As part of the Drone Census, MuckRock has been reviewing the hundreds of pages released by the FBI so far on its use of unmanned aerial vehicles. Your generous support to crowdfund the request fees means that we can continue to uncover just how the Bureau is using unmanned aerial vehicles.

The FBI estimates that it has more than 7,500 pages on the topic, and has released just shy of a 900 pages so far. This volume of documents carries substantial fees for duplication on the FBI’s end. Two weeks ago, we asked for help to ensure that we’d be able to obtain every single page. With one day to go, we’ve met our goal!

So far, MuckRock and our publication partners at Motherboard have unearthed the eighteen year history of the FBI’s UAV program, analyzed the agency’s heavily-redacted internal drone policies and parsed FBI officials’ attempts to answer basic questions about UAV inventory and flight logs. We’ve documented FBI redaction flubs in its attempts to keep UAV details under wraps.

And, thanks to generous support, we’re still going.

Thank you to everyone who contributed, shared our campaign and sent encouragement in our pursuit of UAV transparency nationwide.

Check back soon for more docs on FBI drones — we just got word that another release was mailed over the weekend. You can even get updates in real time by following the request with your MuckRock account.

Thank you!