United States and Canada

Washington, DC, April 21, 2006 - Last month the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) put almost 320,000 declassified cables on-line when it opened up State Department document databases from 1973 and 1974. This is significant news for researchers, because the text of declassified diplomatic cables is now retrievable on the NARA Web site. Beginning in 1973, the State Department began creating electronic systems for transmitting cables to and from U.S. embassies.

Washington D.C., 19 April 2006 - Monday, Archivist of the United States Allen Weinstein released a declassified Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the Central Intelligence Agency, signed in October 2001, and a background paper that shed more light on the recently exposed reclassification of open files at the National Archives and Records Administration. After the secret MOU came to Weinstein's attention last Thursday, he sought its immediate declassification.

Washington D.C., 19 April 2006 - A federal court today granted partial summary judgment to the National Security Archive finding that the Air Force has violated the Freedom of Information Act and has engaged in a pattern or practice of violating the FOIA.

Washington D.C., 11 April 2006 - The National Archives and Records Administration secretly agreed to a covert effort, led by the Air Force, the CIA, and other still-hidden intelligence entities, to remove open-shelf archival records and reclassify them while disguising the results so that researchers would not complain, according to a previously secret Memorandum of Understanding (MOU).

Washington D.C., 7 April 2006 - Only 14 of the full 93 pages of the National Intelligence Estimate that President Bush authorized Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, to disclose to New York Times reporter Judith Miller has actually been officially declassified, according to a posting today on the Web site of the National Security Archive at George Washington University.

Washington, DC, March 28, 2006 - The Central Intelligence Agency and National Reconnaissance Office used the nation's spy satellites and spy planes to obtain high-resolution images of the nuclear facilities of allies, adversaries and neutral nations alike, as illustrated in a collection of overhead reconnaissance images posted on the Web today by the National Security Archive. Today's posting includes 15 photographs and five photographic interpretation reports from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. The images were obtained by U-2 spy planes and CORONA and KH-7 reconnaissance satellites.

In an effort to identify the oldest unanswered Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests in the federal government, the National Security Archive used the FOIA itself to ask more than 60 federal agencies for copies of their ten oldest pending FOIA requests. The results are astonishing-requests as old as 17 years remain unanswered, some agencies are unable even to identify their oldest requests, and agency backlogs are significantly more chronic and extensive than the agencies' annual reports to Congress indicate.

Washington D.C., March 14, 2006 - The first-ever government-wide audit of the ways that federal agencies mark and protect information that is unclassified but sensitive for security reasons has found 28 different and uncoordinated policies, none of which include effective oversight or monitoring of how many records are marked and withheld, by whom, or for how long.

Washington D.C., 13 March 2006 - The Central Intelligence Agency has won the second annual Rosemary Award, recognizing the worst performance by a federal agency in complying with the Freedom of Information Act. The Award is named after President Nixon's secretary Rosemary Woods and the backwards-leaning stretch which she testified resulted in her erasing eighteen-and-a-half minutes from a key Watergate conversation on the White House tapes.

Washington, D.C., March 9, 2006 - The Justice Department official who oversaw national security matters from 2000 to 2003 e-mailed his former colleagues after revelation of the controversial warrantless wiretapping program in December 2005 that the Department's justifications for the program were "weak" and had a "slightly after-the-fact quality" to them, and surmised that this reflected "the VP's philosophy that the best defense is a good offense," according to documents released through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by the Electronic Privacy Information Center and joined by