When agencies of the U.S. Government have refused to process those requests or provided data that is highly redacted or otherwise manipulated, Shapiro has pursued repeated litigation that has been widely publicized.
Prior to his FOIA activism and his associated legal efforts, Ryan Shapiro was a leader in the movement to ban foie gras in the State of California.
Shapiro decided to sue the FBI and retained the services of Jeffrey Light, a Washington, D.C. appellate attorney with an extensive background in pro bono civil rights and FOIA cases.
Because of the sheer number of requests, even heavily redacted records could be assembled to create a "mosaic", a complete view of the FBI's ongoing investigations into animal rights groups.
Department of Justice lawyers representing the defendant Eric Holder argue that because the plaintiffs were never prosecuted under the AETA, they failed to meet the standard of an "aggrieved party" that would grant them standing to bring the suit.
[16] Shapiro and the other parties to the suit acquired new representation from the Center for Constitutional Rights and appealed the decision, arguing their cases before Judges Lynch, Thompson and Kayatta.
An amicus brief was filed on their behalf by the New York State Bar Association that confirmed the original arguments in the case and also held that the terrorism provisions robbed AETA defendants of their Fifth Amendment rights to due process.
On March 12, 2014, the presiding Judge Rosemary M. Collyer of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia has ruled that, while the FBI may have a right to refuse some documents to Shapiro, the justification they have provided to the court is incorrect (in a series of briefs filed between June 16 and June 30, 2013, FBI FOIA chief David Hardy maintained that the documents are exempt from the FOIA because they were compiled for "law enforcement purposes").
[23][24] In January 2014, Ryan Shapiro sued the Central Intelligence Agency after they failed to respond to a FOIA request he processed for documents related to Nelson Mandela.
The request was processed in order to determine whether the US intelligence community played a role in Mandela's arrest and subsequent imprisonment by pro-Apartheid forces in South Africa.
[25] In November 2016, Shapiro and Washington, DC–based FOIA specialist attorney, Jeffery Light, founded the non-profit transparency organization, Property of the People.