United States and Canada

FOIA Request Helps Show What Steps NGA Taking to Reduce Overclassification The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) is going beyond the Executive Order on classification to improve the quality of its classification decisions and reduce overclassification. The Federation of American Scientists’ Steve Aftergood analyzes the changes in the agency’s new classification guide, including three types of […]

Tomorrow Deadline for Mar-a-Lago Records Release Tomorrow is the deadline for the Department of Homeland Security to release all responsive, non-exempt records of presidential visits to Mar-a-Lago in response to a FOIA lawsuit brought by the National Security Archive, together with the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University and the Citizens for Responsibility and […]

Will ‘Still Interested’ Letters Surge as End of FY 2017 Approaches? The Office of Government Information Services has a timely blog on the use of “still interested” letters, reminding agencies of the most recent Department of Justice Office of Information Policy guidance on the use of these letters as the end of Fiscal Year 2017 […]

FOIA Helps Show How Conservative TV Giant Could Find its Way Into 7 out of 10 Homes FOIA requests to the Federal Communications Commission won the release of hundreds of pages of documents showing how the TV giant Sinclair Broadcast Group stands to benefit from the agency’s “deregulatory blitz.” Most important is a deregulation that […]

Federally-Funded Private Prisons Should be Subject to FOIA The National Security Archive joined a large coalition of open government groups calling for the passage of legislation that would apply FOIA to federally-funded private prisons, closing a routinely abused loophole. The Private Prison Information Act of 2017 (S. 1728) was introduced by Senator Ben Cardin (D-Md.) […]

CBP Response to Travel Ban Under Renewed Scrutiny Thanks to FOIA Request Documents released through the FOIA confirm that the agency ordered its employees to stonewall members of Congress and lawyers during the first hours of the travel ban. The released emails show a number of reactions from Customs and Border Protection to the ban, […]

FCC Says No Written Documentation on Claimed DDoS Attack that Crashed Public Comments System during Net Neutrality Controversy The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is in Unredacted’s hot seat again for the second week in a row concerning its responses to FOIA requests on proposed net neutrality rollbacks. This time the FCC is under fire for […]