Built by someone who needed it.

Why this site exists

I spent over a decade in the federal prison system. When you're inside — and for years after you get out — the government holds an enormous amount of information about you. Medical records. Program files. Assessment reports. Documents that directly affect your supervised release conditions, your legal options, and your future. And almost nobody on the inside knows they have a legal right to request them.

I learned that right the hard way, through years of pro se litigation. I filed FOIA and Privacy Act requests myself, recovered my own records, and used them in court. I eventually filed two FOIA lawsuits against the Bureau of Prisons. In the first, I worked with counsel and we settled — I received every record I had requested and the government agreed to pay fees while admitting no liability. In the second, I filed pro se for my BOP medical records; the agency produced the file shortly after suit was filed, mooting the case. Both times, the records came out.

The gap I kept seeing

After my release in June 2020, I began working in reentry advocacy and quickly saw the same pattern: people knew something called FOIA existed but had no idea how to use it. The process felt opaque and intimidating. The government's own resources aren't exactly user-friendly, and hiring an attorney to draft a records request letter isn't realistic for most people coming out of the system.

FederalFOIA.com is the answer to that gap — a free, plain-English tool that walks anyone through the process and produces a properly formatted, legally sound request letter without requiring them to understand statutory citations or agency-specific procedures.

What I bring to this

My undergraduate degree is in Supply Chain Management from one of the nation's top-ranked programs in the field. I think about systems: how information moves, where it gets stuck, and how to design processes that work efficiently for real people. That background shaped how I built this tool.

I also have a long background in web development. I studied computer information systems and web design at two universities, and in the late 1990s I built my school's first website by hand in HTML. In the early 2000s, a classmate and I rebuilt it as a two-part project — an HTML site I designed alongside a Shockwave version he built for users on faster connections. That project won second place in website design at the state Future Business Leaders of America competition.

Since then I've built custom warehouse management systems, inventory tracking tools, and other supply chain applications. While incarcerated, I developed a reentry resource website using WordPress — researching the platform entirely through books, walking my mother through domain registration and server setup by written correspondence, and having her copy and paste actual HTML and PHP code line by line. When the site launched, I promoted it through a Corrlinks newsletter and gained over 800 subscribers overnight.

I'm not an attorney and this site doesn't provide legal advice. But I know this process better than most attorneys do — because I've lived it, litigated it, and helped others navigate it.