FOIA Advisor

FOIA News: Employees at FOIA software company tampered with FOIA requests; company faulted for laxity.

FOIA News (2025)Allan BlutsteinComment

The Case of the ‘Lost’ FOIA Requests

By Jason Leopold, Bloomberg, May 21, 2025

If you’ve ever submitted a FOIA request through a federal agency’s public access portal there’s a good chance you’re using an application called FOIAXpress. The software was developed by Opexus, a Washington-based company that provides software services for processing US government records.

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As I reported today, two Opexus employees, twin brothers Suhaib and Muneeb Akhter, compromised or deleted data from Opexus systems, according to an internal investigation and a separate probe by an independent cybersecurity firm. They worked for Opexus for about a year as engineers before being fired earlier this year. It turns out they’d been previously convicted of hacking into the US State Department and had been sentenced to two and three years in prison.

Read more here.