To celebrate Sunshine Week, MuckRock is hosting our very own transparency-themed science fair on Saturday, March 16th at Oficio Back Bay! Come and explore the ways an open government is essential to an informed and engaged democracy.

California’s top law official is threatening legal action against a pair of journalist who obtained a list of police officers convicted of crimes within the last decade.

The Central Intelligence Archives document then-Vice President Richard Nixon’s disastrous 1958 “goodwill” tour to Latin America, in which Nixon faced multiple mobs of angry protestors - and at least one surprisingly heavy soccer ball.

Massachusetts State Police and local law enforcement have spent millions amassing an arsenal of Tasers, but there’s minimal accountability for those doing the purchasing, or for those doing the tasing.

Agencies who fail to retain public records and vote in closed door meetings without counsel present could face penalties under a new law pending Virginia Governor Ralph Northam’s sign-off.

The Central Intelligence Agency’s approach to Black History Month could charitably be described as somewhat cynical, often using it as an opportunity to recruit minorities and expand the Agency’s contacts.

The United States is committing to a broad program of artificial intelligence to maintain the country’s industry lead and modernize the military, the White House announced in an Executive Order issued by President Donald Trump on February 11th.

After discovering the Soviet Army’s 1948 borscht recipe in the Central Intelligence Agency archives last month, we challenged our readers to try and make the sour soup themselves. While David and Shannon Perry made a slightly scaled-back version in an outdoor firepit, food historian - and professional fermenter - Julia Skinner adapted the recipe for home kitchens.

MuckRock’s API allows easy access to FOIA response data on thousands of different agencies, towns, counties, and cities across America. Now, we want your feedback on what data to surface to make it even more useful.

In this week’s FOIA round-up, public records requests reveal pollution from U.S. mining sites is contaminating American water supplies without being treated, researchers use FOIA documents to reveal mishandling of fentanyl distribution by the Federal Drug Administration, and new records raise ethical concerns over travel expenses of senior advisor to Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert Wilkie.

A bill slated to extend certain aspects of the public records act to the Washington State Legislature is dead following a heated public hearing.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has responded to dozens of FOIA requests regarding darknet markets (and one request for files on Cryptocomb) by refusing to confirm or deny the existence of records mentioning them. To support this denial, the Bureau cited FOIA exemption b(7)a, which covers “ongoing proceedings.” In doing so, the Bureau seemed to violate its own GLOMAR response by citing the existence of proceedings it refuses to acknowledge exist.

Often times people ask to upload their existing FOIA requests to MuckRock or want to share an interesting cache of documents through the site. We’re always excited to see more people using public records, so we wanted to explain why we don’t accept these kinds of offers and suggest some alternatives.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainees at a jail in Newark, New Jersey have been fed spoiled food and subjected to deteriorating conditions, according to a report released last week by the Department of Homeland Security Inspector General.

A New York state appellate court made a landmark ruling this week, which allows the release of body-worn camera footage for one of the country’s largest police departments.

From 1967 to 1970, Black Panther Party founding member and Deputy Minister of Information Elbert “Big Man” Howard went on an international tour to mingle with foreign revolutionary movements, promote the BPP’s agenda, and raise money for the party. Documents released through FOIA following Howard’s death last June show that throughout all his travels - from Japan to Sweden to Algeria - the Federal Bureau of Investigation was tracking him and his activities.

The AI Now Institute is calling for checks on the datasets used by predictive policing systems because of concerns that the technology can perpetuate, rather than address, “dirty” policing practices.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has a long history of focusing on left-wing activists and politicians, often to the exclusion of groups of actual concern. This pattern continues to this day, as recently documented by Property of the People. The FBI’s file on Ramparts magazine shows how this attitude reflected in internal communications - unable to take to Twitter, agents were forced to scribble right-wing talking points in copies of the magazine.

Today, we launched more ways for you to see exactly how and where your MuckRock requests are getting sent — and tweak the submission as you see fit. We’ve also been continuing to make progress on our Sunshine Week project at Code for Boston.

In this week’s FOIA round-up, HUD’s public records system faces severe delays due to contract expiration, North Dakota considers restricting public record access related to “critical infrastructure,” and documents FOIA’d by The Willamette Week show friendly text exchanges between a Portland Police lieutenant and an alt-right leader.

The good news is we found Frank Wilkinson’s 132,000 page Federal Bureau of Investigation file. The bad news is you probably won’t get a chance to read it.

As part of a survey being conducted my MuckRock, seven of the state’s 23 county sheriff departments have provided their contracts, offering additional looks into agreements by Turnkey, Telmate, and Securus, one of the country’s largest providers of inmate prison communication services.

In a first for Georgia, a City of Atlanta employee is facing criminal charges following an order to delay a local tv-station’s public records request.

On Valentine’s Day eve 1976, the Philadelphia Inquirer published a column by Bob Lancaster, in which the veteran humorist bemoans having the flu. In a self-described malaise, Lancaster ponders what a Valentine’s Day card would look like written in a such a sour state, and then - capturing the post-Church Committee zeitgeist - pens one for our “secret admirers” at the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Lancaster would no doubt be delighted to know that his sweethearts at the CIA were so smitten by his sentiment that they kept a copy, and it remained classified for just shy of 30 years.

While the Central Intelligence Agency’s efforts to recruit more people of color stretches back decades,those efforts were unfortunately tainted by racism, as demonstrated by memos from the Agency’s chief recruiters in the ‘60s and ‘70s. In one sentence, the Agency recruiter declared that the age of hiring token POC was over. In the next, they declared that hiring POC meant passing over white applicants who were “better qualified.”