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this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2026
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Today I Learned
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Where should someone start if they want to look into their local politicians? Give us a roadmap of how you'd pull the thread?
As mentioned in the post text, I am a proud copycat. Because if I can do it, you can too.
I was inspired largely by Chaz Stevens' work. There are other resources I have relied on for doing research and filing FOIA requests, examples of which are listed below:
I also used automation to scrape the social media profiles of hundreds of politicians, local governments, individual LEOs, religious nonprofits, religious leaders and so on. Those tools were based on Chaz Stevens' various tool kits. Which are described in articles and posts found at the links above.