It seems like these days, everyone is finding classified documents in places they shouldn’t be: their homes, their offices, their storage lockers, their garages, their guitar cases, between the cracks of their couches, under some withered celery in the vegetable drawer … OK, we’re exaggerating — but it is getting ridiculous. While the pundits continue […]
The Electronic Frontier Foundation
Posted inNews (NCJ)
The Foilies 2022
Each year during Sunshine Week, The Foilies serve up tongue-in-cheek “awards” for government agencies and assorted institutions that stand in the way of access to information. The Electronic Frontier Foundation and MuckRock combine forces to collect horror stories about Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and state-level public records requests from journalists and transparency advocates across […]
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The Foilies 2019: Recognizing the Year’s Worst in Government Transparency
The cause of government transparency finally broke through to the popular zeitgeist this year. It wasn’t an investigative journalism exposé or a civil rights lawsuit that did it, but a light-hearted sitcom about a Taiwanese American family set in Orlando, Florida, in the late 1990s. In a January episode of ABC’s Fresh Off the Boat, […]
Posted inNews (NCJ)
Recognizing the Year’s Worst in Government Transparency
Government transparency laws like the Freedom of Information Act exist to enforce the public’s right to inspect records so we can all figure out what the heck is being done in our name and with our tax dollars. But when a public agency ignores, breaks or twists the law, your recourse varies by jurisdiction. In […]