Now in its fourth year, FOIA March Madness works a lot like the US college basketball version of March Madness, where participants bet on teams in the NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Tournament, except in this version, instead of basketball teams, the brackets consist of 64 federal agencies. MuckRock sends the same request to all the agencies — this year, it asked for data about the agencies themselves — and participants bet on how quickly agencies will reply. MuckRock puts the agencies in brackets, and each week, advances them based on if they get back to them and whether they release any information.
“Agencies repeatedly tell us that FOIA March Madness is their favorite thing, and that they look forward to it every year,” Brown says. “Some agencies take it super seriously — the SEC [Securities and Exchanges Commission] actually made their own award for themselves after they won. Of course, some of the agencies are always going to be bad sports about it, like the CIA and the FBI. But a lot of people [at agencies’ FOIA offices] are actually in this line of work because they want to be doing it.”
The agency that came out on top of FOIA March Madness in 2018, the Securities and Exchange Commission, created a plaque with a rock on it. They have pledged to give it to this year’s winners. Photo: Courtesy of MuckRock
FOIA March Madness isn’t easy, says David Cuillier, who is president of the National Freedom of Information Coalition: “I used data, crunched it and picked agencies based on past performance. But it looks like I didn’t do that well, which tends to confirm my thinking in that it’s kind of hit-and-miss depending on which FOIA officer you get that day!”
Participants whose picks came out on top win packs of MuckRock swag, which is not just your typical tote bags and mugs. Well, they do have mugs, but they’re magical unredacting mugs. MuckRock’s merchandise is full of jokes for public records aficionados, like T-shirts bearing the major US records laws’ acronyms; stickers that read “Always Be Filing”; and “Black Bar” T-shirts (a spin on the logo of punk rock band Black Flag).
.. “Muckrock is helpful because they put out newsletters about successful releases of information that can spark new ideas or questions,” says Anthony Fisher, politics editor at Insider and Business Insider, and a regular user of MuckRock’s requesting service. “I also follow them on Twitter, and every once in a while they’ll show you something fun, like an FBI file from the sixties — something absurd like John Lennon’s FBI file. I think it’s a healthy thing for people to look back at the supposed glory days of the past, and you realize, oh, right, the government was always stretching its power and doing things that they don’t want you to know about.”
.. “There’s something fun about the service, sort of like a social network,” Craven says. “You get notifications when there are updates to your requests, and there are requesters I follow. Oftentimes if I’m trying to structure a certain request, I’ll look through MuckRock’s repository of archived requests and crib language from someone who’s really good at this. You can also look at how others are engaging with this law, and get inspired.”
.. “MuckRock’s process for submitting requests is probably the easiest out there for someone just getting started,” says Nate Jones, Director of the Freedom of Information Act Project for the National Security Archive, a nonprofit that collects declassified records.
.. MuckRock operates with a staff of seven full-time employees. According to Morisy, its budget for 2017 (the most recent year for which finalized financials were available) was just under $300,000. About half of MuckRock’s funding comes from grants from the Democracy Fund, the Knight Foundation, the News Integrity Initiative, and the Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence Initiative. A quarter comes from payment for MuckRock’s services, and the remaining quarter comes from miscellaneous sources like individual donations and merchandise sales (including the sales of two books they’ve authored about the FBI files of writers and scientists).
.. “We want more people filing requests, but we also want more people just supporting and understanding the value of these laws,” says Morisy. “Because that’s really at stake here — increasingly, people are skeptical of government, but also skeptical of oversight of government, and so you talk to a lot of people who say, ‘Well, if the government says that we don’t have a right to know, then who am I, an ordinary citizen, to push back against that?’ I think that’s a very dangerous mentality.
“We have to go out and educate people and say: If in a democracy you’re the government’s boss, then you have not just a right but a responsibility to understand what’s going on. So I think making this accessible, demystifying this process is part of how we build that support.”