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.

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.

MuckRock asked Russ Kick, the investigative archivist behind the Memory Hole and AltGov, to offer his thoughts on the Department of the Interior’s proposed changes to how it would handle FOIA requests - and what we can do to push back against it.

An improved public records law was passed on Beacon Hill two years ago, but just five miles away, the Medford Police Department continues to neglect its legal obligations to records requesters and the public.

On Monday, Democratic Congressional candidate Abigail Spanberger shared that a complete, unredacted copy of her federal security clearance application, known as an SF-86, was released to a Republican opposition research group America Rising through FOIA. Here’s some background on what that means, how it might have happened, and the potential fallout.

Vanessa Nason, who runs our “Counting the Uncounted: The Sexual Assault Evidence Collection Kit Project,” reflects on a year spent tracking down the extent of the rape kit backlog in America.

The National Archives and Records Administration’s recent announcement that there will be no Barack Obama Presidential Library was met with understandable outrage from historians and transparency advocates, who saw it as a blow to a functioning democracy. However, as the National Security Archive’s Nate Jones was quick to point out, this discussion needs to be understood in the larger context of NARA’s current failings in the presidential library system, where FOIA requests can take years, even decades.

Last month, a federal court ruled that the Central Intelligence Agency can selectively disclose classified information while shielding its release from FOIA in order to protect “intelligence sources and methods.” That ruling ignores the Agency’s history of arbitrarily applying that label to everything from beer brands to cafeteria names and using it to hide behavior that was embarrassing, illegal, or both.

As someone who has been threatened with jail, lawsuits, and the occasional death threat over requests I’ve filed or helped file, I understand how frustrating public records can be. But with Sunshine Week 2018 wrapped up, I think it’s worth taking note of everything that’s gone well.

As we kick off what will hopefully be a very transparent Sunshine Week 2018, we want to take a moment to reflect on one of the more absurd finds in the Central Intelligence Agency’s declassified archive so far, and how the work the #OpenGov community can find itself part of the public record.