Invitation: Unf*ck Your FOIA Book Preview

A Community Conversation about Transparency Laws and How We Use Them (Even when fascists would prefer you didn't)

By now you probably know I’m a FOIA nerd. For about a year, I’ve been chipping away at writing a FOIA book. I’m excited to share that it’s almost ready.

On Tuesday, February 18, 2025, I’ll offer the first in series of trainings based on a manuscript I’m working on called Unf*ck Your FOIA: A Field Guide to Freeing the Information We Need to Survive.

Click here to register.

There are a lot of amazing Freedom of Information (FOI) resources out there. I’ll share many of them in the book. But I’ve been searching for years to find a tool that’s geared toward quickly skilling up a broad audience of movement-minded people looking for ways to use transparency laws to inform themselves, defend their communities, build power and win.

So, if that’s something you or someone you know might want to learn more about, here’s a link to the first session. I’ve set a range of $1-$15 in the event page, but if you subscribe to this or any of my other platforms, or if you just shoot me a quick message, I’ll be happy to get you in for free. The goal is not to gate-keep this information, but to road-test it on a wider audience so that the work has more impact once it’s published.

To get a sense of how these sessions will unfold, I’m pasting an older draft of the Book Proposal below:

Book Proposal: Unf*ck Your FOIA

This proposed addition to the Unf*ck Your ___ Series could just as easily be titled “F*ck Your Fascism”. That’s because democracies die in the dark, and fascists fight freedom of information like their regimes depend on it. This book won’t save us from fascism; but it might help us harness more of the power we currently possess and use it to organize and build the world we want. My goal is to offer readers an accessible, relatable, practical guide to engaging with public records laws. The principal audience are movement organizers, independent journalists and researchers, students, policy advocates, lawyers, and community activists who are searching for a mode of direct action they can use to grow power and fuel liberation.

I base this guide on more than 15 years of experience as a public records requestor, lawyer, FOIA litigant, journalist, legal academic, writer, community organizer, and technical consultant.

The book shares new, often heterodox answers to the most common questions journalists, organizers, researchers, and advocates ask about the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and its state analogs. If a “popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prelude to a farce or a tragedy,” the current state of transparency practice in the US is both.

As people living under a notional democracy, we’re constantly reassured that we have “a right to know what [our] governments are up to.” This is “needed to check against corruption and hold the governors accountable to the governed.” Yet when we dare to ask for information necessary to fulfill our democratic roles as a well-informed public, we too often learn how disinterested in and hostile to popular democratic participation our systems really are. Nonetheless, we can use the scraps we claw from government clutches to build a map of a new world, and this book can help.

The interventions in this small but scrappy guide are, therefore, insurgent. Our goal is to offer journalists, scholars, students, activists, communities, and anyone looking to plug into organized movements time-tested techniques for using transparency laws to expose harm, identify illegitimacy, reclaim power, and fight back against injustice.

Unf*ck Your FOIA Book Structure:

1. Introduction

2. Chapter 1: A Society Without Transparency Is ______.

   1. A Brief History of Public Access to Information, from the Pharaohs to the 1950s.

   2. The Freedom of Information Act as an Anti-Repression Tool for Movements

      1. The Promise of Knowledge

      2. Power-Mapping As Praxis

      3. Catalyzing Narrative and Power Shifts

   3. Modern Resistance to Free Information and Its Implications for Democracy

3. Chapter 2: How We Use Public Information to Organize & Win

   1. The Injustice Framework: Power + Harm - Legitimacy = Injustice

   2. Public Records Work as a Means of Power-Mapping

   3. Public Records Work as a Means of Exposing, Corroborating, Articulating, and Reducing Harm

   4. Public Records Work as a Means of Legitimacy-Testing & Delegitimization

   5. Public Records Work as Transformative Justice

4. Chapter 3: The Basic Structure of Public Information Laws

   1. Before the Request: Affirmative Disclosure Obligations

   2. Making the Request: Limits and Possibilities in Demanding Information

   3. Enforcing the Request: Courts, Councils, and Communities as Sites of Adjudication & Contestation

5. Chapter 4: How to Use FOIA and Similar Laws

   1. What Kind of Requestor(s) Are We?

   2. A Step-by-Step Guide to Planning & Filing Your FOIA

   3. FOIA Without Follow-Up Is Fantasy

6. Chapter 5: When They Won’t Respond

   1. Understanding Why They Won’t Respond

   2. Time-Tested Strategies to Subvert Anti-Democratic Transparency Obstruction

   3. Public Records Power-Shifting Strategies Nearly Anyone Can Use

   4. “So Sue Me”

7. Conclusion

   1. What we do with records

   2. Why we keep requesting

8. Appendix A - Sample Request Language

   1. 20 FOIAs to get you started

   2. Scripts for responding to records officers