A Thaumatica archive · Freedom of Information
The public asks the government a question.Everyone gets the answer.
Aletheca drafts Freedom of Information Act requests, files them, chases them for as long as it takes, and publishes everything that comes back. Propose one and let the community fund it, or commission your own and watch it move — printing, postmark, signature, acknowledgement, release — one public line at a time.
- requests filed
- 2requests filed
- pages published
- 0pages published
- refusals, published
- 0refusals, published
- hidden because we disagreed
- 0hidden because we disagreed
Live
Everything the machine does, as it does it.
Carrier scans, agency letters, matcher verdicts, money. One public ledger — the same rows the API serves and the same rows a partner site receives on a webhook.
The machine
Filing is the easy part. This is the rest of it.
FOIA is cheap to start and expensive to finish. Postage is trivial; the eighteen months of follow-up are not, and neither is the day an agency's answer arrives as four photocopied pages in an envelope with no case number on it.
- 01
Drafted, and reviewed by a human
A proposal is not a wish, it is a finished letter: agency, records sought, date range, justification, fee-waiver argument. Everything that reaches the Docket has passed a review gate against a published refusal policy.
- A register of 1,380 federal, state and international bodies, each with its statute and deadline
- Public-interest fee-waiver argument on every federal request
- Refusals logged with a reason, publicly
- 02
Filed through whichever door the agency actually opens
Portal where one exists, email where it does not, fax for the handful that still insist, and physical mail — printed, metered and inducted by a vendor — for the county clerks who have no inbox at all.
- Agency portals: FOIAXpress PAL, SecureRelease, eFOIA, NextRequest, GovQA
- Email from a per-request alias, so every reply routes itself
- Certified mail with an electronic return receipt, priced at checkout
- Every carrier scan — printed, accepted, in transit, delivered, signed — becomes a public event
- 03
A postal address that reads its own mail
Agencies answer on paper more often than anyone expects. Aletheca holds a virtual address whose scans come back through an API, get OCR'd, and enter the same pipeline as an email — usually within twenty minutes of the envelope being opened.
- Inbound scans retrieved by API and full-text indexed
- The green card, when one is used, is scanned and attached to the request
- Faxes and portal downloads land in the same queue
- 04
Every reply matched to the request it answers
The hard part, and the part that is shown rather than assumed. Four deterministic methods are tried before anything is guessed at, and the method and its confidence are printed on the request page next to the letter.
- Per-request email alias — certain, no inference
- The request id printed in the return address, read off the scanned envelope
- The agency's own case number, bound at acknowledgement
- Below the confidence threshold: a human triage queue, never a silent guess
- 05
Chased, then published — whatever it says
The statutory clock runs on a schedule, not on someone's memory. Follow-ups go out automatically, the deadline breach is recorded as a fact about the agency, and the response is published in full: releases, refusals, Glomars and all.
- Automatic follow-up when an agency goes quiet
- Deadline breaches recorded and rolled into the agency scorecard
- OCR'd, searchable, page images intact, free to everyone
Told at every step
Anyone who paid for a filing hears about every one of these lines as it happens.
Request received. Payment captured. Letter finalised. Printed. Accepted at the Kansas City facility. Signed for by the DIA mailroom. Acknowledged, case 26-F-0417. Deadline passed. Third chase sent. Every one is a row in a public ledger, and a notification if you asked for one.
Email · webhook · in-app · RSS
The Docket
Proposed by anyone. Ranked by votes. Filed when the money is there.
Votes sort the queue; money moves it. The two are separate signals on purpose — a proposal with 1,200 votes and no money tells you something different from one funded by three people.
A contribution buys an attempt, not a document. Many attempts return nothing, and that is said here rather than in the terms of service. Money on a proposal that is never filed can be moved to another one or refunded — the arithmetic is public.
Reading Room
What came back, in full.
OCR'd, searchable, page images intact, free to everyone — with the exemption cited for every withholding and the Vaughn index published beside the release where the agency produced one.
The register
Every body worth asking, and the clock it answers on.
1,380 federal, state and international offices published by name, each carrying its statute, its deadline and the routes it takes requests on — plus every county, city, township, school board and fire district in the country, reachable through the law its state wrote.
1,380
bodies published by name
298 federal offices across 15 cabinet departments, 1064 state offices across 56 jurisdictions, and 18 international defence, aviation and archive bodies.
Open74
access statutes
Federal FOIA, the Privacy Act, the act of every state, DC and five territories, and the FOI regime of sixteen other countries — with the deadline machine-readable.
Open224,366
local offices reachable by statute
Counties, cities, townships, school boards and fire districts — each inheriting its state's deadline and appeal path. Counted, deliberately not named; the reason is published.
OpenFastest statutes in the country
And the ones with no deadline at all
12 jurisdictions set no number. Their statutes require production within a reasonable time, which means a request there cannot go overdue in any measurable sense — so Aletheca runs no countdown against them and records no constructive denial on elapsed days alone.
Knowing which of these you are in is the difference between an ordinary wait and a statutory breach, and it is the single most common thing a first-time requester gets wrong.
Agency scorecards
How each body actually behaves, measured against its own statute.
A scorecard exists only where Aletheca has actually filed — it is a measurement of our own correspondence, auditable by anyone who doubts it. The register above says who you can ask; this says what happened when we did.
| Agency | Filed | Median days | Statute | Late | Released | Glomar | Waivers |
|---|
Figures are computed from Aletheca’s own filings — not from an agency’s self-reported Annual FOIA Report. Where both exist they are shown side by side and never merged: two numbers that disagree are more informative than one number of unclear parentage.
For other sites
Put a FOIA pipeline behind your own buttons.
Aletheca is a foundation, not a destination. Any site with an audience that wants a record can embed the whole discipline — drafting, payment, the statutory clock, matching, publication — and keep its own interface, its own domain and a share of the revenue.
- One script tag turns a page into a Docket, a campaign panel, or a request-this-record button.
- A REST API for everything the site does, with webhooks for everything that happens.
- Requests originated by your site are attributed to it, publicly and permanently.
- A revenue share on Aletheca's own platform fee — never on postage or agency fees — set at whatever rate the two of us agree at integration.
uap.nexus/cases/2026-03-11
live<script src="https://aletheca.com/embed/v1.js" data-partner-token="<issued by Aletheca>" data-theme="inherit" async ></script> <div data-aletheca="request-button" data-agency="faa" data-campaign="aaro-resolution-record" data-prefill-title="Radar and ATC audio, SLC sector, 11 Mar 2026" ></div>
The house standard
Three clauses, and the third one has teeth here.
Someone will fund a request hoping for a smoking gun and get a release showing there was never anything to it. It is published with exactly the same prominence as any other.
Show the evidence
Every document carries its provenance: agency, request id, filing date, release date, exemptions cited, and the response letter itself. A page with no traceable request does not go in the Reading Room.
Grade the claim, not the reader
Sixteen dispositions, one controlled vocabulary, applied identically to every request. What a document means is left to you; what the agency did is recorded precisely.
Keep the contested in
Refusals, Glomars, dead ends and abandoned requests stay published. So do releases that plainly undercut the theory that motivated the request. Anyone who cannot live with that should not fund requests here.
0 requests are currently embargoed. Their existence, their agency and their disposition are public; their subject is not, until the embargo expires. Privacy conceals the subject, never the fact — the policy, in full.
ἀλήθεια — un-concealment
Three archives tell you what is known. This one goes and gets what is not.
Every request is public. Every response is published. The failures are the point.
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