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Aletheca

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.

Open the DocketFile a request yourselfHow it works →
requests filed
8requests filed
pages published
356pages published
refusals, published
1refusals, 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 full feed/api/v1/events →

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.

  1. 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.

    • Composer with per-agency templates and statute selection
    • Public-interest fee-waiver argument on every federal request
    • Refusals logged with a reason, publicly
  2. 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
  3. 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
  4. 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
  5. 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

  6. 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.

Every proposal →
PRP-2026-0311AARO

The full list of AARO cases recorded as unresolved, with case numbers

A list of all cases in AARO's case-management system carrying a resolution status of unresolved or insufficient data as of the date of processing, including case number, date of incident and reporting service.

$1,218 of $1,500212 backers
1,284 votesProposed 19d ago by L. Arroyo

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.

Search the documents →
  • No recordsALT-2026-0160Jul 30, 2026

    NARA final response — no responsive records

    A search of the Record Group 341 accession files located no responsive records. Read beside ALT-2026-0061, that absence is itself the finding.

    1 pages115 KB
  • Released in partALT-2026-0061Jul 18, 2026

    Bureau correspondence concerning Blue Book material, 1970–1985

    Internal correspondence and transfer memoranda. Heavily redacted, but the accession dates in the unredacted portions do not match the Archives' record, which was the question asked.

    268 pages27.6 MB80% redactedVaughn indexb(1)b(3)b(6)b(7)(C)b(7)(E)
  • Released in partALT-2026-0061Jul 18, 2026

    Vaughn index

    The agency's own itemisation of what was withheld and why, document by document.

    44 pages2.0 MB
  • GlomarALT-2026-0118May 30, 2026

    NRO final response — Glomar

    A refusal to confirm or deny, citing Exemptions 1 and 3. Published with the same prominence as a release, because on a question this narrow it is the more informative answer.

    2 pages332 KBb(1)b(3)

Agency scorecards

How each body actually behaves, measured against its own statute.

Built from requests whose full text is public and therefore auditable by anyone who doubts the number. This is a genuine reason for the site to exist beyond the documents themselves.

All agencies →
AgencyFiledMedian daysStatuteLateReleasedGlomarWaivers
DIA2138820 bd90%29%19%52%
AARO3421420 bd88%41%12%71%
FBI4730220 bd79%55%9%38%
USAF2617620 bd72%48%4%46%
NRO189620 bd61%22%39%44%
FAA384420 bd41%79%0%61%

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.
Read the APIBecome an integrator

uap.nexus/cases/2026-03-11

live
<script
  src="https://aletheca.com/embed/v1.js"
  data-partner="uap-nexus"
  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 button opens the composer pre-filled from the case, takes the payment, and files it. UAP Nexus never handles a letter, a card or an agency — and every request the button originates carries its attribution for the life of the request.

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.

01

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.

02

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.

03

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.

2
releases
1
Glomars
1
no-records
3
agencies past the deadline
86%
fee waivers granted

1 request is 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.

Fund something on the DocketWhat it costs

Membership is sold once, by the house, and works across every Thaumatica archive · thaumatica.com