Photos of animals struggling in the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill remind me that a great tip is to always note a major news event and then make a calendar item of FOIAing — one year after the date — any such photographic evidence. You never know… Previously unreleased photographs from the 2010 [...]
Filed under: 2. Doc state of mind, FOI At Work | Tagged: Deepwater Horizon oil spill, Greenpeace, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Sea turtle | Leave a Comment »
The Wilmington, Delaware, Gannett site has created a really cool visualization….The News Journal acquired eight years worth of parking ticket data from the City of Wilmington that shows where and when vehicles are ticketed. Check it out…very cool!
Filed under: 2. Doc state of mind, 7. Electronic records | Tagged: data, data visualizations, Delaware, parking tickets | Leave a Comment »
This is one of FOI’s lowest hanging pieces of fruit — looking at overtime pay records. More often than not, they yield gold. Here is a beauty from Montgomery County, Maryland… Dozens of firefighters, correctional and police officers and transportation employees in Montgomery County are doubling or nearly doubling their salaries with overtime pay. More [...]
Filed under: 1. Records that matter, 2. Doc state of mind, FOI At Work | Tagged: FOI at work, Maryland, overtime | Leave a Comment »
Is it just me, or did you think we had kind of already settled this point of law a decade ago? Accident reports compiled by troopers and maintained in a state database should be treated as public records available by request, Washington’s Supreme Court ruled Thursday. Justices said in their 7-2 decision that the Washington [...]
Filed under: 2. Doc state of mind, 3. Access law, 6. Overcoming denials, 7. Electronic records | Tagged: accident reports, database, Washington State | Leave a Comment »
Passing along this wonderful post from Sunlight on a fabulous new FOI classroom project! Love to see this kind of stuff! On April 11, 2012 ten University of Utah Honors students will launch a state-wide public initiative which, if successful, will forever change how Utah citizens interact with their local governments. The initiative, called the [...]
Filed under: 1. Records that matter, 2. Doc state of mind | Tagged: FOI projects, studies, Utah | 1 Comment »
An interesting nugget, courtesy of FOI: The state medical school disciplined 20 doctors and fined 11 of them up to $4,000 for handing out sick notes to demonstrators at last year’s labor protests, newly released records show. The records, requested by the Journal Sentinel last year under the state’s open records law, show for the [...]
Filed under: 1. Records that matter, 2. Doc state of mind, 3. Access law, FOI At Work | Tagged: doctors, University of Wisconsin–Madison, Wisconsin | Leave a Comment »
No reason why every journalism program in the country can’t do this: On Wednesday afternoon, Feb. 29, the Spartan Online News Network, powered by Michigan State University journalism students, emailed most of the municipalities and school districts in Ingham County with a simple request. The students asked how many Freedom of Information Act requests these [...]
Filed under: 2. Doc state of mind, 3. Access law, 4. Finding records, FOI At Work | Tagged: foi audits, Michigan State | Leave a Comment »
A really interesting piece from the AP on the hunt for bin Laden…and the hunt for bin Laden records… The hunt for Osama bin Laden took nearly a decade. It could take even longer to uncover U.S. government emails, planning reports, photographs and more that would shed light on how an elite team of Navy SEALs killed the world’s most [...]
Filed under: 1. Records that matter, 2. Doc state of mind | Tagged: Joint Special Operations Command, Osama bin Laden, Pakistan, Pentagon | Leave a Comment »
A new trove of emails acquired by Judicial Watch show that the White House was intimately involved in managing the fallout from the Shirley Sherrod story, in which the USDA employee was forced to resign after Andrew Breitbart posted a fragmented video of one of her speeches to his website, Big Government. At the time, then-White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs [...]
Filed under: 2. Doc state of mind | Tagged: email, Judicial Watch, SHirley Sherrod, White House | Leave a Comment »
