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Release Notes: Import and search emails, extract metadata from PDFs and more
Over the past few weeks, the MuckRock team has been busy with several updates and improvements. Our new Email Archiver Add-On allows you to preserve email files (EML/MBOX) with corresponding metadata for long-term storage by seamlessly converting emails to EA-PDFs, a new archive-friendly standard that preserves email metadata in a consistent way while ensuring emails are consistently preserved as PDFs.
For the Record: Requesting documents for the stadium that never was
“This is a once in a lifetime opportunity,” Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s office said in their proposal for Monumental Sports, owners of the Washington Wizards and the Washington Capitals, to move from Washington, D.C. to Alexandra, Virginia. The project promised 30,000 new jobs and $12 billion in economic...
Admiral Grace Hopper’s landmark lecture is found, but the NSA won’t release it
In a vault at the National Security Agency lies a historical treasure: two AMPEX 1-inch open reel tapes containing a landmark lecture by Admiral Grace Hopper, a giant in the field of computer science. Titled “Future Possibilities: Data, Hardware, Software, and People,” this lecture, recorded on August 19, 1982, at the NSA’s Fort Meade headquarters, and stored in the video archives of the National Cryptographic School, offers a rare glimpse into the mind of a pioneer who shaped the very fabric of technology. Yet this invaluable artifact remains inaccessible, trapped in an obsolete format that the NSA will not release, stating that the agency is unable to play it back.
Elected officials are opting out of secret Koppers community meetings about air pollution.
Elected officials and public employees from the 7,500-person Village of Stickney are no longer planning to attend meetings of the secretive Koppers Community Advisory Panel, the company-sponsored public relations initiative meant to combat news coverage about air pollution and unresolved Illinois Environmental Protection Agency violations near its Cook County coal tar plant.
For the Record: Celebrate the Fourth with FOIA
The Freedom of Information Act, transparency’s landmark legislation, was signed into law on July 4, 1966 by President Lyndon B. Johnson. Since its passage, journalists, researchers, activists and all sorts of other people have come together to request government documents, making politics more transparent and democracies more informed. Get...
Release Notes: Knight Election Hub, more OCR tools and expanded raw email access
Over the past few weeks, the MuckRock tech team has focused on several key updates and additions. These include the development of the Knight Election Hub, which offers vital resources to U.S. newsrooms for comprehensive coverage of the 2024 elections. Additionally, we have enhanced DocumentCloud with a new Textract OCR...
For the Record: How to background political candidates through public records
As November inches closer, June’s #FOIAFriday session explored what type of public records can be used to investigate political candidates who are running in the 2024 election cycle. Friday’s session covered how to request these overlooked documents, including military personnel records, voter lists and Paycheck Protection Program loans.
For the Record: Navigating MuckRock’s FOIA Log Explorer
Last September, FOIAonline, a portal for Freedom of Information Act requests used by dozens of federal agencies, shut down to the dismay of many requesters. The portal, hosted by the Environmental Protection Agency, allowed the public to make and track Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to over 20 federal agencies.
Search across almost 170,000 requests via MuckRock’s expanded FOIA Log Explorer
Over the last few weeks, we have been hard at work on a range of improvements to MuckRock and DocumentCloud, but FOIA fans have something special to celebrate: We’ve imported many of the requests from FOIAonline into a searchable database that allows you to filter, browse and even re-request almost 170,000 requests with just a few clicks.
‘They bungled it:’ NIH documents reveal how $1.6 billion long Covid initiative has failed so far to meet its goals
More than three years ago, the National Institutes of Health launched a $1 billion-plus initiative to find the root causes, and potential treatments, for long Covid, the chronic disease that has quickly changed the lives of millions of Americans. But a lack of visible progress from the initiative, called RECOVER,...
MuckRock to SCOTUS: Requesting information is not a crime
In 2017, Priscilla Villarreal — sharing updates through her popular La Gordiloca Facebook page — first confirmed with a government source and then reported on a series of deaths in and near Laredo, Texas. They were not unusual stories for Villarreal to share — she has gained wide attention for local updates and breaking news on public corruption and thousands tune in to her videos and updates.
For the Record: How Fiquem Sabendo used records requests and DocumentCloud to reveal corporate card expenditures
In Brazil, presidents and other top government officials have the right to use “corporate cards” to cover occasional travel expenses and other small value purchases on behalf of the federal government. In January 2023, the Brazilian journalism non-profit Fiquem Sabendo secured access to over 13,000 pages of corporate...
Help track PPP loans associated with 2024 election candidates
The Paycheck Protection Program launched in 2020 to help businesses, non-profits and other entities keep workers employed during the COVID-19 pandemic. In total, more than 11 million loans were approved and over $700 billion given out, according to the Small Business Administration. If loan recipients met certain criteria, including showing...
For the Record: Requesting data inventories
MuckRock’s #FOIAFriday webinar series continued last Friday with a step-by-step guide on how to request data inventories from federal and state agencies. But first: what is a data inventory? Essentially, it is a dataset that lists all the data held by an agency. This seems almost too good to...
Release Notes: More information when scheduled Add-Ons stop working
DocumentCloud now allows Add-On developers to customize the emails sent when a scheduled run fails, making it easier to understand why something stopped working and potentially fix it. The Regex Extractor Add-On now enables tagging documents when a matching regular expression is found, opening up new ways to sort and filter large document collections with ease.
For the Record: Appealing an unduly burdensome denial in Illinois
After the Cicero Independiente and MuckRock published the “Air We Breathe,” a series of investigative articles about air pollution and the chemicals company Koppers, the company hired a public-relations firm to organize a secret, behind-the-scenes campaign to influence local officials. The secret meeting was called a “Community Advisory...
For the Record: Michigan bill could expand FOIA law to governor and legislature
In our continuing coverage of the state of public records laws across the country, we’re turning to Michigan and how two new bills could expand the state’s Freedom of Information Act. MuckRock has tracked new proposed legislation in Colorado and Kentucky and the future of public records laws...
Release Notes: Making it easier to sort, filter and reprocess document OCR
Since our last Release Notes, we released a new Add-On OCR Tagger that allows you to tag your document(s) based on the OCR engine used and we added better logging for when scheduled Add-Ons like Klaxon or Scraper get disabled. This helps more easily diagnose and correct outages that impact Add-Ons.
For the Record: New bill in Louisiana would exempt economic development projects from the state’s public record law
In a continuing series on proposed and final changes to state public records laws, MuckRock’s For the Record column is going to Louisiana to understand potential changes there. Across the country, MuckRock has tracked new legislation in Colorado and Kentucky and what’s next for public records laws in New...
Were you treated unjustly by police in New York? Are you a former officer with a story to tell? We want to hear from you.
A new investigation by a team of journalists reporting for MuckRock and New York Focus offers a first-of-its-kind look at how these ‘peace officers’ in New York City’s Department of Homeless Services are held accountable — and how long their behavior can go unchecked. Previously-unreleased disciplinary...
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MuckRock is a non-profit, collaborative news site that brings together journalists, researchers, activists, and regular citizens to request, analyze, and share government documents, making politics more transparent and democracies more informed.
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