New website tracks FOIA requests to shed light on the process

By Robin J Phillips on Mar 30, 2011 in Basics, Featured, Investigation

A new website, The FOIA Project, is dedicated to improve the process of asking for information from government sources.

The FOIA project is being developed by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) with support from Syracuse University and a grant from the CS Fund/Warsh-Mott Legacy.

The site’s explainer says:

“The ultimate goal of these FOIA Project mechanisms will be to shame those who violate the FOIA by creating a broad new kind of sanction: through systematic public exposure, eliminate the de facto secrecy that today cloaks from public censure those who engage in unlawful withholding.”

This site’s goal is to “bring transparency to the process by which the U.S. government withholds information.”

Initially, it will feature documents from FOIA cases against government defendants brought in district court, and provide a number of ways of getting at these documents. You can search for cases in the database by state: The FOIA Project Search Cases.

Here’s a map of the FOIA cases tracked so far:

Source: The FOIA Project

About the Author

I am digital director at the Reynolds Center for Business Journalism, which I joined in 2009. Before that I was Online Community Manager for azcentral, the online site for The Arizona Republic. Before arriving in Arizona, I worked at Newsday where I was Deputy Business Editor. I was the small business editor at BusinessWeek Online. I teach journalists to use Twitter, Facebook and other social media tools to expand and manage their networks. And I am a cofounder of #wjchat, a weekly Twitter chat about web journalism. You can reach me at Email: Robin.Phillips@BusinessJournalism.org OR RobinJPhillips.com OR @RobinJP