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Aletheca

74 statutes · 3,224 counties inherit one

Every law Aletheca files under.

Federal FOIA, the Privacy Act, the public-records act of all fifty states, the District of Columbia and five territories — and the international FOI regimes governing the foreign bodies in the register. The deadline drives the statutory clock; the text beside it is what gets printed, because “10 days” and “10 calendar days to determine, with a 14-day extension” are not the same claim.

Federal

  • Freedom of Information Act

    5 U.S.C. § 552

    Federal Freedom of Information Act governing access to executive branch agency records. Does not apply to Congress, federal courts, or state/local governments.

    20 business days90-day appealfull text here

  • Privacy Act of 1974

    5 U.S.C. § 552a

    Access and amendment of records about oneself held in a system of records. Often paired with FOIA.

    20 business days30-day appealfull text here

States and territories, by how fast they must answer

The spread is the finding. Arkansas gives three days; Alabama gives no number at all. Both are governing the same activity, and a requester who does not know which they are in has no way to tell an ordinary wait from a statutory breach.

3 days or fewer

9 jurisdictions

4–5 days

15 jurisdictions

6–10 days

18 jurisdictions

More than 10 days

2 jurisdictions

No fixed deadline

12 jurisdictions

International — 16 FOI regimes

The bodies answering to them →

The access laws governing the foreign defence, aviation and archive bodies in the register — added so requests about UAP records held outside the United States can be routed under the right statute. Denmark answers in seven working days; Sweden sets no number because “promptly” is enforced culture; France and Spain treat silence as refusal, Uruguay treats it as release.

Reading the statutes themselves

2 are reproduced here in full — federal FOIA and the Privacy Act. The United States Code is a work of the federal government and carries no copyright, and a reader should not have to leave a FOIA archive to read FOIA.

The other 72 — fifty-five state and territorial codes, and 16 foreign acts — are published by their own legislatures under their own claims of compilation copyright, so they are linked rather than copied. 66 of 74 carry an official source link that was fetched and confirmed (states on 2026-08-22); anything that 404’d was dropped rather than shown. Where a legislature’s site refuses automated requests the link is published and labelled unchecked, because saying so is more useful than either hiding it or pretending we looked.

66/74

official links verified

Re-checked whenever a legislature reorganises its site. A statute page whose official link is dead is worse than one with no link at all — it looks like provenance and is not.

Machine-readable at /api/v1/laws — deadline, business-vs-calendar flag, appeal path and fee-waiver standard on every row.