[qingcharles]

Not correct. All FOIA laws that I know of say that any records created or held by private corporations under contract to the government are FOIA-able via the government. (the government has to go out and get the records for you)

[chaps]

Yep! Here's Illinois's statutory language on this topic:

    (2) A public record that is not in the possession of a public body but is in the possession of a party with whom the agency has contracted to perform a governmental function on behalf of the public body, and that directly relates to the governmental function and is not otherwise exempt under this Act, shall be considered a public record of the public body, for purposes of this Act. 

The nuance is in the definitional limitations/vagueness of "directly relates to the governmental function".

[qingcharles]

Yeah, my bad, I forgot the extra clause. And, of course, you often have to fight even harder for these types of records as it is extra work for the government to do, as chaps above can surely attest.

Some stuff slips through, though. For instance, I tried to FOIA the source code for the Voyager probes, but NASA outsourced the dev to Caltech and somehow there is a copyright restriction on it, or something daft like that, which means it cannot be released, even though taxpayers paid the bills.