foia-requests

foia-requests is a skill for Codex from jamditis/claude-skills-journalism. It costs 28 tokens per session (7,285 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A set of workflows for requesting records from government agencies under freedom-of-information and public-records laws. FOIA is the United States federal law that lets people request many government records; state and local rules differ.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to draft records requests, track responses, check whether exemptions apply, and appeal denials.
Why use it?
It helps you handle legal differences, possible exemptions, submission tracking, and appeals when an agency withholds records.

Skill for Codex

Written for Codex: agents/openai.yaml present.

Part of the journalism-core plugin — 15 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to draft records requests, track responses, check whether exemptions apply, and appeal denials.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/jamditis/claude-skills-journalism/foia-requests
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add jamditis/claude-skills-journalism --skill foia-requests
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/jamditis/claude-skills-journalism

Made for: Codex.

Or install journalism-core, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 15 skills.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for foia-requests

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jamditis/claude-skills-journalism/foia-requests/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/jamditis/claude-skills-journalism/foia-requests)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/jamditis/claude-skills-journalism/foia-requests"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jamditis/claude-skills-journalism/foia-requests/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for foia-requests

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/jamditis/claude-skills-journalism/foia-requests"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jamditis/claude-skills-journalism/foia-requests.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 28 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 7,285 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
SkillSpector: 1 finding, up to low

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

  • low Excessive Agency · line 195
    Skill's behavior or capabilities extend beyond its stated purpose. Scope creep allows an agent to perform actions unrelated to its documented functionality, increasing the attack surface.
    Fix: Limit the skill's scope to its documented purpose. Remove instructions that enable the agent to perform actions outside its stated functionality.
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00028 $0.07285
Opus 5 $0.00014 $0.03642
Sonnet 5 $0.00006 $0.01457
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00728

Measured 12d ago against content hash 6396794392f2, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

foia-requests scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 12d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

journalism-core/skills/foia-requests/SKILL.md · 646 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 646 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

FOIA and public records requests

Workflows and templates for obtaining government records through freedom of information laws.

Understanding FOIA landscape

Jurisdiction overview

Level Law Scope
Federal Freedom of Information Act (5 U.S.C. § 552) Federal executive branch agencies
State Varies by state (e.g., OPRA in NJ, FOIL in NY) State and local agencies
Local Often covered by state law Municipal, county, school boards

Key federal exemptions (U.S. Federal FOIA)

## The 9 federal FOIA exemptions

1. **National security** - Classified information
2. **Internal personnel rules** - Agency housekeeping matters
3. **Statutory exemptions** - Other laws prohibit disclosure
4. **Trade secrets** - Confidential business information
5. **Inter/intra-agency memos** - Deliberative process privilege
6. **Personal privacy** - Personnel, medical files
7. **Law enforcement** - Could interfere with proceedings
8. **Financial institutions** - Bank examination reports
9. **Geological data** - Oil and gas well information

Note: Agencies must segregate and release non-exempt portions

State public records laws

All 50 states have enacted laws requiring certain government records to be open to the public.

State-specific resources

### State public records resources

#### Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press
- Open Government Guide: rcfp.org/open-government-guide
- State-by-state analysis of public records laws
- Sample request letters by state

#### National Freedom of Information Coalition
- nfoic.org/state-freedom-of-information-laws
- State FOI organization contacts
- Training and resources

#### MuckRock
- muckrock.com
- File requests through platform
- Search previous requests/responses
- Agency response time data

Common state exemptions

State legislatures may be subject to different rules than the rest of their governing bodies:

  1. Exempt from public records statute (e.g., Massachusetts, Oklahoma, Oregon, Wyoming)
  2. Excluded from definition of public body (e.g., Georgia, Minnesota)
  3. Covered by separate statute (e.g., California)
  4. Allowed to set own policies (e.g., Mississippi, New York)

Read the full file on GitHub · 646 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 12d ago First seen · 646 lines · 28 tokens per session scan A 6396794392f2

Subscribe to this mod's changes

foia-requests is a skill published in the GitHub repository jamditis/claude-skills-journalism (391 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 28 tokens to every session and 7,285 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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