It seems like these days, everyone is finding classified documents in places they shouldn’t be: their homes, their offices, their storage lockers, their garages, their guitar cases, between the cracks of their couches, under some withered celery in the vegetable drawer … OK, we’re exaggerating—but it is getting ridiculous. Read on for some of the worst of the worst in 2022 transparency stories.

Last weekend, an anonymously-attributed presentation entitled “FOIA Strategies and Tactics” started making the rounds in the #OpenGov community, offering something for beginners, veterans, and fans of vintage Tex Avery alike. While the whole thing’s worth a read, today we wanted to focus on the five points brought up in the presentation’s conclusion, as they address some often-overlooked elements of the whole FOIA process.

In the eerie depths of the Central Intelligence Agency’s declassified archives, a document came rapping, rapping at our browser window. “POEDGR,” the Agency’s computer-themed “The Raven” parody which might be the first poem to have its rhyme scheme thrown off by a FOIA exemption.

More than a year after Amazon released its HQ2 RFP and weeks after it announced the winners, a majority of #AmazonHQ2 bids submitted to the company are still not public. MuckRock and other news outlets obtained many of those that are through public records requests - we break down what has and hasn’t been released.

Back in December, we wrote about how MuckRock’s Mitchell Kotler used FOIA to get the Central Intelligence Agency to release a number of internal board games used for training exercises. Today we’re looking at another game in the series, which the Agency reproduced in full - “Kingpin: The Hunt for El Chapo.”