FOIA can be a tricky process, but you don’t need to go at it alone. Here are some of our favorite tips, tricks and examples of opening up the public records process, whether it’s hosting an event to train others or building a larger records campaign that works to get more people involved. The benefits: More transparency, more documents and stronger laws that work better for all requesters.

A MuckRock user found an interesting memorandum from the late ‘70s in our recent assignment From the Archives: Memos mentioning Senator Joe Biden, in which the Central Intelligence Agency bemoaned the “burdens” placed on it by the recently strengthened Freedom of Information Act.

Partially due to Joe Biden’s time on the Senate Select Committee for Intelligence, a search of the Central Intelligence Agency’s CREST database returns thousands of records - news articles, memos, letters, and more - referencing the Senator.

MuckRock announced that it would be looking at the extent of drone use by municipalities, counties, and states throughout the country. Since then, individuals from Connecticut to California have responded to the call.

It’s summertime!

You know what that means: it’s the only time when the Middletown and Hamilton campuses of Ohio’s Miami University can stock the vending machines with the products of Pepsi’s competitors!

Last week, in partnership with the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, we put out a call to help find and preserve as much as the online primary source material in the Mueller Report as we could. Hundreds of people helped, and now we’ve updated a version of the Mueller Report to over a hundred of the original sources, right on the page.

Help the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine and MuckRock build up an annotated version of the redacted Mueller Report, including URLs to all the publicly referenced government documents, news accounts, and other reference materials.

Yesterday, we loaded a redacted version of the Mueller Report into our crowdsourcing tool and asked for your help in finding what is - and isn’t - in the release. The response was overwhelming, with hundreds of submissions from just the past 24 hours. We wanted to highlight a few of the finds so far, and we’ll have a more in-depth analysis next week.

The first public release of the Mueller report is now live, and we want your help going through it to find the most interesting pages, references to other documents to request, and help us breakdown how much of it was redacted under various exemptions.

More than a year after Amazon released its HQ2 RFP and weeks after it announced the winners, a majority of #AmazonHQ2 bids submitted to the company are still not public. MuckRock and other news outlets obtained many of those that are through public records requests - we break down what has and hasn’t been released.