Request 009 — 1/9/2026

Touring the facilities and picking up Slack

Hi! It’s Friday, and it’s foiaday!

It’s day nine, and I’m going to keep this one short and sweet. Some updates:

• We got back the files! (The unredacted list of rejected license plates from the Illinois Secretary of State’s office, that is.) I’m still working through it, and waiting on a possible additional field that we’re getting next week, but I’ll have it up in DocumentCloud tomorrow for y’all to peruse.

• Lots of new things are in progress, even if they’re being extended. For example, the blocked users FOIL with the NYC Mayor’s Office? Acknowledged, extended, and expected in April. Maybe NASA will come back sooner!

Subscribe now

Now, the new stuff! Government agencies use all sorts of third-party systems in order to best communicate and get things done. The best case, usually, is when you don’t notice how clunky the systems may or may not be — by this, I’m referring to my worst enemy in the FOIA-sphere, which is a slow, bloated SharePoint folder. 

So what’s a system that a constituent would hardly notice at all? Slack.

Internal, not public facing, nothing to embed, nothing to link to. It’s the searchable log of all communication and knowledge, after all.

So how do you know if your agency uses Slack? And how can you get the records created by it?

One thing to look for are subscriptions or mentions of GovSlack, which is the government client version of our standard Slack that we know and love. It provides different records retention and archiving and message exports and compliance and security and everything. 

For example: this ebook on their site has a list of six agencies — governmental and nonprofit — that use GovSlack, including the VA, MBTA and the DoD. Many contractors, like Lockheed Martin and software companies, also are mentioned.

Day 16 of the FOIA Advent calendar covered one request that can be made to agencies that use Slack: a list of all channel names. Channels are like official group chats within Slack, and can be used to organize different projects and conversations. Other ideas include Slack messages, as well as Slack emoji reactions, something that is such a fun FOIA possibility. 

Some of this language is pulled from the request example I linked in the calendar, which was filed through MuckRock by Rebecca Williams: 

Copies of the following documents:

- A list of all Slack channel names, including private channels, in use by the Slack account at present (1/9/2026 or whenever this request is processed). Examples of this can be viewed here: https://18f.gsa.gov/foia-reading-room/, https://18f.gsa.gov/foia-reading-room/gsa-tts-slack-channel-list-3-29-2017.txt

- A list of the names of all custom Slack emojis uploaded to the workspace.

- Billing information, including the contract, invoices and MOUs with Slack for this specific workspace.

- A screenshot of Slack workplace statistics available to Workspace Owners or Administrators via the analytics dashboard. A link to information about it is here: https://slack.com/help/articles/360057638533-Understand-the-data-in-your-Slack-analytics-dashboard#channels 

(And let’s file them to the agencies listed in that e-book, because we know they use Slack for certain!)

Alrighty. Tomorrow’s will be earlier! I hope! I’m excited for more FOIAs to file this weekend, even if they won’t be touched for a few days; we’ll have some fun batch requests tomorrow, so keep an eye out for that.

Take care folks, and have a good weekend!

Cam