#freedom-of-information-act — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #freedom-of-information-act, aggregated by home.social.
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Effectively USING THE FREEDOM OF INFORMATION ACT (FOIA) - often described as the law that keeps citizens in the know about their government.
https://rosecoveredglasses.wordpress.com/2026/05/21/effectively-using-the-freedom-of-information-act-foia/
#FOIA #FreedomOfInformationAct -
The FCC Received Hundreds of Complaints About Bad Bunny’s ‘Vulgar’ Super Bowl Performance
https://web.brid.gy/r/https://www.wired.com/story/bad-bunny-super-bowl-fcc-complaints/
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The FCC Has a Fast Lane for Complaints About Trump’s Media Critics
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ICE and CBP’s Face-Recognition App Can’t Actually Verify Who People Are
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#ice to wear body cams.
And so i expect the next bar to be the #freedomofinformationact
If people decide to go on the offensive or more aggressive defensively...
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Trump Warned of a Tren de Aragua ‘Invasion.’ US Intel Told a Different Story
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#FBI paid nearly $1M in overtime to #redact #Epsteinfiles, documents show
@bloomberg reporter @JasonLeopold sued the FBI and #DOJ for the files as part of a #FreedomofInformationAct request.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/fbi-overtime-redact-epstein-files/
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The #Pentagon has to provide #NewYorkTimes information about #ElonMusk #security clearances, a federal judge ruled Wednesday—and the #billionaire own #socialmedia habits helped decide the case. In September 2024, the Times filed a #FOIA #FreedomofInformationAct request seeking “a list of security clearances” granted to #Musk, including “any details about the extent and purview of each of the clearances.” #doge #transparency #accountability #democracy #trump #maga #firing #government #workers
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Effectively Using THE FREEDOM OF INFORMATION ACT (FOIA). It is often described as the law that keeps citizens in the know about their government.
https://rosecoveredglasses.wordpress.com/2025/08/11/effectively-using-the-freedom-of-information-act-foia/
#freedomOfInformationAct #FOIA -
Michael Nedd’s BLM Calendar, From Election Day 2016 through the Inaugural Period
Back in 2019, I made a Freedom of Information Act request for the work calendar of Michael Nedd, a longtime Bureau of Land Management official, for the months following the 2016 election through the inaugural period. The documents were released just the other day, six years and four months after I submitted the FOIA request.
Nedd had been promoted from Executive Director, Energy Minerals and Management to Deputy Director at the Bureau of Land Management in March of 2017, just a couple of months after Trump took office. He would have been privy, I imagined, to any discussions of Twin Metals’ canceled mineral leases and the full-court-press flurry to renew them. I thought his work calendar might help me fill out the Timeline I made of that coordinated effort or help me reconstruct what was happening behind closed doors at BLM.
Upon review, these documents do not seem all that helpful in that regard. For example, the Timeline indicates that on February 7, 2017, Nedd forwards a briefing paper on land withdrawals to his colleagues; no surprise, his calendar for that day shows a “Land Withdrawal Proposal Discussion.” In my view, all this does is drive home a point I’ve made many times, that reversing land withdrawals was a priority for the incoming administration. And we already have Nedd’s calendar for April of 2017, when he met with then-solicitor Daniel Jorjani and other officials to discuss “Mining in Minnesota.” Or at least we had that calendar, but the link (to a domain called altgov2) has now gone dead. Well, not exactly dead: it’s a tarted-up 404 Page, occupied by “affiliate marketers.” I’m not going to bother linking to it, but if you want to see what I’m talking about, just go to the entry for April 10th on the Twin Metals Timeline and click the link to Nedd’s calendar.) It’s been a while, and, contrary to popular wisdom, the Internet is not forever.
So why put these documents up now? Circumstances have changed. The threat to the Boundary Waters looks even more menacing than it did during Trump’s first term, and we should be paying attention to what’s going on now, not what happened eight or more years ago, right?
What’s more, Michael Nedd was frog marched out of BLM’s office back in May, 2025, for telling employees to ignore a DOGE directive. (Politico has the details here; the Washington Post also has a story; I’ll note in passing that it’s classic Politico to report Nedd’s ouster, which is part of the clumsily executed destruction of modern American government that we’re witnessing, as a threat to Trump’s fossil fuel agenda.) Though Nedd is still listed on the BLM website as Deputy Director, Greenwire reports that Joe Stout has now replaced him as Acting Deputy Director. Things are unclear: there may be litigation underway or some reinstatement in the works. (After all, the DC kleptocrats wouldn’t want to do anything to threaten that fossil fuel agenda).
Anyway, I put these records up now because a) they arrived, so I might as well acknowledge the response; b) they help fill out the public record for a critical period; c) someone else might find these records useful; and d) I have a chance to test out Muckrock’s DocumentCloud plugin for WordPress — which I have not used until now.
In order to upload the 2000-plus-page calendar to documentcloud.org, I had to break it into two parts.
Part 1.
Part 2.
Postscript 30 August 2025: Results from the plugin experiment are mixed. Right now, it looks as if the documentcloud server is returning a 500 error. The docs, if you want them, are here.
Postcript 2, 9 Sept 2025. 1) It turns out the 500 error only shows up when I try to view the documents on Chrome, on my laptop. The plugin works just fine on Safari and Firefox. And when I emailed Sanjin Ibrahimovic at Muckrock to ask about all this, he said he could not replicate the 500 error, even when viewing the post in Chrome. So, who knows? I speculated that it might be an extension I’m running on Chrome. As long as people can access the documents, all is well, I guess. 2) On Chris D’Amico‘s suggestion, I tried looking at the post in an incognito window. And I can see the docs just fine.
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#antiScience #bureaucracy #climateDenial #corruption #FOIA #FreedomOfInformationAct #kleptocracy #Muckrock #publicRecord #recordKeeping #Water #Wordpress
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#DOGE affiliates Kenneth Jackson & Nate Cavanaugh “disabled & restricted access to the Institute's #FOIA system, terminated the employees responsible for processing FOIA requests, & restricted the use of Institute financial resources.”
#law #Trump #Musk #transparency #FreedomOfInformationAct
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-06-13/secret-service-still-probing-james-comey-s-86-47-instagram-post -
"The FOIA has taken a serious beating over the past five months. The mass firing of federal workers has hollowed out FOIA offices at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Office of Personnel Management, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the US Agency for International Development, the National Security Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Justice Department and other agencies.
Now, add the State Department to that list. I’ve learned that a hiring freeze has stymied the agency from filling critical leadership positions, including roles that administer the agency’s FOIA operations and litigation. Additionally, contractors who review records and have classification authority were suspended through the end of the fiscal year as a result of cost-cutting measures. On the whole, the number of State Department employees and contractors who process FOIA requests has been cut in half due to the deferred resignation program and budget cuts, according to documents seen by Bloomberg News.
These cuts and departures will only exacerbate the State Department's awful track record when it comes to FOIA. The agency currently has more than 23,000 FOIA requests in its backlog, according to the latest stats on FOIA.gov. I alone have more than 50 requests pending at State, 46 of which have been stuck in a backlog for more than five years and 22 that have lingered for more than a decade.
To be clear, it’s certainly not the fault of FOIA analysts. While the FOIA is statutorily mandated, there’s not a single government agency that allocates funding specifically for FOIA operations."
#USA #Trump #DOGE #FOIA #FreedomOfInformationAct #Transparency #OpenGovernment
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Elon Musk Tried Keeping Issues at His Texas Mansion Private, Emails Show - The tech billionaire’s staff were concerned that correspondence about his home in West La... - https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/06/technology/elon-musk-texas-neighbors.html #realestateandhousing(residential) #fencesandpropertybarriers #computersandtheinternet #freedomofinformationact #building(construction) #westlakehills(tex) #citycouncils #muskelon #zoning
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"In a previous edition of FOIA Files, I wrote that NARA spent a year trying to get Trump to return 14 boxes of documents he took to Mar-a-Lago after he left the White House in 2021. The documents should have been turned over in accordance with the Presidential Records Act. When the archivists finally got the boxes back a year later, they discovered classified records in the cache, prompting NARA to refer the matter to the Justice Department. Jack Smith was then appointed special counsel to lead the case.
Ever since, Trump has vilified NARA, once describing it as an agency controlled by the “radical left.”
It was in that context that Trusty told Fox News that Trump’s legal team had filed a FOIA request on the former president’s behalf demanding a wide range of records “that will expose NARA’s completely different treatment of President Trump from every other president.” (Trusty withdrew as Trump’s attorney in June of that year citing "irreconcilable differences.”)
I tried to get a copy of the request, but Trump’s team declined to turn it over. So, I FOIAed Trump’s FOIA. I also asked NARA for a copy of every document Trump demanded, even though I had no clue what he was after."
#USA #Trump #FOIA #Journalism #FreedomOfInformationAct #News
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Some wild Freedom of Information Act stories, including an arrest, million dollar fees, and a secret guacamole recipe.
https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2025/mar/11/ten-years-of-the-foilies/
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Just dropping this here....
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Coinbase Chasing Receipts at SEC to Tally Cost of Agency's Crypto Saga - As the smoke clears on its own newly dropped enforcement case, Coinbase is demanding the ... - https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2025/02/28/coinbase-chasing-receipts-at-sec-to-tally-cost-of-agency-s-crypto-saga #u.s.securitiesandexchangecommission #freedomofinformationact #enforcement #breaking #coinbase #policy
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The far-right Heritage Foundation is weaponizing the Freedom of Information Act to do Trump's dirty work.
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The following image contains a message from Ben:
Please consider donating!
https://chuffed.org/project/journalist-sued-for-doing-his-job
#foia #journalists #losangeles #legal #freedomofinformationact
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London Underground is testing real-time AI surveillance tools to spot crime - Enlarge (credit: John Keeble/Getty Images)
Thousands of people... - https://arstechnica.com/?p=2002361 #freedomofinformationact #londonunderground #aisurveillance #syndication #security #biz #ai
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The NSA’s Furby Artificial Intelligence Scare: FOIA Documents Provide Insight - For those of us who were paying a modicum of attention to the part of the news aro... - https://hackaday.com/2024/01/25/the-nsas-furby-artificial-intelligence-scare-foia-documents-provide-insight/ #freedomofinformationact #toyhacks #furby #news #nsa
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CW: Long thread/4
#15yrsago Obama administration brings back the #FreedomOfInformationAct and transparency in government https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/01/on-day-one-obama-demands-open-government
#15yrsago Man arrested for shouting complaints about “Arab types” on Turkish Airlines flight https://nypost.com/2009/01/21/plane-crazy/
#15yrsago Net-based pressure forces UK government to cancel plans to make MPs’ expenses secret https://www.mysociety.org/2009/01/21/blimey-it-looks-like-the-internets-won/
#10yrsago Lunar panorama stitched from Chinese Chang’e lander images https://www.360cities.net/image/lunar-panorama-change-3-lander
4/
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Tonight's phone call to Doug Ford was to express my displeasure at the lack of transparency with regard to Greenbelt issues and that a Freedom of Information request by theToronto Star on his phone calls during the Education Workers' strike revealed that no phone calls were made or received during that two-week period when he said he was constantly on the phone. It is theorized that he is making use of his personal phone which makes calls/callers impossible to track through a Freedom of Information request. There is a reason for this process to be used that Doug Ford is bypassing. If you would like to follow suit, Doug Ford's office can be reached at 416-325-1941 or send off a quick email or letter. https://correspondence.premier.gov.on.ca/en/feedback/default.aspx #GreenbeltScandal #Greenbelt #DougFord #Corruption #OnPoli #Transparency #FreedomofInformationAct #TorontoStar
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Defi Education Fund Submits FOIA Request for SEC’s Docs - The Defi Education Fund, an organization dedicated to expanding the decentralized ... - https://news.bitcoin.com/defi-education-fund-submits-foia-request-for-secs-docs/ #theussecuritiesandexchangecommission #freedomofinformationact #defieducationfund #amandatuminelli #foiarequest #jpmorgan #news #sec
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@gimulnautti @nycCatHerder @LadyDragonfly
(10/n)
...to a reverse #FreedomOfInformationAct (#FOIA)*, reversing the roles of the People and Government.
2) Instead of obligating the global human population to identify itself, the #AI companies (and organizations) set to rake in billions of dollars in the coming decades**, should be obliged to imprint each and every content the generate with #LLM's with...
