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?

With Sunshine Week just around the corner, we wanted to count down the days to our favorite time of year with a closer look at what’s going on behind the black bars: the nine federal FOIA exemptions. Today, strap yourself in for the long-haul because we’re looking at b(7) - the law enforcement exemption.

Thirteen years ago, the writer Hunter S. Thompson sat down at his kitchen desk - a typewriter at his seat and a Smith and Wesson Model 645 in his hand - and never stood again.

MuckRock published over twice as many articles in 2017 as we did last year, which necessitated breaking this year in review into two parts. Let’s pick up where we left off, just in time for FOIA’s 51st birthday.

Playboy magazine was founded just a few years after Central Intelligence Agency, and together, those two institutions left their mark on the 20th century, for better and for much, much worse. To mark Hugh Hefner’s passing, we dug up those times those two overlapped in the Agency’s declassified archives.

After decades as a West Coast leftist, Ramparts editor Warren Hinckle finally landed a place in the FBI’s files after his magazine ran a pro-IRA ad and credited a Michigan Senator for its creation.

The O.G. (Original Gonzo) journalist Hunter S. Thompson wielded a way with words that cut through a lot of 20th-century America’s crap. His Vietnam-era letters to President Johnson, recently released by the LBJ Library, are no exception.

The antics of hell raiser Hunter S. Thompson occupy a permanent place in the culture of anti-authoritarian American angst. In honor of the birthday HST certainly never expected to reach, MuckRock wants your help in tracking down what’s left of the paperwork the rebel king forced the bureaucrats to fill out.

The career of Hunter S. Thompson, chronicler of America’s counterculture movement, was closely followed by the FBI - even going so far as to interview his neighborhood liquor store clerk.