MuckRock

263 Huntington Ave, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA · 501(c)(3) nonprofit · Founded 2010

Overview

MuckRock is a nonprofit organization and public records platform founded in 2010 by Michael Morisy and Mitchell Kotler — two Cornell University graduates who looked at the Freedom of Information Act and saw not just a transparency mechanism but a broken process. Morisy had worked in journalism and experienced firsthand the procedural aggravation that makes FOIA requests difficult for even professional reporters: finding the right agency, drafting the request correctly, managing the mandatory follow-up, tracking multiple simultaneous requests across federal and state agencies, digitizing paper responses, and ultimately making the resulting documents available to others. After interviewing more than a hundred journalists and confirming that his frustrations were universal, he and Kotler built a website — as Morisy described it — that would make FOIA work the way it was supposed to work.

The platform launched in beta in May 2010 and began as a for-profit limited liability company operating out of the Boston Globe's GlobeLab incubator. It converted to nonprofit status in 2016, a deliberate choice to prioritize its public mission over commercial pressures and to access foundation grant funding that its growing ambitions required. In the years since, MuckRock has evolved from a FOIA filing tool into a full public records infrastructure organization: filing and tracking requests, publishing the resulting documents, operating DocumentCloud (a platform for hosting and analyzing documents used by thousands of newsrooms worldwide), funding investigative journalism through the Gateway Grants program, and in October 2025 merging with the Sunlight Research Center to add direct hands-on newsroom research support. It has filed more than 100,000 public records requests and published over a million pages of government documents.

Founding: "The Anti-Leak"

Michael Morisy described MuckRock's approach in terms that capture its founding logic precisely: "We're like the anti-leak. As a citizen, you have a right to ask your government a question, and they're legally required to respond." Mitchell Kotler, then 24 years old, put it more colloquially: "We're sticking it to the man, but in a really polite way that you could take home to your mom." The contrast with WikiLeaks and whistleblowing — which MuckRock operates alongside in the information transparency ecosystem, without the legal risk and without the reliance on unauthorized disclosure — is both deliberate and substantive. FOIA requests are explicitly legal mechanisms; the government is legally required to respond; MuckRock's platform automates the administrative infrastructure of that process so that the barrier to filing a request is as low as possible.

The platform's design philosophy — making FOIA accessible to ordinary citizens, not just professional requesters — reflected a specific insight: that the knowledge required to file a FOIA request effectively was itself a form of privilege, concentrated in journalism schools and law firms rather than distributed across the public the law was designed to serve. MuckRock's request templates, agency database, automated follow-up system, and document digitization service were all designed to close that gap. The name "MuckRock" — a compound of muckraking and rock-solid journalism — connected the platform to the early-twentieth-century tradition of investigative journalism while signaling the founders' intent to use technology to revive and democratize that tradition.

The CREST Campaign: 13 Million Pages of CIA Secrets

MuckRock's most consequential single legal action was its three-year campaign to force the online release of the CIA's CREST database — the CIA Records Search Tool, which contained every "historically valuable" record the CIA had declassified, covering 13 million pages of intelligence documents stretching from the Cold War through the recent past. Since 1995, the CREST database had been physically available at the National Archives facility at the University of Maryland — but only on four designated computers during weekday business hours. The CIA acknowledged on its own website that this arrangement "may be inconvenient and present an obstacle to many researchers." That was a considerable understatement: an archive containing the operational record of the world's most powerful intelligence agency was effectively inaccessible to anyone who could not travel to College Park, Maryland on a weekday.

In June 2014, MuckRock sued the CIA, arguing that CREST was technically public but practically inaccessible and that the CIA was obligated to make it genuinely available. The CIA initially estimated it would take up to 28 years to put the material online. The campaign took an inventive turn when MuckRock user Michael Best launched a crowdfunding project with the specific threat of printing out all 13 million pages — at the CIA's mandated per-page reproduction cost — and then republishing them online, turning the CIA's own fee schedule into a lever for public access. The combination of legal pressure and the embarrassment of the crowdfunding campaign accelerated the timeline dramatically. On January 17, 2017, all 13 million pages of CREST were published on the CIA's public website. MuckRock subsequently organized the documents on DocumentCloud and created a comprehensive search guide, CIA World Tour project, and crowdsourced timeline to help researchers navigate the archive. The CREST collection is now also preserved via IPFS and the Filecoin decentralized network, ensuring it remains accessible even if the CIA's own hosting fails.

Tools and Platform

MuckRock Requests

The core public records filing and tracking platform — allowing users to draft, submit, track, and share FOIA requests at federal, state, and local levels. Maintains a database of agency contacts and addresses. Automated follow-up reminders. All requests and responses published publicly as part of the permanent MuckRock archive. API available for programmatic access.

DocumentCloud

A document hosting, annotation, and analysis platform co-developed with ProPublica and now maintained by MuckRock Foundation. Used by thousands of newsrooms worldwide to host, annotate, and publish primary source documents. Recent features include AI-powered document summarization, automated extraction of key facts, website monitoring add-ons, and batch upload tools. The CIA CREST database, among many other major document collections, is hosted on DocumentCloud. Open source; source code on GitHub.

Sunlight Research Center (merged Oct 2025)

A newsroom research support service — formerly an independent organization, merged into MuckRock Foundation in October 2025. Provides hands-on research desk support for local and regional newsrooms: backgrounding, data analysis, document gathering, and guidance on FOIA requests and public records strategy. Supported dozens of newsrooms including Arizona Luminaria, The Nevada Independent, Texas Tribune, Wisconsin Watch during the 2024 election cycle.

Gateway Grants

A competitive grant program funding document-based journalism investigations up to $50,000, with technical and editorial support from MuckRock. Current and past grantees have used DocumentCloud and MuckRock tools to investigate rainforest destruction in Brazil, police misconduct in Chicago, Nigerian election integrity (160,000+ polling unit results archived), and radiation experiments by the US Navy. Partnership with Filecoin Foundation supports permanent decentralized preservation of grant-funded document collections.

Datasette Cloud

Integration with Datasette — an open-source tool for exploring and publishing data — available through MuckRock's platform suite for journalists who need to explore and analyze structured data derived from public records responses.

Plucky Wire

A monitoring tool for tracking changes to web pages that may contain newsworthy updates — allowing journalists to be alerted automatically when government websites or other sources add or change content, without manual monitoring.

Morisy and the FOIA Advisory Committee

Michael Morisy's standing in the public records and transparency community extends beyond MuckRock's platform. He was a 2014–2015 John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford, a 2012–2013 Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics Network Fellow at Harvard, and a 2018–2019 nonresidential fellow at the Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri. He served as a member of the federal FOIA Advisory Committee — the body that advises the Archivist of the United States on improvements to the FOIA process — giving MuckRock a formal seat in the federal transparency governance process. His stated motivation for seeking the advisory role was consistent with MuckRock's founding: "I want to make sure that FOIA is used by everyone who could benefit from it, not just a small community of specialists."

Board

MuckRock's board includes Jim Neff, Meredith Broussard (AI and journalism researcher, NYU), Scott Klein (data journalism), Jenny 8. Lee (publishing), Freddy Martinez (transparency advocate), Victoria Baranetsky (General Counsel, Columbia Journalism Investigations), Mago Torres (journalist), and Rebecca Williams (open data researcher). The board's composition reflects MuckRock's position at the intersection of journalism, civil liberties, technology, and open data.

Access and Membership

Anyone can browse MuckRock's public archive of filed requests and published documents without registration at muckrock.com. Filing requests requires a free account; a paid membership unlocks bulk filing, priority processing, and additional features — details at muckrock.com/accounts/register. DocumentCloud is freely accessible for document hosting and annotation at documentcloud.org. Newsrooms seeking research support through the Sunlight Research Desk can contact MuckRock through the website. Gateway Grant applications are open periodically; the current round details are at muckrock.com/gateway-grants. MuckRock publicly discloses donations of $5,000 or more. Address: 263 Huntington Ave, Boston, MA 02115.