foia-request-writer

foia-request-writer is a skill for Claude Code from ur-grue/autopunk-media-skills. It costs 40 tokens per session (8,962 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A legal drafting tool for U.S. Freedom of Information Act and state public-records requests, appeals, and challenges to document redactions.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to seek government emails, contracts, reports, and communications, file administrative appeals, and question improper redactions.
Why use it?
It helps journalists request government records in the correct form and respond when agencies deny access or remove information. FOIA is the U.S. law that provides access to many federal records; states have their own public-records laws.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: positional $N argument.

Part of the autopunk-media-skills plugin — 187 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to seek government emails, contracts, reports, and communications, file administrative appeals, and question improper redactions.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/ur-grue/autopunk-media-skills/foia-request-writer
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 ur-grue/autopunk-media-skills --skill foia-request-writer
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ur-grue/autopunk-media-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install autopunk-media-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 187 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-request-writer

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ur-grue/autopunk-media-skills/foia-request-writer/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/ur-grue/autopunk-media-skills/foia-request-writer)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ur-grue/autopunk-media-skills/foia-request-writer"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ur-grue/autopunk-media-skills/foia-request-writer/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-request-writer

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ur-grue/autopunk-media-skills/foia-request-writer"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ur-grue/autopunk-media-skills/foia-request-writer.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 40 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 8,962 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 warn 7 Sept 2026
SkillSpector: 3 findings, up to high

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 →

  • high Memory Poisoning · line 44
    Skill manipulates agent memory, state, or stored context. Memory corruption can alter personality, override safety rules, or cause unpredictable behavior.
    Fix: Protect agent memory and state from modification by untrusted content. Use read-only memory for critical instructions and validate all state changes.
  • low Excessive Agency · line 317
    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.
  • low Excessive Agency · line 380
    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 $0.00040 $0.08962
Opus 5 $0.00020 $0.04481
Sonnet 5 $0.00008 $0.01792
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00896

Measured 8d ago against content hash b8cd45122ce1, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

foia-request-writer 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 8d 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.

skills/magazine-journalism/investigation/foia-request-writer/SKILL.md · 483 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 483 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

FOIA & Public Records Request Writer

What This Skill Does

Drafts formal, legally complete public records requests to U.S. federal and state government agencies. Also drafts administrative appeal letters when requests are denied, and analyzes redactions to identify improperly applied exemptions with specific challenge strategies.

When To Use This Skill

  • You need government records, contracts, communications, or internal reports for a story — at the federal or state level
  • You are beginning an investigation and want to establish a paper trail through official channels
  • You need a request that maximizes the chance of a full, timely response and minimizes the chance of blanket denial
  • You want to request a fee waiver as a journalist or news organization
  • Your federal or state records request has been denied or heavily redacted and you need to draft an administrative appeal
  • You received redacted documents and want to identify which exemptions are likely misapplied and how to challenge them
  • You need to file parallel requests to federal and state agencies for the same investigation

What You Need To Provide

For a new request (federal or state)

Required: The name of the agency (federal or state); a description of the records you want (dates, subjects, document types); your name and contact information; your stated purpose as a journalist; the state (if filing a state-level request) Optional: The specific FOIA or public records office address; any known document numbers, case IDs, or reference numbers; the name of the news organization; a deadline tied to publication; specific officials or offices whose records you want

For an appeal

Required: The original request (date and tracking number); the denial or adverse determination (date, exemptions cited, name of the FOIA officer who issued it); a brief explanation of why you believe the denial is improper Optional: Any evidence that the records exist (news reports, other agency disclosures, congressional references); whether you want to request mediation through OGIS

Read the full file on GitHub · 483 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. 8d ago First seen · 483 lines · 40 tokens per session scan A b8cd45122ce1

Subscribe to this mod's changes

foia-request-writer is a skill published in the GitHub repository ur-grue/autopunk-media-skills (32 stars, last pushed 12d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 40 tokens to every session and 8,962 once invoked, about $0.0002 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 2026-09-04.

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