Document Friday: “Released in a Sanitized Form” … With a Twist.
Few things break a FOIA requester’s heart like tearing open an envelope from the CIA, seeing that they’ve released the document you requested, beginning to read it, and realizing that it’s been so...
View ArticleWhat is Deep Secrecy?
Deep secrets are secrets that “we do not know that we do not know,” writes David Pozen for the Stanford Legal Workshop. Pozen’s theoretical piece explores the nuances of government secrecy, provides...
View ArticleFOIA Tip 14: Which Government Agencies can be FOIA’d?
All executive branch departments and agencies are subject to the FOIA. A list of these departments and agencies can be found on the Department of Justice’s FOIA Web site. Congress and the courts are...
View ArticleTruth, Reconciliation and Government Archives: What Justice in Argentina...
On March 8th, Aleida Gallangos filed a petition before the Inter-American Human Rights Commission (IAHRC), using dozens of declassified documents to charge the Mexican State with the abduction and...
View ArticleDoes the Bulgarian Prime Minister Always Pay His Own Way?
The Prime Minister of Bulgaria, Boiko Borisov, trained to be a firefighter, served as bodyguard to the former king, and is a karate expert. According to the Prime Minister’s Office, he also has not...
View ArticleBulgarian Journalists Search the Files of the Former State Security Services:...
Opening the files of the former communist security services has been a long and painful process for most of the East European States. In Bulgaria, The Dossier Act (officially The Law for Access and...
View ArticleWhat were the “certain data points” which The Post eliminated from “Top...
Each day as I walk into work, I see the words cited on the Archive’s 1999 George Polk journalism award and smile. The Archive was recognized for “piercing the self-serving veils of government secrecy,...
View ArticleRepost: How to Decipher a State Department Cable (FOIA Tip #2)
This guide –originally written by Kristin Adair– might come in handy as you peruse the 251,287 Department of State cables recently released by wikileaks. [As of today only 243 cables are available on...
View ArticleUPDATE: “The Heat from Destroying [The Torture Videos] is Nothing Compared to...
UPDATE 27 March 2013. This morning the Washington Post reports that the as yet unnamed woman who “signed off on the 2005 decision to destroy video tapes of prisoners being subjected to treatment...
View Article22 Years Later, US Still Classifying “Bombshell” Plan to Pull Peacekeepers...
The tinderbox of Rwanda’s ethnic tensions ignited in April 1994 and mass violence engulfed the country in one of the swiftest campaigns of genocide in history. The National Security Archive’s Genocide...
View ArticleMexican Community Seeks Help in Mining Conflict
by Olivia Mozdzierz New York, November 26, 2019 – Representatives of a community of Mexican ejidatarios (communal landowners) from north-central Mexico met recently with the National Security Archive...
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