We filed nearly as many requests in 2015 as we did in our previous five years combined, releasing over 350,000 pages of government documents. And that’s just the beginning - here’s the stories, big and small, you helped uncover this year.

• We started off with Homeland Security social media searches, which appeared to include somebody getting a late night hankering for a Blizzard.

• Oh, and it turns out, the FBI had a Cold War-era list of 13,000 “subversives” who were to immediately detained in the advent of martial law.

• This seems to be a good place to mention that more recently, the FBI not-so-subtly equated Bitcoin with terrorism …

• Disagree? Let them know on their customer satisfaction survey.

• The NYPD’s following you on Twitter, while cops in Texas are flipping through your Facebook albums.

• The DEA broke a site record - and our backend - with a staggering $1.4 million processing fee

• To be fair, they probably need that money to pay off their informants medical bills.

• We partnered with the Electronic Frontier Foundation to look at how police are tracking your biometric data, and released our first report on California. Aaron Cantú of LittleSis then took that report and put together this nifty power map. Synergy!

• Building off of Dave Maas’s request and Beryl’s article from last year, Evan Anderson found the places you’re most likely to get busted for marijuana across the country. Stoners, steer clear of Florida.

• And if you’re not white, New York.

• Boston City Hall can’t find its Olympics emails, then finds its Olympics emails, then charges a lot of money for its Olympics emails, then you help raise a lot of money for the Olympics emails, then we publish the Olympics emails, and then the Olympics get cancelled. The mystery of Emily’s identity remains unsolved.

• In other Massachusetts news, Beryl’s gasleak census shows there’s a pretty decent chance we’re all going to explode.

• Which is pretty bad news if you live in Lawrence.

• Oh yeah, the water’s got poop in it.

• Send in the IT - the Marines finally fix their broken hard drive, completing a five year old request.

• “American Sniper” Chris Kyle’s military record is released.

• It was a great year for cute animal FOIAs - there were kangaroos in McDonalds, llamas on the freeway, and painting police horses.

• The Department of Transportation’s aviation complaints feature useful air travel tips, such as “alcohol cannot remove stool on hands” …

• While Amtrak’s redaction game puts the CIA’s to shame.

• Perhaps feeling a bit left out of all the cloak and dagger fun, the US Postal Service decides they want to get in on this “neither confirm nor deny” thing, and the IRS is encrypting CDs of completely redacted documents.

• Bobs Burgers has an episode about drones, and the DOJ really should have watched it.

• On the subject, turns out that the the FBI’s super-secret drone program is run by just two people …

• And Homeland Security doesn’t think you care about its drone program - which, for the record, isn’t very good.

• Which might have something to do with letting the intern name their testing area.

• The Army’s not doing much better, with some drones going missing in Afghanistan for months, and others revealed as quarter-of-a-million dollar lemons.

• And if you were ever curious how “anti-drone” tech works, we’ve got two words for you. Net guns.

• Customs can seize your data when you cross the border. That includes dick pics.

• Speaking of, the FBI sent so many sexts that they had to disable photos on their phones.

• Turns out, we couldn’t find WMD.gov, either.

• Peak FOIrony is reached when the Austin fusion center puts a “Activism is not terrorism” rally on their watch calendar.

• Cambridge police refused to release their use of deadly force policy, so we wrote about it.

• Cambridge police release their use of deadly force policy.

• Meanwhile, in Connecticut, the training for Willimantic’s police new 22 ton Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicle is a 20-page Power Point, which is not a good wight-to-understanding ratio.

• Though to be fair, some of the training plans in Texas are a single page.

• California released its death in police custody data - making them one of the few that actually keep track.

• And for cops on college campuses, public disclosure is more than academic.

• In lighter news, there’s a Point Break-esque surf gang running around SoCal.

• Shawn partnered with the New York World for a state-wide assessment of New York agencies’ compliance with public records law. Results were … mixed, to put it charitably.

• Despite the fact that billions have been spent in Afghanistan on planes that couldn’t fly and buildings that “literally melted” when it rained, Afghan reconstruction agency SIGAR reports that the army has been lacking winter gear for two years.

• In completely unrelated news, SIGAR faces budget and staffing cuts.

• In case you were wondering, according to Guantanamo’s Standard Operating Procedures “Metallica, Britney Spears, and Rap music” are the official interrogation soundtrack of the War on Terror.

• In response to a request for her emails, Kim Davis - yes, that Kim Davis - cites the “old school” exemption as a justification for printing and fax her emails. Shawn cites “the law” in response, and - after teaching her the export function on Outlook, Davis releases her emails.

• There’s a national park in an old nuclear missile silo, and it’s as weird as it sounds.

• With the help of a few generous donors, Beryl got the Boston Police to release their footage of last year’s Black Lives Matter protest. It was totally a thing.

That was just standalone pieces - in regards to our ongoing investigations, thanks to the new Projects feature, this was our biggest year yet.

• With the support of nearly a hundred different people, Beryl Lipton’s Private Prison Project was fully crowdfunded, ensuring that next year’s reporting will be even better. We really can’t thank you enough, and while there’s not enough space here to even scratch the surface of the amazing work Beryl’s been doing over the last year and a half, you’re encouraged to get caught up here, and get excited for the in-depth, investigative journalism you’ll see in 2016.

• The Spy in Your Pocket saw the final release of the NDA, the Justice Department issuing guidelines, and the FBI’s 5,000 plus page doc dump.

• The FBI files we’ve featured on Subjects Matter this year include alleged Soviet spies, disbarred attorneys, bizarre beatniks, the Man in Black, t-shirt contests, Marxist gadflies, Malcolm Little, men in greasepant, colossal liars, meth-addled mathematicians, the original Rebel Girl, blue comedians, cultural and artisan events, blacklisted historians, underworld people, imagineers, vitriolic commentators, Miss America, men in greasepaint, the Master of Suspense, pentagram enthusiasts, bearded Mainers, Russell Jones, Agent Erskine, insincere labor activists, and not David Peel.

• FCC Complaints covered everything from the Superbowl to the very last season of Mythbusters. And thanks to Reddit, our article on 30 Rock became our all-time most-trafficked piece. Blerg, indeed.

Long stor(ies) short, it was an amazing year, and it was all thanks to our even more amazing users. Last year was better than the previous four years combined, and this year was even better than that. Moving into FOIA’s 50th year - and our sixth - we’re humbled by what you’ve made possible, and giddy at what we’re going to do together next. From all of us at MuckRock, thank you, and have a very transparent New Year.

And in closing, if nothing else, this would still be our best year ever on the merit of our new 404 page alone.

Image via National Archives Flickr