Secrecy and FOIA

Declassification Diplomacy: Trump Administration Turns Over Massive Collection of Intelligence Records on Human Rights and Argentina Today in a diplomatic ceremony hosted by U.S. Archivist David Ferriero at the National Archives, U.S. officials completed the turnover of some 7,500 CIA, FBI, DOD, NSC and State Department records—47,000 pages in total—to Argentina’s Minister of Justice and […]

Bicameral, Bipartisan Letter Seeks GAO Review of FOIA Compliance   Representatives Elijah Cummings and Jim Jordan were joined by Senators Dianne Feinstein, Patrick Leahy, Chuck Grassley, and John Cornyn in sending a letter to the Comptroller General at the Government Accountability Office requesting the GAO “conduct a comprehensive review of agency compliance with the Freedom […]

Archivist Bill Burr Wins Dubious Honor of Oldest Pending FOIA Request  The Archive’s latest FOIA Audit showed that the oldest pending FOIA request government-wide is 25-years-old, that’s old enough to rent a car! Curious to see who it belonged to (and with a strong suspicion it was ours), we filed a FOIA request with the […]

For Better or Worse, The Obama Library to Depart From Status Quo The National Archives and Records Administration has released its agreement with the Obama Foundation that outlines how the Foundation’s plan to depart from the traditional NARA-run presidential library model – in favor of digitizing all of Obama’s 30 million unclassified paper records – […]

State Dept. Worsens FOIA Reading Room The Department of State has inexplicably made its FOIA reading room significantly less user-friendly. The previous version allowed researchers to sort the reading room’s tens of thousands of documents by date or title, among other filters, or search through curated collections. The current iteration has no such features and […]

The Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan, 1979: Declassified Documents Show Moscow’s Fear of an Afghan Flip President Trump’s claim that the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979 to get rid of terrorists who were coming over the border is false, according to declassified U.S. and Soviet documents released through FOIA and posted by the National Security […]

No More Deaths Trials Shed Needed Light on Department of Interior’s Immigration Role Assistant U.S. Attorney Anna Wright argued the first of the Trump administration’s three cases against the humanitarian aid organization No More Deaths in Tucson last week. (The group leaves food and water for migrants crossing the desert and has led efforts to […]

FBI Tries to Put FOIA Lawsuits on Hold The FBI recently told a government attorney that it is beginning to file “Open America” stays in “all FOIA lawsuits going” forward. This means, according to Jason Leopold, who brought attention to this alarming development, that “even if you sue the FBI, the bureau won’t process it until […]

ISCAP Directed to Help with FRUS Volume The Interagency Security Classification Appeals Panel (ISCAP), which is housed at the U.S. National Archives and charged with – among other things –  deciding on Mandatory Declassification Review appeals, held a forum today to discuss the current MDR landscape. Major takeaways from the meeting include: ISCAP received a […]