The Department of Defense and military agencies use the foreign policy exemption in Executive Order 13526 to deny or heavily excise documents that are well over 50 years old. According to Pentagon claims, declassifying information from that far back could cause significant harm to U.S. diplomacy. That many of the same documents have been declassified […]
Federally-Funded Private Prisons Should be Subject to FOIA The National Security Archive joined a large coalition of open government groups calling for the passage of legislation that would apply FOIA to federally-funded private prisons, closing a routinely abused loophole. The Private Prison Information Act of 2017 (S. 1728) was introduced by Senator Ben Cardin (D-Md.) […]
Washington, D.C., August 8, 2017 – The British Foreign Office approached the Truman administration on more than one occasion in late 1952 to propose a coup to overthrow Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq, according to freshly declassified State Department documents. Posted today for the first time, two previously Top-Secret memoranda from senior officials at State refer to a series of communications and meetings beginning in October 1952 in which British officials tried to win U.S. approval of Mosaddeq’s ouster.
CBP Response to Travel Ban Under Renewed Scrutiny Thanks to FOIA Request Documents released through the FOIA confirm that the agency ordered its employees to stonewall members of Congress and lawyers during the first hours of the travel ban. The released emails show a number of reactions from Customs and Border Protection to the ban, […]
FCC Says No Written Documentation on Claimed DDoS Attack that Crashed Public Comments System during Net Neutrality Controversy The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is in Unredacted’s hot seat again for the second week in a row concerning its responses to FOIA requests on proposed net neutrality rollbacks. This time the FCC is under fire for […]
CIA Overclassification Jeopardizes Hmong Veterans’ Fight for Military Burial Journalist James Eli Shiffer has a must-read piece in the Minneapolis StarTribune on Hmong veterans who fought for the United States during the Vietnam War and are currently fighting for the right to be buried with “military honors in a national cemetery.” But the CIA is […]
The CIA is positioned to begin destroying a large number of potentially important documents, including classified information related to the Agency’s official actions abroad, investigative files from the offices of the Inspector General, Security, and Counterintelligence, and files relating to CIA assets (spies) that the CIA itself does not deem “significant.” As reported in the […]
Washington, D.C., July 17, 2017 – The Department of Homeland Security will release the visitor logs for President Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort by September 8, according to a court order filed on July 14, 2017, by federal judge Katherine Polk Failla.
A blistering 2008 Central Intelligence Agency legal settlement of $350,000 to the National Security Archive’s pro bono lawyers, paid after losing a Freedom of Information Act case, led to the opening of an Inspector General investigation to review whether the CIA violated “policy and federal law” with respect to the FOIA. The IG report, released in […]
Trump’s Deregulation Teams Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, interviews, and public records helped The New York Times and ProPublica identify 71 appointees to the Trump administration’s deregulation teams at agencies across the government, including 28 members with potential conflicts of interest. The Times notes, “Some appointees are reviewing rules their previous employers sought to […]