioning the company to influence the Army’s long-term implementation of its artificial intelligence priorities.