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Aletheca
FBIFederalJustice & Law Enforcement

Federal Bureau of Investigation

Component of Department of Justice

The eFOIPA portal is reliable but produces status changes without any explanatory letter, so most of what we learn about an FBI request comes from the quarterly status page rather than from correspondence.

What happened when Aletheca filed

Requests filed
47
Median to determination
302 days
Past the deadline
79%
Released something
55%
Pages with redactions
84%
Glomar
9%
Fee waivers granted
38%
Appeals that changed it
27%

Computed from Aletheca’s own filings, whose full text is public. Not the agency’s self-reported Annual FOIA Report — where both exist they are shown side by side and never merged.

How it takes requests

  1. 01portalAgency FOIA Portalunconfirmed

    https://efoia.fbi.gov

  2. 02portalFOIA.gov PALverified

    https://pal.foia.gov

  3. 03emailEmailunconfirmed

    fbi@foia.fbi.gov

  4. 04mailPostal mailunconfirmed

    Federal Bureau of Investigation FOIA Office, FOIA Requester Service Center, Washington DC 20208

Routes marked unconfirmed are inferred from the agency’s domain pattern in the source dataset and have not been proven by a delivered letter. Aletheca confirms an endpoint before the first request goes to it and records the confirmation as a public event — a request sent to a plausible-looking address that bounces silently is worse than no request at all.

Routes Aletheca actually uses

  1. 1portaleFOIPA portal
  2. 2mailRecord/Information Dissemination Section, Winchester VA

Tried in this order; the router falls through when one fails and records the fallback as an event.

What it holds

  • correspondence
  • contracts
  • reports
  • emails
  • memoranda
  • data
  • policies

Record classes this kind of body normally keeps. Useful for drafting a request a records officer can act on without guessing — a request describing records the agency does not hold is refused as no-records, which costs a filing fee and teaches nobody anything.

Filing tips

  • Be specific on date range and custodians
  • Cite public-interest fee waiver and news-media status if applicable
  • Request Vaughn index for withholdings
  • Ask for rolling release

Requests filed here