This FOIA Friday coincides with a particularly special day for transparency enthusiasts throughout the world. Celebrate by quizzing yourself on global FOI facts and sending us your own!

With the recent launch of both our book of Federal Bureau of Investigation files and a crowdsourced effort to analyze Ronald Reagan’s 30,000-page file, we thought it would be the perfect time to answer one of the most frequently asked questions we get here at MuckRock: How do you even begin to tackle these huge releases?

In this week’s FOIA round-up, public records confirm the Trump administration’s intentional policy of family separation and shine light on a stalled Orlando Fire Department policy that could have saved lives during the Pulse Nightclub shooting. In public records law news, a provision of a November ballot initiative could expose San Francisco’s lauded Sunshine Ordinance to lawmaker interference.

Last week, MuckRock submitted requests for any policies and materials these agencies might have related to the post-incarceration opportunities. So far, the responses can’t speak to the question, because most Departments of Correction don’t keep the data.

Crafting an appeal can be daunting, but the results are worth it. Here’s some quick tips on what you can do to get an agency to reconsider your fee category, which can result in drastically reduced costs.

Two of the least populated states in the nation are experiencing enough prison crowding to warrant, by their estimates, the transfer of hundreds of inmates to private prison facilities in other states.

In June, we put out a general call to news nerds everywhere asking for great ideas to make our Slackbot for news (we call it Quackbot) amazing. Today, we are thrilled to announce we have had not one but two journalists take up the challenge.

In response to a FOIA request filed by Emma Best back in June, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has located close to 22,000 pages of records on Adler Berriman “Barry” Seal, a notorious drug smuggler with ties to the Central Intelligence Agency, whose life was most recently fictionalized in the 2017 film American Made.

It’s dog week here at MuckRock, and we’re kicking things off with a challenge to you, dear reader. We requested photos of mayors in major cities around the country with either dogs, or with hot dogs. Now it’s up to you to guess - are these mayors hanging with Shih tzus or sausages?

Back in June, we announced that DocumentCloud and MuckRock were merging. Today, DocumentCloud’s co-founder - and our Chief Strategy Officer - Aron Pilhofer will outline some of the platform’s less-known features to ensure you’re getting the most out your hard-won records.

Removing features is not as much fun as adding them, but we think this time it will make things easier as you stay on top of your requests.

Ronald Reagan’s decades-long association with the Federal Bureau of Investigation - from his early days as an anti-Communist informant in Hollywood to the law and order governor of California to President of the United States during Iran-Contra - is attested to in his 30,000-page file, recently released to Emma Best. Due to the size and scope of the historical material contained in these pages, we’re using our new Assignments tool to start a crowdsourced project to hone in on the most interesting finds buried in the Bureau’s margins.

Each state and jurisdiction has the discretion to implement FOIA and public record laws differently. Depending on the type of document you’re searching for, accessing that same record in one state may not be so public in another. In Washington state, the Public Records Act is not clear on whether the legislative branch is exempt or not. However, a new Legislative Task Force on Public Records in Washington met for the first time early this month to tackle the PRA as it pertains to their legislature and find solutions to issues of transparency.

For this week’s FOIA round-up, records show the Justice Department motioned to seal text messages implicating Border Patrol’s deliberate targeting of a humanitarian group, and New Mexico settled almost $5 million in legal claims. Also, parents of two victims in the Parkland shooting are being prevented from getting public records about the massacre.

Inspired by your feedback, we’re looking for any reports states’ Departments of Corrections might have on inmate firefighters post-incarceration employment.

Last week, we took our first look into Ronald Reagan’s recently released Federal Bureau of Investigation file and how it documented the close personal friendship between Reagan and Director J. Edgar Hoover. However, a section of the file from a decade earlier reveals a much less auspicious first encounter between the Gipper and the G-Man, with Hoover repeatedly turning down a starstruck Reagan’s offer to guest star on General Electric Theater.

MuckRock users are continuing to sift through a selection of materials released on the Supreme Court nominee. Here’s some of what we’ve found so far.

From million-dollar price tags to requests for a few cents, MuckRock and its users have had its fair share of FOIA fee debacles. We decided to look at our 50,000+ requests to-date and breakdown the biggest and most noteworthy in each state.

Setting up a relatively passive tip line for your audience is really easy with our new Assignment tool. Currently in a semi-public beta, it’s available to all Pro and Organizational users (and open to others who are interested; just send us an email!) - to help investigators and newsrooms, small and large, engage with their readers, current and future.

Mykola Lebed was sentenced to death in Poland in 1934. He died in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1998.

By various accounts, he was an assassin, a freedom fighter, a terrorist, a hero, a villain, a prisoner, a refugee, a Nazi collaborator, a Nazi target, a writer, and a war criminal. To the Central Intelligence Agency, which bankrolled his activities for close to half a century, he was known as “Uncle Louie.”

The Federal Bureau of Investigation files on James Baldwin, Ernest Hemingway, and Susan Sontag, and a dozen famous writers have a lot of stories to tell, and over the past eight years the MuckRock team has been digging through them. Today, we’re excited to tell those stories in a new format: a 400-page volume that brings the most funny, frightening, poignant, and provocative tales about the intersection of surveillance and freedom to life, as told through those primary source documents.

MuckRock is collect cola contracts throughout the country. Do we have yours?

The details of the negotiations and planning surrounding the Cuban Missile Crisis have long been the subject of some contention for historians, with some of the most influential and enduring accounts contradicting what the tapes of those planning sessions tell us. Almost immediately after the Cuban Missile Crisis resolved, rumors began floating around Washington D.C. that the narrative that emerged was the handiwork of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy in an effort to force the resignation of Adlai Stevenson, Kennedy’s Ambassador to the United Nations. A Central Intelligence Agency chronology, originally classified SECRET and recently released to MuckRock, confirms that the architect of this historical revisionism was, in fact, Kennedy - and reveals that denials of this were based on nothing more than word games.

This week, we released improvements to our request download tool so it works better with large requests and improved the language in follow ups. Here’s what’s new at MuckRock and how you can help out.

For this week’s FOIA round-up, we’re taking a look at FEMA cuts for ICE programming, a school leader’s spending habits, and Scott Pruitt’s money problems. Plus, open nominations for the FAC Free Speech and Open Government Award.