OPRAmachine Blog

OPRAmachine is pleased to announce our 2018 year in review.

2018 was our first full year in operation and brought unprecedented growth to the site. We’ve compiled a video with some of the most interesting statistics we’ve compiled in the past year, including our most popular towns and requests.

We are pleased to announce that you can now file private OPRA requests using OPRAmachine! Private OPRA requests can be filed with public agencies if you have an OPRAmachine Pro subscription. With a Pro subscription, you can keep your OPRA requests and documents private, so they won’t show up on the site or in search engines. This feature is geared toward companies and individuals who use OPRAmachine in a professional capacity, such as law firms, private investigators and corporate users. [Read More]

Our OPRA lawsuit against Monmouth County is scheduled to be heard on Monday, November 26th We are set to have a hearing for our case at 3:00 PM Wendesday before the Monmouth County assignment judge. Read more about the case here Essentially, Monmouth County and its attorneys made a mistake when responding to an OPRA request submitted by an OPRAmachine user. They failed to properly redact documents, and OPRAmachine staff took action to correct their error, and even waived enforcement of our formal takedown policy. [Read More]

We are pleased to announce the succesful completion of recent upgrades to the underlying code that powers OPRAmachine. After some brief downtime on Saturday, we are pleased to announce the succesful completion of the deployment of the latest changes to the OPRAmachine platform. Here are some of the improvements you can begin taking advantage of immediately: 1. Collapisble correspondence We’ve added the ability to collapse parts of the chain of correspondence on OPRA requests, making it easier to keep things tidy on request threads that have a lot of messages. [Read More]

This month, OPRAmachine will be celebrating its first year of revolutionizing public records & transparency throughout New Jersey. The official one year anniversary of the public launch of the OPRAmachine statewide freedom of information portal will be coming up on October 24th, 2018. Throughout October, we will be reflecting on what the site has accomplished in its first year of public availability. We’ll be talking about the positives, including feedback from users and government officials, in addition to the negatives, such as technical and legal challenges that we have encountered in the course of running the site. [Read More]

We have good news for our users who request records from Toms River Township and the Toms River Police Department For a few months now, we have had an impasse with the Toms River clerk’s office and police department over their refusal to honor requests submitted through OPRAmachine. The township recently purchased a proprietary system from GovQA for handling public records requests and attempted to force OPRAmachine users to submit their requests through the proprietary system, which would have prevented the requests from being published on the OPRAmachine website. [Read More]

Monmouth County attorneys unlawfully dodging OPRA requests to cover up county employee negligence This week we announced our multi-plaintiff OPRA lawsuit against the Monmouth County government. Since this summer, Monmouth County officials have been refusing to respond to otherwise legally valid OPRA requests that were submitted using our service. Previously, they had no problem with OPRAmachine, but ever since a county employee failed to properly redact confidential information, county officials have discriminated against OPRAmachine users, refusing their requests solely on the grounds that they dislike the fact that they are automatically published online. [Read More]

Our friends at the New Jersey Foundation for Open Government recently hosted an event in Essex County featuring a wealth of information about both the Open Public Records Act and the Open Public Meetings Act.

Full video below:

We recently hosted a webinar at the Montclair University Center for Cooperative Media. We discussed tips and tricks for using OPRAmachine, how the site has served as a public records research tool and platform, along with some of the challenges and interesting use cases for the site.   The webinar was attended by both journalists and other individuals interested in making use of the advanced public records research capabilities provided by our platform. [Read More]

OPRAmachine adminstrator & indepdendent journalist Jeff Epstein recently interviewed CJ Griffin, Esq. of the firm Pashman Stein Walder Hayden. Griffin has developed a reputation as one of the leading OPRA advocates in the state. They discussed numerous issues, some of which touched on the OPRAmachine platform and challenges that we have encountered.