How to FOIA (gift link):
"Every day, Washington Post reporters use public records to inform people about our communities and hold powerful people and governments accountable...
As The Post’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) director, my job is to help reporters file requests for those documents — and win them. Now, I’m sharing my best strategies, tips and secrets in this handy guide." https://wapo.st/4c1AvaD #FOIA#FreedomofInformationAct#PublicRecords#government
Submitted an #FBI#FOIA for any records relating to Jonathan Joseph James, the first juvenile #hacker incarcerated for #cybercrime in the United States. He went on to commit suicide because he thought he was going to be arrested for involvement in the soupnazi credit card theft gang. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_James
My attempt to dislodge @ccc related #FOIA documents from the FBI vaults continues, I've reduced the number of the responsive documents I'm requesting to have processed to theoretically shave a few years off of my wait time. #hacker#hacking#history
It only took 7 years, but the Department of Transportation finally confirmed that they use a standard version of Outlook for their email system - and the documentation is public.
This makes forcing them to properly perform #FOIA searches a lot easier
You can find the entire six pages released by the FBI in response to a #FOIA request below, at archive.org. I've also included much of the text from the document in the description. https://archive.org/details/ARPANET-FOIA-1982
:blobcatcoffee: These Are the Notorious NSA Furby Documents Showing Spy Agency Freaking Out About Embedded AI in Children's Toy
— @404mediaco
"kotaKat, whose interests include furry fandom and infosec, filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the NSA a year ago because he was “bored in a group chat one night” and was discussing the episode"
The #FBI has finally declassified its files on Nikola Tesla, but questions remain.
By: Sarah Pruitt
Updated: June 1, 2023 | Original: May 3, 2018
"What happened to Tesla’s files from there, as well as what exactly was in those files, remains shrouded in mystery—and ripe for conspiracy theories. After years of fielding questions about possible cover-ups, the FBI finally declassified some 250 pages of Tesla-related documents under the Freedom of Information Act [#FOIA] in 2016. The bureau followed up with two additional releases, the latest in March 2018. But even with the publication of these documents, many questions still remain unanswered—and some of Tesla’s files are still missing.
"Three weeks after the Serbian-American inventor’s death, an electrical engineer from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (#MIT) was tasked with evaluating his papers to determine whether they contained 'any ideas of significant value.' According to the declassified files, Dr. John G. Trump reported that his analysis showed Tesla’s efforts to be 'primarily of a speculative, philosophical and promotional character' and said the papers did 'not include new sound, workable principles or methods for realizing such results.'
"The scientist’s name undoubtedly rings a bell, as John G. Trump was the uncle of the 45th U.S. president, Donald J. Trump. The younger brother of Trump’s father, Fred, he helped design X-ray machines that greatly helped cancer patients and worked on radar research for the Allies during World War II. Donald Trump himself cited his uncle’s credentials often during his presidential campaign. 'My uncle used to tell me about nuclear before nuclear was nuclear,' he once told an interviewer.
"At the time, the FBI pointed to Dr. Trump’s report as evidence that Tesla’s vaunted '#DeathRay' particle beam weapon didn’t exist, outside of rumors and speculation. But in fact, the #USGovernment itself was split in its response to Tesla’s technology. Marc Seifer, author of the biography Wizard: The Life & Times of Nikola Tesla, says a group of military personnel at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, including Brigadier General L.C. Craigee, had a very different opinion of Tesla’s ideas.
"'Craigee was the first person to ever fly a jet plane for the military, so he was like the John Glenn of the day,' Seifer says. 'He said, ‘there’s something to this—the particle beam weapon is real.’ So you have two different groups, one group dismissing Tesla’s invention, and another group saying there’s really something to it.'
"Then there’s the nagging question of the missing files. When Tesla died, his estate was to go to his nephew, Sava Kosanovic, who at the time was the Yugoslav ambassador to the U.S. (thanks to his familial connection with Serbia’s most celebrated inventor). According to the recently declassified documents, some in the FBI feared Kosanovic was trying to wrest control of Tesla’s technology in order to 'make such information available to the enemy,' and even considered arresting him to prevent this.
"In 1952, after a U.S. court declared Kosanovic the rightful heir to his uncle’s estate, Tesla’s files and other materials were sent to Belgrade, Serbia, where they now reside in the Nikola Tesla Museum there. But while the FBI originally recorded some 80 trunks among Tesla’s effects, only 60 arrived in Belgrade, Seifer says. 'Maybe they packed the 80 into 60, but there is the possibility that…the government did keep the missing trunks.'
"For the five-part HISTORY series The Tesla Files, Seifer joined forces with Dr. Travis Taylor, an astrophysicist, and Jason Stapleton, an investigative reporter, to search for these missing files and seek out the truth of the government’s views on the 'Death Ray' particle-beam weapon and Tesla’s other ideas.
"Despite John G. Trump’s dismissive assessment of Tesla’s ideas immediately after his death, the military did try and incorporate #particlebeam weaponry in the decades following World War II, Seifer says. Notably, the inspiration of the 'Death Ray' fueled Ronald Reagan’s #StrategicDefenseInitiative, or 'Star Wars' program, in the 1980s. If the government is still using Tesla’s ideas to power its technology, Seifer explains, that could explain why some files related to the inventor still remain classified.
[...]
"Although some of his more sensitive innovations may still be hidden, Tesla’s legacy is alive and well, both in the devices we use every day, and the technologies that will undoubtedly play a role in our future. 'Tesla is the inventor of #wireless technology. He’s the inventor of the ability to create an unlimited number of wireless channels,' Seifer says of the inventor’s lasting impact. 'So radio guidance systems, #encryption, remote control robots—it’s all based on Tesla’s technology.'"
But to be serious, anyone who’s actually interested in the state of science in the US can compare budgets against research output and program requirements to see that in the last couple of years those expected performance metrics have been missed more and more due to orders coming down the pipeline from the Biden administration.
I know I was in a meeting just last week going over astoundingly poor numbers from the past couple of years.
Anyone who’s interested in this should really be pulling up those numbers from federal agencies and even filing FOIA requests to see the internal arguments about it, because it has been a major thing that’s been coming up that hasn’t been getting as much attention as it deserves.
And again, I’m not saying it’s anything intentional. As far as I can tell it’s just micromanaging by people who don’t know what they’re doing, but it is seriously impacting scientific efforts throughout the country, and even the world.
I found this foil # for a record I did not request.
FOIL-2023-841-00845
This was how it was handled.
"Your request under the Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) has been reviewed and the documents you requested have been posted on the OpenRecords portal."
I cannot find the appropriate data set to find this result. All I know it was in 2023.
Their work has an incredible impact: They are holding goverments accountable, exposing misdemeanour, drawing attention to oudated laws and questionable practices and ultimately even pushing for changes in law.
legendary journalist #JohnPilger on how my #FOIA battle has allowed revealing that the #CrownProsecutionService,then headed by #KeirStarmer, contributed creating the legal and diplomatic quagmire that kept Julian #Assange trapped in London:
"Calling FOIA 'one of the most important tools citizens can use to hold their government accountable,' [Secretary of State Jocelyn] Benson said the new online portal would make document requests easier and the results more accessible than they’ve ever been. In fact, she said once a FOIA request has been made, many of the responsive documents will be publicly available on the department’s website. "
Uploaded #FBI#FOIA file relating to case of ShadowHawk, a #hacker arrested for #hacking AT&T & NATO in 1987. File includes a lot of press clippings as FBI agent asked NCAVC for a profile of juvenile hackers & got back 'Computer World' article photocopies. https://archive.org/details/ShadowHawk-FBI-FOIA
Congratulations to my friend Emma Best (@NatSecGeek); fellow frequent #FOIA filer, transparency hero, journalist and all around great human on the 5 year anniversary of DDoSecrets. The library of leaks includes 100M files from 59 countries, disclosures that resulted in dozens of news stories in the public interest and has made a huge impact since the collective was founded in 2018
LexisNexis began selling face recognition... and personal location data to U.S. Customs and Border Protection late last year, according to contract documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request... the $15.9M contract includes a broad menu of powerful tools for locating individuals... using a vast array of personal data, much of it obtained and used without judicial oversight...