A look back at the games governments played to avoid transparency

In the year 2015, we witnessed the launch of OpenAI, a debate over the color of a dress going viral, and a Supreme Court decision that same-sex couples have the right to get married. It was also the year that the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) first published The Foilies, an annual report that hands out tongue-in-cheek "awards" to government agencies and officials that respond outrageously when a member of the public tries to access public records through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) or similar laws.

A lot has changed over the last decade, but one thing that hasn't is the steady flow of attempts by authorities to avoid their legal and ethical obligations to be open and accountable. Sometimes, these cases are intentional, but just as often, they are due to incompetence or straight-up half-assedness.

Over the years, EFF has teamed up with MuckRock to document and ridicule these FOIA fails and transparency trip-ups. And through a partnership with AAN Publishers, we have named-and-shamed the culprits in weekly newspapers and on indie news sites across the United States in celebration of Sunshine Week, an annual event raising awareness of the role access to public records plays in a democracy.  

This year, we reflect on the most absurd and frustrating winners from the last 10 years as we prepare for the next decade, which may even be more terrible for government transparency.

The Most Infuriating FOIA Fee: U.S. Department of Defense (2016 Winner)

Assessing huge fee estimates is one way agencies discourage FOIA requesters.

Under FOIA, federal agencies are able to charge "reasonable" fees for producing copies of records. But sometimes agencies fabricate enormous price tags to pressure the requester to drop the query.

In 2015, Martin Peck asked the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) to disclose the number of "HotPlug” devices (tools used to preserve data on seized computers) it had purchased. The DOD said it would cost $660 million and 15 million labor hours (over 1,712 years), because its document system wasn't searchable by keyword, and staff would have to comb through 30 million contracts by hand. 

Runners-up: 

City of Seattle (2019 Winner): City officials quoted a member of the public $33 million for metadata for every email sent in 2017, but ultimately reduced the fee to $40.

Rochester (Michigan) Community Schools District (2023 Winner): A group of parents critical of the district's remote-learning plan requested records to see if the district was spying on their social media. One parent was told they would have to cough up $18,641,345 for the records, because the district would have to sift through every email. 

Willacy County (Texas) Sheriff's Office (2016 Winner): When the Houston Chronicle asked for crime data, the sheriff sent them an itemized invoice that included $98.40 worth of Wite-Out–the equivalent of 55 bottles–to redact 1,016 pages of records.

The Most Ridiculous Redaction: Federal Bureau of Investigation (2015 Winner)

Ain't no party like a REDACTED FBI party!

Brad Heath, who in 2014 was a reporter at USA Today, got a tip that a shady figure had possibly attended an FBI retirement party. So he filed a request for the guest list and pictures taken at the event. In response, the FBI sent a series of surreal photos of the attendees, hugging, toasting, and posing awkwardly, but all with polygonal redactions covering their faces like some sort of mutant, Minecraft family reunion.

Runner-Up 

U.S. Southern Command (2023 Winner): Investigative journalist Jason Leopold obtained scans of paintings by detainees at Guantanamo Bay, which were heavily redacted under the claim that the art would disclose law enforcement information that could "reasonably be expected to risk circumvention of the law."

The Most Reprehensible Reprisal Against a Requester: White Castle, Louisiana (2017 Winner)

WBRZ Reporter Chris Nakamoto was cuffed for trying to obtain records in White Castle, Louisiana. Credit: WBRZ-TV

Chris Nakamoto, at the time a reporter for WBRZ, filed a public records request to probe the White Castle mayor's salary. But when he went down to check on some of the missing records, he was handcuffed, placed in a holding cell, and charged with the crime of "remaining after being forbidden.” He was summoned to appear before the "Mayor's Court" in a judicial proceeding presided over by none other than the same mayor he was investigating. The charges were dropped two months later. 

Runners-up

Jack White (2015 Winner): One of the rare non-government Foilies winners, the White Stripes guitarist verbally abused University of Oklahoma student journalists and announced he wouldn't play at the school anymore. The reason? The student newspaper, OU Daily, obtained and published White's contract for a campus performance, which included his no-longer-secret guacamole recipe, a bowl of which was demanded in his rider.

Richlands, Virginia (2024 Winner): Resident Laura Mollo used public records laws to investigate problems with the 911 system and, in response, experienced intense harassment from the city and its contractors, including the police pulling her over and the city appointing a special prosecutor to investigate her. On separate occasions, Morro even says she found her mailbox filled with spaghetti and manure. 

Worst Federal Agency of the Decade: Federal Bureau of Investigation 

Bashing the FBI has come back into vogue among certain partisan circles in recent years, but we've been slamming the feds long before it was trendy.

The agency received eight Foilies over the last decade, more than any other entity, but the FBI's hostility towards FOIA goes back much further. In 2021, the Cato Institute uncovered records showing that, since at least 1989, the FBI had been spying on the National Security Archive, a non-profit watchdog that keeps an eye on the intelligence community. The FBI’s methods included both physical and electronic surveillance, and the records show the FBI specifically cited the organization's "tenacity" in using FOIA.

Cato's Patrick G. Eddington reported it took 11 months for the FBI to produce those records, but that's actually relatively fast for the agency. We highlighted a 2009 FOIA request that the FBI took 12 years to fulfil: Bruce Alpert of the Times-Picayune had asked for records regarding the corruption case of U.S. Rep. William Jefferson, but by the time he received the 84 pages in 2021, the reporter had retired. Similarly, when George Washington University professor and documentary filmmaker Nina Seavey asked the FBI for records related to surveillance of antiwar and civil rights activists, the FBI told her it would take 17 years to provide the documents. When the agency launched an online system for accepting FOIA requests, it somehow made the process even more difficult.

The FBI was at its worst when it was attempting to use non-disclosure agreements to keep local law enforcement agencies from responding to public records requests regarding the use of cell phone surveillance technologies called cell-site simulators, or "stingrays." The agency even went so far as to threaten agencies that release technical information to media organizations with up to 20 years in prison and a $1 million fine, claiming it would be a violation of the Arms Export Control Act.

But you don't have to take our word for it: Even Micky Dolenz of The Monkees had to sue the FBI to get records on how agents collected intelligence on the 1960s band.

Worst Local Jurisdiction of the Decade: Chicago, Illinois

Some agencies, like the city of Chicago, treat FOIA requests like a plague.

Over the last decade, The Foilies have called out officials at all levels of government and in every part of the country (and even in several other countries), but time and time again, one city keeps demonstrating special antagonism to the idea of freedom of information: the Windy City.

In fact, the most ridiculous justification for ignoring transparency obligations we ever encountered was proudly championed by now-former Mayor Lori Lightfoot during the COVID-19 lockdown in April 2020. She offered a bogus choice to Chicagoans: the city could either process public records requests or provide pandemic response, falsely claiming that answering these requests would pull epidemiologists off the job. According to the Chicago Tribune, she implied that responding to FOIA requests would result in people having to "bury another grandmother." She even invoked the story of Passover, claiming that the "angel of death is right here in our midst every single day" as a reason to suspend FOIA deadlines.

If we drill down on Chicago, there's one particular department that seems to take particular pleasure in screwing the public: the Chicago Police Department (CPD). In 2021, CPD was nominated so many times (for withholding records of search warrants, a list of names of police officers, and body-worn camera footage from a botched raid) that we just threw up our hands and named them "The Hardest Department to FOIA" of the year.

In one particularly nasty case, CPD had mistakenly raided the home of an innocent woman and handcuffed her while she was naked and did not allow her to dress. Later, the woman filed a FOIA request for the body-worn camera footage and had to sue to get it. But CPD didn't leave it there: the city's lawyers tried to block a TV station from airing the video and then sought sanctions against the woman's attorney. 

If you thought these were some doozies, check out The Foilies 2025 (to be published on March 16) to read the beginning of a new decade's worth of FOIA horror stories.