The Freedom of Information Act:
Who Owns the Truth About What the Government Did

Before FOIA, the U.S. government had no legal obligation to show the public anything. The 1946 Administrative Procedure Act technically allowed records access, but it contained a broad exemption for any information held "in the public interest" to remain secret — a loophole agencies used to refuse almost everything. The press could report on what the government chose to tell it. That was the entire information architecture of the federal government for the first two decades of the Cold War.

Congressman John Moss (D-CA) introduced the first version of what would become FOIA in 1955. It took eleven years to pass. Every executive branch agency opposed it. The Department of Defense, the State Department, the Justice Department, and the FBI all submitted formal objections arguing that mandatory disclosure would compromise national security, harm foreign relations, and impede law enforcement. These were the same agencies that were, at that moment, running COINTELPRO — the secret domestic surveillance program targeting the NAACP, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

President Lyndon Johnson signed FOIA on July 4, 1966 — Independence Day, a date chosen for political symbolism — but his signing statement was notably cold. Johnson despised the bill. His aide Bill Moyers later recalled that LBJ "had to be dragged kicking and screaming to sign it" and refused to hold a signing ceremony, instead signing it quietly at his Texas ranch. He said the law "made him shudder." The most powerful democracy advocate in his own self-mythology had just been legally required to let people look at his government's files, and he hated it.

The law that passed was weak by design. It required agencies to disclose records on request but included nine broad exemptions — for national security, internal personnel rules, trade secrets, law enforcement, and more. Agencies could invoke any exemption and then require the requester to sue them in federal court to challenge the refusal. For individuals without legal resources, the exemptions were functionally absolute. The right to know was real. So was the infrastructure built to limit it.

The original 1966 FOIA was almost useless as a practical tool — agencies routinely ignored requests or invoked exemptions with no timeline for response. The first major enforcement came not from FOIA litigation but from break-ins. On March 8, 1971, eight activists calling themselves the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI broke into the FBI's resident office in Media, Pennsylvania and stole every file. The documents they mailed to journalists contained the first public evidence of a program called COINTELPRO.

The Watergate scandal (1972–1974) created the political climate to strengthen the law. Congress passed FOIA amendments in 1974 over President Ford's veto — the first time Congress had ever overridden a presidential veto on a transparency bill. The 1974 amendments imposed response deadlines, created fee waivers for journalists and researchers, and allowed courts to order agencies to search for records and pay attorney fees when requesters won. They also, critically, required the FBI and CIA to respond to national security requests — allowing challenges to the exemption in court rather than accepting the agency's word.

Between 1975 and 1978, civil rights attorneys, journalists, and activists used the strengthened FOIA to systematically request the FBI files on the Black Panther Party, the NAACP, Martin Luther King Jr., Fred Hampton, the Nation of Islam, and SNCC. What came back — thousands of pages, heavily redacted, but with enough visible — documented the architecture of the state's war against Black political life in its own bureaucratic language. The forged letters. The informant instructions. The memos from Hoover himself. All of it retrieved through FOIA.

FOIA contains nine exemptions that allow agencies to withhold records. They are officially numbered Exemption 1 through Exemption 9. The most commonly invoked against civil rights and racial justice requesters are:

Exemption 1 (National Security): Covers classified information. Used to withhold surveillance records, intelligence assessments, and military files. The FBI invoked this against virtually every COINTELPRO request in the 1970s, releasing documents only after years of litigation. Records about Black domestic organizations were classified as national security threats.

Exemption 6 (Personal Privacy): Covers personnel and medical files. Used routinely to redact the names of FBI informants in COINTELPRO documents — protecting, for decades, the identities of the agents and informants who helped engineer assassinations like Fred Hampton's. Some names were not released until decades after the individuals had died.

Exemption 7 (Law Enforcement): Covers records compiled for law enforcement purposes that could interfere with enforcement proceedings, deprive a person of a fair trial, constitute an unwarranted privacy invasion, disclose an informant's identity, or endanger life. This is the exemption that has been most extensively used to withhold police misconduct records, surveillance files on activists, and any ongoing "investigation" — including investigations that have been nominally closed for decades but never formally terminated.

The exemptions are not neutral. A 2020 Knight First Amendment Institute study found that agencies with the worst records of withholding — the FBI, CIA, and State Department — were disproportionately responsible for withholding records related to civil rights, racial justice, and protest activity. The categories of information most likely to be redacted or withheld track almost perfectly with the categories of information that would document government misconduct against Black communities.

After the 2014 Ferguson uprising and the growth of the Black Lives Matter movement, journalists and civil liberties organizations began filing FOIA requests for federal surveillance records of protest activity. What returned — often after years of litigation — documented a surveillance infrastructure that directly recalled COINTELPRO's logic, if not its official name.

In 2017, an internal FBI intelligence bulletin obtained by Foreign Policy magazine through a source (not FOIA — the bureau did not voluntarily release it) described a new threat category: "Black Identity Extremists." The category defined anyone who "use[s] force or violence in furtherance of their ideological agenda in response to perceived racism and injustice" against Black people as a domestic terrorism threat — applying a terrorism framework to people who responded to police violence against Black people. The category had no statutory basis. It was not passed by Congress, defined in regulation, or subjected to public review. It was created internally and applied to BLM-affiliated activists.

FOIA requests for the underlying "Black Identity Extremist" assessment and related surveillance files were filed by the ACLU, EFF, and multiple journalists. The Justice Department took more than three years to respond to most of them, invoked Exemption 7 on virtually all responsive documents, and released files so heavily redacted as to be unintelligible. A federal court eventually ordered additional disclosure in 2021. The released pages showed the FBI had been monitoring Black Lives Matter chapters, tracking organizers' social media, and sharing intelligence about protest activity with local law enforcement — beginning before any evidence of planned violence.

The parallel is not metaphorical. In 1967, the FBI classified the Black Panther Party as the "greatest threat to national security" in an internal memo. In 2017, the FBI classified individuals who protested police violence against Black people as domestic terrorists. Both designations were made without public knowledge, without judicial review, and without the subjects' ability to contest them. FOIA was the only mechanism that eventually exposed both — and in both cases it took years, litigation, and determined journalists to get past the exemptions.

FOIA is not only a historical subject. It is a usable tool, and it has practical limits that are worth understanding precisely. Every federal agency is covered. All 50 states have their own FOIA-equivalent laws (called "open records" or "sunshine laws"), which cover state agencies, local police departments, school districts, and city governments. The federal government's FOIA does not cover Congress, federal courts, or the White House (though the Presidential Records Act provides separate, delayed access to White House documents).

To file a federal FOIA request, you identify the specific agency holding the records you want, describe the records as specifically as possible, and submit the request to the agency's FOIA office. Agencies are required by law to respond within 20 business days — though virtually all of them maintain multi-year backlogs and routinely miss this deadline without penalty. If you are a journalist, academic, or educational institution, you can request a fee waiver and expedited processing.

The most important practical reality of FOIA is this: agencies do not search for what you don't specifically ask for. If you ask for "all records related to the surveillance of [organization]," the agency will search for documents with that organization's name in the title or subject line. Documents that discuss the organization without naming it in those fields — which is a common technique for creating records that are harder to retrieve — may not be returned. Effective FOIA requests require specificity about date ranges, document types, specific officials' names, and specific programs.

State open records laws are often more immediately useful for accountability work about local police departments, city contracts, and school discipline records. Police misconduct records, use-of-force reports, disciplinary files, and internal investigation records are held by local agencies — and in most states, are covered by state sunshine laws. Some states, including California and New York, have passed specific laws requiring disclosure of police misconduct records that override agencies' attempts to invoke privacy exemptions.

The National Security Archive at George Washington University, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, and MuckRock (an online platform for filing, tracking, and publishing FOIA requests) are the primary public resources for navigating the process. MuckRock has facilitated over 100,000 FOIA requests and published the results — creating the largest public database of government records obtained through transparency law in American history. Many of those records directly document the treatment of Black communities by federal, state, and local governments.