Sai’s Projects

28 USC 753 records (court recordings and transcripts)

The law requires all court proceedings to be recorded. Court reporters are sometimes allowed charge for the act of transcribing those records, but not for the actual transcript (once created), nor for the original recordings. Court clerks are required to keep them for 10 years, freely available to the public. In practice, virtually none of these public records are actually available. This requests all such records.

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552(a)(1,2) documents

Auditing the entire Federal government's compliance with the protective disclosure mandates of 5 U.S.C. § 552(a)(1, 2).

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Agency HQ/PR emails with attribution designation phrases

Part of Fiat Fiendum's FOIA audit, this is an all-agency request for emails containing phrases like "off the record", "on background", etc. It specifically targets emails as stored in centralized databases.

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Chief FOIA officer's desktops

Literally, the stuff on their physical and computer desktop. Audits process concerns such as what FOIA officers are in fact doing on a day-to-day basis (as a snapshot), time to respond, format compliance, litigation holds, and reasonableness of responses such as difficulty of search (this literally is "the stuff in plain sight in your office", so should be zero search time), availability of records (by definition, these records exist), and negotiation (the exclusion list is basically "stuff that's hard to scan, triggers a recursion, or is private", and agencies could easily request that it be extended to cover other such things I didn't anticipate).

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DOI records slated for disposal

The Department of Interior wants to destroy a huge amount of records. This request preserves them all. See background info here: https://altgov2.org/doi-records-destruction/

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Email recalls

Microsoft Outlook deceives users into thinking they can un-send an email by "recalling" it. Actually, all this does is send another email *asking* the recipient to please delete the thing they already received. Emails that someone wants to delete from the recipient are particularly likely to be interesting. This asks for literally all of them.

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Fedetal agency email metadata

This project asks for all email metadata of emails to/from Federal agencies, including intranet emails.

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FOIA administrative record in cases with successful administrative appeal

This all-departments request seeks the entire administrative record in FOIA matters which involved a successful administrative appeal.

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FOIA contracts

The government hires vendors to outsource FOIA review, make software to track, redact, & review FOIA requests, etc. This asks for the details of all of those contracts.

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Jeffrey Epstein files

Jeffrey E. Epstein was a billionaire and serial child sexual predator. He is now dead while in federal custody. This seeks records held by Federal, New York, & Florida governments about him, and his extensive criminal and civil legal history.

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One email, per organizational unit, dated 2019-04-20

Part of Fiat Fiendum's FOIA audit. This requests exactly one email per organizational unit (department, agency, office, etc) that has a significant-size attachment, was sent to/from the senior members of that unit, and was closest to 4:20 pm on 2019-04-20. This is very narrow, so should test the "simple" processing track, while also auditing compliance with subcomponent referrals, electronic format, and other provisions. And probably get some fun pot-related content.

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Payments from U.S. Treasury in civil actions or complaints

How much does the Government pay, to whom, for what? This seeks to find out better information than is currently available for litigation & complaint related payouts.

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Secret court policies

Federal courts are required to publish all policies. They don't. This tries to change that. Note, this is not under FOIA; it uses laws specific to the judiciary.

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Social Security Death Master File

A database of everyone who's died more than 3 calendar years ago.

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