Known as a ”FOIA superhero” for his skill at obtaining government records using the Freedom of Information Act. He is suing several federal agencies, including the NSA, for their failure to comply with FOIA requests regarding former South African President Nelson Mandela. Shapiro is also a Ph.D. candidate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he has received tens of thousands of FBI files on the animal rights movement while doing research for his dissertation, titled “Bodies at War: Animals, Science, and National Security in the United States.”