Introduction


(A sample portion of the body of a FOIA request.)



Welcome to "I Can FOIA And You Can Too". I have created this blog to help the public understand how to use the Freedom of Information Act to hold our government officials accountable and foster greater transparency.

I am by no means an expert at using the Freedom of Information Act, however I do feel that I have learned a great many things about FOIA, and I want to share with you what I have learned. I hope that you will find the information in this blog useful, and I hope that it may inspire you to use your own rights to better understand what our elected officials are doing with the power we allow them to have. FOIA is a powerful and sadly underused tool at our disposal and it is my hope that explaining just how easy it is to use FOIA, we can change that underused part.

For now, I am going to focus on what I know best, which is the Virginia FOIA process. Every jurisdiction has a different law for their own FOIA process. You will need to learn about the laws in the jurisdiction that you plan to submit a FOIA request in, in order to be successful. The FOIA process can be frustrating. The best advice I can give you about managing the frustration of FOIA is to have a lot of patience and to put a lot of thought in to your requests before you submit them.

So let's get started.







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