I am also looking forward to seeing what I can find. I suspect it will be a mixed bag, with some major victories and significant disappointments.
Once the information has been delivered, I plan on building a public facing website with easy means of downloading all of the content.
And to your point about the journalists, my social self agrees with you. These professional investigators/communicators should have been all over this. But then my logical mind enters the chat and I recall how absolutely pathetic modern "journalism" has become. Most journalists are parasites. So we have to do this ourselves.
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:
- The Stevens Method - Chaz Stevens' substack which contains most of his templates for creating a FOIA request, as well as specific strategies for rejection responses
- u/ChurchOMarsChaz - This is Chaz Stevens' Reddit account where he discusses most of his ongoing projects
- Little Sis - An excellent volunteer project attempting to map networks of power
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.
I already know the baseline of what I'm going to receive in most cases. I already have the evidence I need for a public shaming campaign. But I want more tissue/meat to play with.
As a result of "things", I have insider information into some of these requests. Largely due to the research done ahead of time.
There are also others doing the exact same thing who have reaped true change from. I am a copycat, which is excellent. We need more copycats. We need to inspire each other.
These FOIA requests are ultimately a bureaucratic step towards what local communities have known for decades.
LocalFOIA
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