Crafting an appeal can be daunting, but the results are worth it. Here’s some quick tips on what you can do to get an agency to reconsider your fee category, which can result in drastically reduced costs.

There are a lot of factors when it comes to determining your FOIA request cost, but one of the key ones is which requester category you fall under. Under FOIA fee regulations, there are three broad categories of requesters, and making sure you are classified correctly can mean getting the documents for free or a reasonable fee and being asked to pay thousands - or even hundreds of thousands - of dollars.

For three weeks in 2003, the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement evaluated the Predator drone as a tool for monitoring the border. Twelve years later, even as a scathing inspector general loudly questions the millions spent on border drones, records officials at ICE can’t puzzle out the news value in releasing reports from this early study.