Automating Transparency: A New Era for FOIA Requests

Public records requests under freedom of information laws are often slow and manual, which makes large-scale accountability work hard. Florin Badita, an activist and founder of the anti-corruption group Corruption Kills, argues that sending the same request to many public bodies builds a comparable dataset. He explains how to normalize the answers, for example cost per resident, so that unusual outliers stand out for follow-up investigation.

The middle of the talk covers the workflow of a tool released just before the event. It uses a Google service account to send single or bulk emails, reads replies back with thread identifiers, stores them in a local SQLite database, and runs OCR on PDF attachments to pull out figures. He stresses writing very specific questions, requesting a fixed spreadsheet template, and checking how forms print so that responses come back in a consistent structure.

As a case study, he sent requests to about 3,200 Romanian local authorities asking how much they spend on young people. Only a minority of the replies showed youth funding, and a small share said they had consulted young people before deciding. The takeaway is that automation can turn one-off records requests into a repeatable data collection method, provided requesters first check whether the data already exists and respect the time of the agencies they contact.