Over the last few weeks, we have been hard at work on a range of improvements to MuckRock and DocumentCloud, but FOIA fans have something special to celebrate: We’ve imported many of the requests from FOIAonline into a searchable database that allows you to filter, browse and even re-request almost 170,000 requests with just a few clicks.
For previous site improvements, check out all of MuckRock’s Release Notes, and if you’d like more frequent peaks at the latest and greatest, join the MuckRock Slack.
MuckRock
FOIA Log Explorer
FOIAonline, a federal website for filing and managing FOIA requests, was decommissioned last September, removing access to over a million requests the public could previously browse.
Fortunately, several teams — including MuckRock and the Project on Government Oversight as well as independent efforts by the Internet Archive, Archive Team and Ed Summers — archived the site’s materials to preserve access to many of the requests as well as some of the responsive documents that were released on the portal. But while the Internet Archive had copies of these request pages, there was no easy mechanism to search across these requests. Working with the Internet Archive and Ed Summers, MuckRock has now imported over 150,000 of these FOIA requests across ten agencies in our expanded FOIA Log Explorer, including two very large archives of the Environmental Protection Agency (66,000 requests) and Customs and Border Protection (75,000 requests).
These requests are now publicly searchable. Even better, FOIA log entries now have the option to specify a request_url parameter that links to the request page on the Wayback Machine (or other sources), so in many cases, you can see not just the request but access the responsive materials if they were publicly released.
We’re excited to continue to develop and expand the FOIA Log Explorer. If you have additional data on FOIA logs, we’d love to add your collection to our database. Email us at info@muckrock.com or fill out our form.
State Pages
As we continue to update our state public records guides, they now have a section showing the last time the page was updated. If the date is not showing on a given page, the page has not been updated since this feature has rolled out. It doesn’t indicate the page is out of date necessarily, just that no changes have been recently made.
We always welcome feedback, additional resources and corrections on state guides — just click “Suggest Change” on a page or email us at info@muckrock.com.about
DocumentCloud
Some users have reported receiving a 429 timeout error upon making requests, with an error stating that they were blocked for going over 500 calls in a 24-hour period despite being authenticated using our python-documentcloud client. python-documentcloud 4.1.3 has resolved this issue.
DocumentCloud Add-Ons
The Bad Redactions Add-On, which builds on Free Law Project’s X-Ray tool to uncover text from poorly redacted documents, now shows the unredacted text in each annotation that is left on the page.
We have also made some fixes to the Email Conversion Add-On. The Add-On allows you to convert MSG and EML files to PDFs, and optionally allow you to extract attachments from them. It received an update to a dependency that fixes the extraction of attachments that led to failures for some email types.
MuckRock Accounts
Outstanding invites to join a MuckRock accounts organization now show the email address in addition to the username for admins of an organization.
Header image via Magic Mockups under public domain license.
