Palantir, a data mining startup based in Silicon Valley, will be handling initial delivery of the U.S. Army’s battlefield intelligence network, the Pentagon confirmed earlier this year, positioning the company to influence the Army’s long-term implementation of its artificial intelligence priorities.

Over the last nine months, our FOIA Fellow Jessie Gomez has been looking at public records law across the nation through our State of State Public Records Law project. Today, we’ll be exploring the major takeaways from her reporting.

High price tags and records exemptions remain consistent barriers to access.

Legislative efforts to reform state public records law are good, but not enough.

Transparency advocates serve as key players in gaining better access to government records.

Records law issues remain a pertinent part in transparency conversations.

Here are our final thoughts on the last nine months of exploring public records laws.

Last week, we saw a lot of progress on our new tool for monitoring government agency websites. Building off data from the MuckRock API, it checks and grades agency web pages on criteria such as accessibility, privacy, and speed.

Amazon investors introduce two votes limiting company’s facial recognition technology, contracts reveal that the “trade secret” of ransomware firms is to pay off hackers directly by charging clients extra, and Chicago’s City Council legislative committees fuel a system of patronage and cronyism.

A 2003 document with the unassuming title of “MIL-C-44072C” first surfaced in early 2010 on the personal website of Finnish programmer Lars Wirzenius, and shortly thereafter saw reporting from Reason, National Public Radio, and the National Security Archive’s Unredacted blog. What was in this document that generated such considerable interest? Nothing less than the military’s official specifications for brownies, spanning an impressive 26 pages.

Recently, we received our 1500th submission to the Great Hoover Hunt project, which aims to catalog all of the handwritten notes from longtime Federal Bureau of Investigation Director J. Edgar Hoover in the Bureau’s files. To commemorate the occasion, we put together a collection of some of Hoover’s choicest bureaucratic broadsides, ready to be copy-pasted into your office’s Slack debate over who forgot to pick up more toner.

MuckRock is filing requests with the North Carolina Department of Public Safety, as well as sheriffs’ offices in each of the state’s counties to learn more about the commissions these agencies are receiving for communication services and their policies around them.

The state of state public records laws continues to evolve as lawmakers discuss new legislation, court rulings clarify ambiguities in records law, and advocates press for better access. To get a sense of what’s happening, we’ve compiled a list of recent changes to access all across the country. If we missed news in your state, let us know by filling out the form below!

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has released more than 3,000 pages of its files on the activist and Earth First! organizer Judi Bari, with more on the way. We need your help going through it.

Last week, we quashed a bug that was overly aggressively logging users out, so you should now be able to use the site with fewer interruptions.

In this week’s FOIA roundup, the Navy Times investigates the jet that drew a giant penis over Washington state, text messages indicate that Michigan Representative Larry Inman sought campaign contributions in exchange for his vote, and records reveal that West Virginia Governor Jim Justice has been largely absent from his legislative responsibilities.

Today, Food & Water Watch and MuckRock are announcing a joint project to identify and shed a light on efforts to privatize the country’s public water systems. The organizations will be submitting public records requests to the largest water systems in the United States - from Puerto Rico to California and in between - looking for the latest corporate attempts to absorb community water supplies into their revenue streams.

Three years ago, Massachusetts legislators revised the state’s public records law with the ostensible goal of increasing access. And yet, the law is still considered one of the most restrictive in the country - in no small part owing to the fact that the Bay State remains the only state in which all three branches of its state government are exempt from disclosure.

The Virginia-based advocacy group Richmond Transparency and Accountability Project talks to Tom Nash about how they use public records to push for police oversight.

More than 4,500 individuals at federal and local law enforcement agencies currently have access to a facial recognition database hosted by the Ohio Attorney General’s office, including at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

How did the National Aeronautics and Space Administration handle one of the first major hacktivist incidents? Newly released records sheds light on what happened during NASA’s investigation of the 1989 WANK worm infection.

Over the last nine years, MuckRock users have filed over 60,000 public records requests at the local, state, and federal levels, resulting in the release of four million pages of government records. Today, we’re going to look at how you can use the Requests page to explore the archives, and even build off the great FOIA work of others.

New proposed changes to FOIA law in Washington D.C. could block access to government emails dealing with “matters unrelated to public employees and officials’ work,” among other restrictions.

Last week, we made it easier to register for our newsletter and pushed a small fix on a landing page.

In this week’s FOIA roundup, two FOIA lawsuits push the Justice Department to release a new version of the Mueller Report, records reveal that the Connecticut police officer who shot an unarmed teen last month had worried past supervisors, and an elected city clerk in Illinois sues his city over its own FOIA processes.