Complaints and claims of violations of freedom of speech, press, religion, assembly, petition and other 1st amendment issues, for agencies where such issues often come up (police, school districts, universities, meetings of public bodies, etc.)
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.
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.
Kratom is a plant in the coffee family from Southeast Asia. It is typically consumed as raw powder, tea, and in capsule form. Although the herb displays an excellent safety profile, in 2014 the United States Food and Drug Administration issued an import alert on it, a de facto attempt to prevent its importation and sale.
In honor of the 105th anniversary of the legendary April 15, 1912 sinking of the RMS Titanic, I'm looking through records across the country to find historic and current information about the ship, her crew, her passengers and more.
"Atomic Fallout" is an ongoing collaboration between The Missouri Independent, MuckRock and The Associated Press involving thousands of pages of previously-unreleased government records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. They show radioactive waste from the Manhattan Project was known to pose a threat to people living in North St. Louis County as early as 1949. But federal officials repeatedly wrote off potential health risks off as "slight," "minimal" or "low-level."
For almost every city around America, fines and fees are a useful law enforcement tool, offering a way to punish everyday infractions without the immediate threat of jail or a permanent mark on a criminal record.
But what happens when governments stop thinking of fines as a deterrent, but as a crucial source of funding? How does it change policing when the goal is neither to serve and protect, but to ensure that the budget doesn't take a hit?
The Sunlight Foundation and MuckRock are partnering to find out.
We are working to shut down a large, new natural gas distribution line in Ionia County. This line is already in progress. This 12/24" line, owned by Consumers Energy, will pass under Duck Creek, a protected trout stream. Additionally, I have not sold an easement and no eminent domain has been established. Lastly, if it runs in the right of way, it could cause the bridge over Duck Creek, which is slated for replacement in 2018, to fail, perhaps to the point of collapse.
UPDATE 5/30/17: The pipeline has been slightly rerouted. It will no longer pass through my property but will be installed approximately 75 feet est of my property line.
We want records of emails, calendars, and similar in their original electronic format, with all headers, metadata, etc. except those explicitly deemed exempt.
This project illustrates `test' requests intended to get agencies to provide metadata and/or justify correctly their refusal to do so.
Included are various appeals intended to get rulings declaring metadata as part of the public record.
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).
This project will evaluate Massachusetts municipalities’ responsiveness to records requests, as well as which have kept up with reviewing and releasing the executive session minutes of their local boards, and which have not.