This Week in FOIA: "The Dude Called Me... I Didn't Know He Had My Number"

New document releases show a key disclosure on Russiagate, confusion over how "misinformation" narratives are chosen, odd emails about drop boxes and pre-bunking, and more

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas

This is going to be a long, document-heavy week at Racket.

As readers know, this site has a number of FOIA requests out in different directions. We received several batches of responses recently. Pieces by new reporter James Rushmore as well as

UndeadFOIA

will be taking dives into multiple topics, and we’ll be adding well over a thousand pages of emails to our FOIA library.

One of the first articles will detail a smaller group of documents from the University of Washington, and features a response to a query from a New York Times reporter to the now-defunct Election Integrity Partnership run out of Stanford University, which played a key role in 2020 election content moderation.

The response to the Times reporter ultimately comes from former Homeland Security official Matthew Masterson, who’d just left the Department’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to take a temporary post at Stanford (he would later move to Microsoft). Masterson tells a Times reporter he’d be happy to explain what work “we (the feds) did in coordination with social media companies” to head off misinformation. Scratch an academic, find a fed.

A brief note about the irony of some of these disclosures: