How do police officers lockdown their online presence? A document released by the Chicago Police Department to Lucy Parsons Labs provides clues.

Matt Topic, a Chicago-based FOIA attorney, has taken on some of the biggest public records paces of the past few years, managing to win important precedent after precedent. He shares what he looks for when considering litigation, why public records matter, and how he accidentally fell into transparency law in the first place.

This week there have been some great examples of the impact public records requests can have, including how a three-year fight for records ended up overturning a murder conviction, while another long-running transparency effort is leading to reforms in civil asset forfeiture in Illinois.

In response to a recent public records request, Chicago Police claimed to have no records related to Cellebrite tech used to extract data from cellphones. Which is interesting, considering that CPD had already released that information not even a full two years earlier.

In early 2014, hoping to learn more about StingRay cell phone surveillance by the Chicago Police Department, Lucy Parsons Labs started filing a few requests - and began a two-year journey into unveiling a secret, multimillion dollar surveillance program.