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The Foilies 2023: Recognizing the worst in government transparency
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.

Five lessons from “FOIA Strategies and Tactics”
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.

Quoth the █████: Read the CIA’s declassified computer-themed Edgar Allan Poe parody
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.

#AmazonHQ2 and transparency: An ongoing post-mortem
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.

Play the CIA’s internal board game depicting the Hunt for El Chapo
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.”