Need a Sunshine Week or National FOI Day story?

National Freedom of Information Day is Friday, and all of next week is Sunshine Week. These events honoring the importance of transparency and open government to our democracy are great pegs for stories about the Freedom of Information Act, the law that gives the public the right to obtain public documents.

Here’s a couple of ideas from TRAC’s FOIA Project.

1. Report on the FOIA Project’s “FOIA Failure” public contest.

We’ve asked six prominent users of FOIA to select a case that represents a particularly egregious example of improper withholding from our database of more than 8,600 lawsuits brought against the government under FOIA. The selected cases deal with front-burner topics such as the targeted killings of Americans abroad and the use of drones by the FBI for domestic surveillance.

We’ll post the package that summarizes these cases Thursday, March 12, on the eve of National FOI Day, and invite the public to vote for the biggest FOIA Failure of them all. We’ll also send out a full release tomorrow, and are happy to share information in advance. The project will be active on Twitter at #foiafail and #sunshineweek.

2. Search the database of lawsuits yourself for interesting cases in your area.

Our database of cases now includes every instance since Oct. 1, 1996, that the government has been sued under FOIA. It contains nearly 28,000 documents from 8,600 district and appellate cases and is updated daily. It is searchable by defendant agency, plaintiff, and date.

The cases can also be filtered by district, so any news outlet can use the database to identify recently filed FOIA lawsuits in their coverage area by going to http://foiaproject.org/case_search/.

The FOIA Project staff is able to assist you at any time to identify and explore interesting stories related to the Freedom of Information Act that will be of interest to your audience. Please feel free to contact Greg Munno, 315-443-3613 or gjmunno@syr.edu to discuss, and please be on the lookout for our full release tomorrow about our “FOIA Failure” package and contest.