The Freedom of Information Act promises that the government's records belong to the public and then supplies nine reasons they might not. This article walks through the statute the way a requester experiences it: what counts as an agency record, why the request's wording determines everything that follows, what the fee categories actually mean, and how the twenty-day clock became a polite fiction. It then takes each exemption in turn, with the decisions that define them, spending the most time on the two that do the most work, Exemption 5's deliberative process privilege and Exemption 4's protection of business information after Food Marketing Institute v. Argus Leader Media. Later sections cover the Glomar response, the Vaughn index, the 2016 foreseeable harm standard that was supposed to change agency behavior, litigation and attorney fees, reverse FOIA suits brought by the companies whose data is at stake, and the state public records laws that are often faster and broader than the federal statute.