Customs and Border Protection has a well-earned reputation for being one of the hardest agencies to get records out of. But with their recent rejections of Curtis Waltman’s FOIA requests for contracts, they’ve crossed the line from frustration into absurdity.

Congress is looking to limit the secrecy of for-profit prison companies, and MuckRock has joined a coalition of 50 nonprofit and public interest organizations to support this cause of transparency and accountability at contract facilities.

As we’ve written about before, the Central Intelligence Agency’s obsessive scrapbooking led to the preservation of quite a few bizarre artifacts in its declassified archives - and perhaps none are stranger than this collection of terrible topical poems, which, through tortured rhyming couplets, offer the author’s takes on geopolitics, race relations, and the merits of “Captain Kangaroo.”

Memos found in the Central Intelligence Agency’s CREST database show the planning stages of the Agency’s annual Halloween party in 1980. If you were lucky enough to be guest list, then you were looking at an evening of cocktails, lively conversation, and of course, ferocious jelly-bean counting competition.

Michigan Department of Correction’s 60 page long list of books banned in state prisons, acquired by MuckRock through a public records request, includes 43 that are prohibited for “advocating racial supremacy.” These titles include Mein Kampf, The Turner Diaries, and, alarmingly, Black Skin, White Masks, by post-colonial theorist Frantz Fanon. Michigan DOC’s ban on an important anti-colonial text is one reminder of the inconsistent, and potentially biased, book banning practices that exist in prisons across the United States.

Diana, Princess of Wales, died twenty years ago this month. Her surprisingly slight FBI file, released via the Bureau’s FOIA reading room, covers two separate investigations into possible threats against her life. It includes someone “sarcastically” claiming they mailed her and Charles a bomb as a wedding present.

Hundreds of people have written to the FCC to describe tales of suffocating service fees and general confusion over a prison phone system that seems to be genuinely indifferent to the casualties of its practices.

Show how much you love transparency with a limited-edition FOIA t-shirt for the public records punk in all of us, or find a little respite when there’s a little too much sunshine with MuckRock shades. It’s all available with the MuckRock Summer Swag sale, plus you stock up on classics like the MuckRock Magic Unredacting Mug.

Declassified Central Intelligence Agency documents describe the Agency’s agreement to work with a Senator’s plan to use a 1952 Congressional investigation into Soviet war crimes for propaganda purposes. While it may have worked in the short run, documents indicate that both Agency and State Department personnel believe it may have backfired, and led to charges the U.S. was using biological weapons in Korea.

In a find from Central Intelligence Agency’s declassified archive, a late war communication includes an agreement to foot the bill for some cosmetic concerns.

While popular media has often portrayed Jim Garrison, the New Orleans District Attorney behind the infamous Clay Shaw trial, as having been targeted by the federal government for retribution, a look at his FBI file reveals the exact opposite - according to the documents, Garrison’s investigation was considered so toxic and aggressive that Director J. Edgar Hoover ordered no agents have any contact with him. When third parties began providing the FBI with evidence that Garrison had engaged in fraud against the government, the Bureau cautioned against investigating him, precisely because of how Garrison would inevitably frame it.

Grey Faction is launching a project with the goal of bringing some much needed transparency to the field of mental health. Through FOIA requests and analysis of publicly available documents, this project will shine a light into some dark corners inhabited by psychiatrists and mental health counselors who may be causing unaccounted-for damage to their clients by peddling conspiratorial theories of organized groups of Satanists engaged in ritual abuse.

With a career spanning the early decades of the Bureau’s existence and a list of acquaintances that could have passed as an FBI radicals watchlist, I.F. Stone was a well-established person of interest to the federal government.

A request for FCC complaints for InfoWars turned up a handful of indignant Alex Jones fans furious that their fearless leader was so rudely disrespected by the hosts of other shows.

A series of 1984 memos from the Central Intelligence Agency Inspector General’s office reveals some alarming views on the press and how to deal with them. Among other things, the memo shows that 33 years before the Agency declared WikiLeaks a hostile non-state intelligence service, they were viewing the general press in the same terms.