The Case of the ‘Lost’ FOIA Requests
FOIA requests at numerous federal agencies in February were “lost” by a government records contractor. It turns out, the “data failure” was linked to two convicted hackers who worked at the company.
Welcome to a special edition of FOIA Files! Today, I published a wild story sparked by an email I received from a federal agency. It alerted me that a few days’ worth of Freedom of Information Act requests submitted in February had been “lost” due to a “data failure” or an “outage” at a software company the agencies work with. My investigation into the incident led to a big reveal related to some twin problems. Read on for the backstory! And If you’re not already getting FOIA Files in your inbox, sign up here.
If you’ve ever submitted a FOIA request through a federal agency’s public access portal there’s a good chance you’re using an application called FOIAXpress. The software was developed by Opexus, a Washington-based company that provides software services for processing US government records.