The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s work to use the Freedom of Information Act to gain access to detailed information about the way that the US government operates in the realm of privacy, due process and civil liberties has been an enormous success. Too enormous, as it turns out. Now, EFF has more liberated documents than it can handle, so it’s seeking volunteers to help look through the document dumps for significant material:
Here’s how the Cooperating FOIA list will work: Send us an email to put your name on our list. When we get government documents in response to a FOIA request, we’ll post a note to the list with a basic description of the project (for example: “Documents from DHS detailing government use of social media – approximately 100 pages” or “Documents from FBI detailing misuse of National Security Letters – approximately 10,000 pages”). If you’re on the list and are interested, you contact us, and we’ll tell you how to access pdf versions of the documents and what we’re looking for in the information. Then you review the documents and let us know what you find. If it’s important and we think it fits in with our mission at EFF, we’ll blog about it and publicize it. If we decide not to, you’re free to write about it on your own.
You don’t need to be an attorney or have any specialized knowledge to be a Cooperating FOIA Reviewer. The documents we get may include technical specifications, reflect internal conversations on policy, or discuss violations of the law, so the ideal FOIA Reviewer is someone with sharp eyes and an interest in ferreting out information. Interested in being a Cooperating FOIA Reviewer? Send a note to coopfoia@eff.org with your name, email address, and some brief information on who you are and what you’re interested in, and we’ll add you to the list.
EFF Seeks Cooperating FOIA Reviewers