Sunlight Foundation Reporting Group

1. Does the EPA collect SF-LLLs?

   By Anupama Narayanswamy Jul 20, 2007 8:35 p.m.

   Browsing through the 2008 Senate Interior and Environment Appropriations Bill on the Taxpayers for Common Sense site, I noticed that one of the largest amounts ($11 million) was earmarked to the National Rural Water Association a non-profit organization that provides training and technical assistance and gives out sub-grants to water providers in rural areas. They receive grants from the USDA and the EPA.

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2. Great use of correspondence logs

   By Anupama Narayanswamy Jul 10, 2007 3:46 p.m.

   The Center for Investigative Reporting and the Los Angeles Times used some of our correspondence logs to track down letters members of Congress were writing to federal agencies requesting funding for certain projects. Here's a link to the LA Times story.

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3. Defense correspondence logs

   By Anupama Narayanswamy Jun 21, 2007 9:46 p.m.

   Here's the correspondence logs we received from the Department of Defense recently. We received about 100 pages of documents in PDF format that we converted to text.

4. Defense Contractors Reap Windfall in 2005 Earmarks

   By Anupama Narayanswamy Jun 12, 2007 7:01 p.m.

   By Larry Makinson and Anupama Narayanswamy

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5. Whistleblower Complaints to DoD

   By Anupama Narayanswamy Jun 4, 2007 6:17 p.m.

   Two letters members of Congress wrote to the Defense Contract Audit Agency reveal two cases of employees of government contractors who alleged wrongdoing by their companies.

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6. FCC Correspondence Logs

   By Anupama Narayanswamy May 30, 2007 3:08 p.m.

   Here are the two Federal Communications Commission spreadsheets, converted from PDF to excel. The first one is for January and February and the second for March.

7. FOIA on a Floppy

   By Anupama Narayanswamy May 23, 2007 8:46 p.m.

   Here's a picture of the most recent addition to the stack of FOIA clutter on my desk.

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8. An interview with a former Alaska lawmaker on the Veco scandal

   By Anupama Narayanswamy May 14, 2007 10:21 p.m.
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9. Air Force Logs of Correspondence

   By Anupama Narayanswamy May 3, 2007 10:11 p.m.

   We received

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10. Going Back To An Earlier Post...

    By Anupama Narayanswamy Apr 24, 2007 9:50 p.m.

    on the letter Senator McCain wrote to the Secretary of the Air Force: Here's a copy of it, from the Project on Government Oversight

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11. DOD misinterpreted the FOIA

    By Anupama Narayanswamy Apr 24, 2007 9:49 p.m.

    A couple of days ago I followed up with DOD about why they denied our FOIA for correspondence logs earlier. Their denial was based on the fact that the records were too large and they wanted us to narrow our request. On talking to them I figured that DOD officials had interpreted our FOIA to include all documents and not just the logs of correspondences. So, they agreed to re-open our FOIA based on this clarification.

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12. The Days Happenings

    By Anupama Narayanswamy Apr 20, 2007 9:40 p.m.

    A few minutes after I posted the story about the USDA publishing Social Security numbers on their Web site, I received a call from Marc Kesselman, USDA's General Counsel. He "appealed to my senses" and said that by publishing the story, we were compromising confidential and sensitive information that could be misused.

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13. USDA Puts Aid Recipients' Social Security Numbers Online

    By Anupama Narayanswamy Apr 20, 2007 4:09 p.m.

    For almost a decade, some divisions of the Department of Agriculture published the Social Security numbers of individuals who receive federal aid in a publicly available online database of government grants. The Farm Service Agency and at least one other agency within Agriculture included the nine digit numbers as part of the tracking number assigned to each recipient of government assistance, called a Federal Award ID.

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14. Two Replies and Conversations with FOIA Officers

    By Anupama Narayanswamy Apr 11, 2007 2:38 p.m.

    Today, we received a reply to our correspondence logs FOIA from USAID as an excel spreadsheet. This is only the second time we have gotten a reply in a format that can be uploaded and used to fulfill our goal of making the logs searchable using keywords. Here are the two replies we have received so far: from EPA(.xls) and USAID (.xls).

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Investigations by Sunlight Foundation reporter Anupama Narayanswamy