FBI Adds Electronic Form for FOIA Requests

The FBI has a new electronic form designed to make requesting information easier. In addition, the bureau has retooled it records website, including a guide for research in FBI Records. Of course, filing a request has always been the easiest part of making a FOIA request of the FBI. George Washington University’s National Security Archive [...]

Three More Domestic Spying Programs Revealed

The Department of Homeland Security is acknowledging the existence of three more government programs charged with spying on American citizens in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. The programs — Pantheon, Pathfinder and Organizational Shared Space — used a variety of software tools to gather and analyze information about Americans, according to [...]

WikiLeaks: Collateral Murder

WikiLeaks has released a classified US military video depicting the indiscriminate slaying of over a dozen people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad — including two Reuters news staff. Reuters has been trying to obtain the video through the Freedom of Information Act, without success since the time of the attack. The video, shot [...]

ACLU sues USAID for FOIA violations over abstinence-only programs

The American Civil Liberties Union has sued the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) for failing to provide documents regarding its overseas religiously-influenced abstinence-only-until-marriage programs. In July and September 2009, the ACLU sent USAID requests for the programs funded through HIV/AIDs grants, including requests for proposals, contracts with USAID, curricula used by grantees, communications [...]

Homeland Security Releases Annual FOIA Report

The Department of Homeland Security has released the 2009 Freedom of Information Act Report. The report shows that the Department processed over 160,000 requests in the past year, with 27,182 requests remaining pending. Of the requests processed, 11% were granted in full, 60% were classified as “partial grants/partial denials,” and the remaining 29% were denied [...]

Proposed Law Would Extend FOIA Reach to Private Prisons

Congress is considering proposed legislation to extend the Freedom of Information Act to private prisons that contract with government agencies. At present, the companies that run private prisons say they are not subject to FOIA because they are not public agencies. Read more about H.R. 2450 here. (Private Prison Information Act of 2009)

EPIC Posts TSA Documents on Body Scanners

The Electronic Privacy Information Center has posted more than 250 pages of documents it obtained in  a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit concerning body scanners. The documents, released by the Department of Homeland Security, reveal that Whole Body Imaging machines can record, store, and transmit digital strip search images of Americans. This contradicts assurances made by [...]

Officials Hid Truth of Immigrant Deaths in Jail

Silence has long shrouded the men and women who die in the nation’s immigration jails. For years, they went uncounted and unnamed in the public record. Even in 2008, when The New York Times obtained and published a federal government list of such deaths, few facts were available about who these people were and how [...]

Federal Agencies Need Not Confirm or Deny Electronic Surveillance under FOIA

The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit affirmed that the National Security Agency and the Department of Justice do not need to confirm or deny the existence of electronic surveillance records under the Freedom of Information Act. The appellate court found that federal agencies are allowed to file “Glomar” responses, which were [...]

FBI Releases Michael Jackon Files

Michael Joseph Jackson, a celebrity pop star, was born on August 29, 1958. He died unexpectedly on June 25, 2009 at the age of 50. Between 1993 and 1994 and separately between 2004 and 2005, Mr. Jackson was investigated by California law enforcement agencies for possible child molestation. He was acquitted of all such charges. [...]

Federal court says mug shots not public records

A federal court in south Florida told a freelance journalist that his request for the mug shot of a securities fraud mastermind will go unfulfilled because the Freedom of Information Act does not apply to booking photos of suspects in federal custody — at least not if you make the request in the Eleventh Circuit. [...]

Intelligence Improperly Collected on U.S. Citizens

WASHINGTON — In February, a Department of Homeland Security intelligence official wrote a “threat assessment” for the police in Wisconsin about a demonstration involving local pro- and anti-abortion rights groups. That report soon drew internal criticism because the groups “posed no threat to homeland security,” according to a department memorandum released on Wednesday in connection [...]

Millions of Bush-era e-mail messages to be recovered

Two groups announced Monday that they have settled a 2007 lawsuit against the government over millions of missing e-mail messages that were sent during the Bush administration, USA Today reported. Citizens for Professional Responsibility and the National Security Archive reached a deal with the Obama White House to have 22 million missing e-mail messages from [...]

White house announces 20 agency open government initiatives

Each of the 20 cabinet departments has unveiled a new open government initiative in response to the directive issued Tuesday by the Obama administration, the White House reports. “This work represents only the beginning of an ongoing commitment across the Administration to create a culture of openness in government,” the White House stated in its [...]

Lawsuit demands info on government’s use of social media sites

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is suing five different government agencies for refusing to disclose their policies on investigations using social networking websites. The lawsuit was filed Monday after the Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of the Treasury, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence [...]

Climate Scientists’ E-Mail Hacked

This archive presents over 120Mb of emails, documents, computer code and models from the Climatic Research Unit at the , written between 1996 and 2009. The CRU has told the BBC that the files were obtained by a computer hacker 3-4 days ago. This archive includes unreleased global temperature analysis computer source code that has [...]

FBI kept tabs on Pulitzer-winning author Studs Terkel for 45 years

The Federal Bureau of Investigation, which acted as America’s political police during the Cold War, spent several decades watching Pulitzer Prize-winning author Studs Terkel, who died earlier this year at age 96.  The revelation was made by the City University of New York’s NYCity News Service, which acquired 147 of the 269 pages in Terkel’s [...]

State police want nearly $7 million to fulfill FOIA request

The Michigan Department of State Police is charging the Mackinac Center for Public Policy nearly $7 million to fulfill its Freedom of Information Act request for information on how the state has used homeland security grant money since 2002, the nonpartisan research group reported. A communications specialist at the center requested information after the Department [...]

Q&A With FBI Director Mueller

As a result of polygraph testing, more than a thousand applications for employment at the Federal Bureau of Investigation have been rejected or otherwise terminated in the last year alone, the FBI told Congress last month.  Polygraph testing has been the single largest reason for discontinuing an application, well ahead of administrative or medical issues, [...]

Soldiers broke law in Alabama shooting response

SAMSON, Ala. — An Army investigation found that soldiers should not have been sent to man traffic stops in a small Alabama town after 11 people were killed in March during a shooting spree. An Army report released to The Associated Press on Monday in response to a Freedom of Information Act request said the [...]

Special Interests See ‘Classified’ Copyright Treaty; You Can’t

Want to know the Language of the ever-transforming proposed Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement? It’s classified. And, according to the Obama administration, it carries national security implications. According to leaked documents on WikiLeaks, the proposed treaty would require ISPs to terminate repeat copyright scofflaws, criminalize peer-to-peer file sharing, subject iPods to border searches and even interfere with [...]

Telephone Company Is Arm of Government, Feds Admit in Spy Suit

The Department of Justice has finally admitted it in court papers: The  nation’s telecom companies are an arm of the government — at least when it comes to secret spying. Fortunately, a judge says that relationship isn’t enough to quash a rights group’s open records request for communications between the nation’s telecoms and the feds. [...]

CIA documents on Agent Posada Carriles released

The Washington, DC-based investigative nonprofit National Security Archive released several documents on Oct. 6 written by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in 1965 and 1966 about its Cuban-born longtime “asset” Luis Posada Carriles, who currently lives in Miami under indictment after entering the US illegally in 2005. The Archive’s Peter Kornbluh obtained the documents [...]

DoD Suppressed Critique of Military Research

“Important aspects of the Department Of Defense basic research programs are ‘broken’,” according to an assessment performed by the JASON Defense Advisory Group earlier this year, and “throwing more money at the problems will not fix them.” But that rather significant conclusion was deliberately suppressed by Pentagon officials who withheld it from public disclosure when [...]

Attorney: Oklahoma City bomb tapes appear edited

OKLAHOMA CITY  — Long-secret security tapes showing the chaos immediately after the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building are blank in the minutes before the blast and appear to have been edited, an attorney who obtained the recordings said Sunday. “The real story is what’s missing,” said Jesse Trentadue, a Salt Lake City attorney [...]

ACLU demands records of border searches of laptops

The U.S. Customs and Border Patrol‘s controversial practice of randomly searching laptops upon U.S. entry quietly began last year but has quickly drawn attention, including a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed this week by the American Civil Liberties Union for records related to the practice. With regard to the searches, which don’t require “individualized suspicion” to [...]

DHS Admits It Failed to Disclose 11 More Deaths at Immigration Facilities

In response to a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) revealed yesterday that the government had failed to disclose 11 more deaths in immigration detention facilities. In April, DHS officials released what they called a comprehensive list of all deaths in detention. That list included [...]

Senate Bill Would Disclose Intel Budget Request

The Senate version of the FY2010 intelligence authorization bill (pdf) would require the President to disclose the aggregate amount requested for intelligence each year when the coming year’s budget request is submitted to Congress.  Currently, only the total appropriation for the National Intelligence Program is disclosed — not the request — and not before the [...]

Report Finds ICE Home Raids Violate the Constitution

Constitution on ICE: A Report on Immigration Home Raid Operations The Cardozo Immigration Justice Clinic has just released this report which cites widespread constitutional violations from immigration home raids conducted by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in recent years. “This report is the first public effort to compile and analyze the available evidence regarding the [...]

Congressional Action on Secrecy

The Senate on June 17 passed a bill sponsored by Senators Joseph Lieberman and Lindsey Graham that would exempt from the Freedom of Information Act certain photographs documenting the abuse of detainees held in U.S. custody.  Senator Graham said that if the bill was not enacted into law, the Obama Administration had assured him it [...]

ACLU seeks data on border laptop searches

The American Civil Liberties Union has filed a FOIA request for records on laptops searched by border officials, PC Magazine reported. ACLU says these searching practices raise questions concerning First and Fourth Amendment rights because “they involve highly intrusive governmental probing into a traveler’s most private information.” Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano is [...]

A Few Intelligence Science Board Reports

There is “an astonishing number of groups and activities concurrently pursuing the subject” of information sharing, according to a newly disclosed 2004 report (pdf) of the Intelligence Science Board (ISB).  But those activities are not well coordinated.  “In effect, we aren’t even sharing information about information sharing.” The ISB is a little-known advisory panel that [...]

Reporters Committee releases summary of Sotomayor decisions

The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press has released a report summarizing the First Amendment and freedom of information opinions of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor. The report notes that while Sotomayor has an abundance of judicial experience, “it is surprising to see that no clear standard on First Amendment issues has emerged from [...]

Newly declassified documents reveal More than $97 million from USAID to separatist projects in Bolivia

The declassified documents in original format and with Spanish translation are available here Recently declassified documents obtained by investigators Jeremy Bigwood and Eva Golinger reveal that the US Agency for International Development (USAID) has invested more than $97 million in “decentralization” and “regional autonomy” projects and opposition political parties in Bolivia since 2002. The documents, [...]

LSD canine psychosis article from USSR (1962)

“Description of an Experimental Psychosis Induced by Lysergic Acid Diethylamide.” Official US government translation of an article from a Soviet psychiatric journal in 1962. [Released due to a Freedom of Information Act request filed with the Defense Technical Information Center by Russ Kick, 28 Feb 2009. The request was referred to and fulfilled by the [...]

Army Intel Journal Back Online

The U.S. Army last year blocked online public access to the Military Intelligence Professional Bulletin (MIPB), an Army intelligence journal, and moved the publication archive to the password-protected “Intelligence Knowledge Network.”  (“Army Blocks Public Access to Intel Journal,” Secrecy News, March 31, 2009). But in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from the [...]

FAA drops plan to make bird-strike data secret

Government officials promised Wednesday to stop a proposal by the Federal Aviation Administration to restrict access to a key database containing records of aircraft-wildlife strikes. The Washington Post reported that Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood told the paper in an interview the database would remain public. The FAA is part of the Department of Transportation. LaHood told [...]

New guidance from Justice on processing FOIA requests

The Justice Department’s Office of Information Policy issued new guidance Friday further implementing the attorney general’s memo that gives direction to federal agencies regarding the Freedom of Information Act. The guidance applies to all federal agencies and stresses “that the FOIA is to be administered with the presumption of openness.” It also says the “combined [...]

Army Blocks Public Access to Intel Journal

The Military Intelligence Professional Bulletin (MIPB), a U.S. Army journal devoted to intelligence policy and practice, has been removed from online public access and transferred behind a password-protected Army portal. The former MIPB website states that “The MIPB is now being hosted on the Intelligence Knowledge Network (IKN). (AKO account required).”  AKO (Army Knowledge Online) [...]

Bureau of Prisons pressed to comply with FOIA request

The federal Bureau of Prisons was ordered by a U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., on Thursday to either look again for records requested by a legal magazine under the Freedom of Information Act, or prove that its initial search was done properly. In its lawsuit over the records, Prison Legal News challenged the Bureau’s handling of its [...]

Records now presumed public in South Dakota

South Dakota is now on par with most states and the federal government in treating its government records as presumably public rather than non-public. Gov. Mike Rounds signed a bill flipping the legal standard despite the fact that he, as well as several other groups, opposed it, the Associated Press reported. South Dakota Sen. Dave Knudson championed [...]

Attorney General Issues New FOIA Guidelines to Favor Disclosure and Transparency

WASHINGTON – Attorney General Eric Holder issued comprehensive new Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) guidelines today that direct all executive branch departments and agencies to apply a presumption of openness when administering the FOIA. The new guidelines, announced in a memo to heads of executive departments and agencies, build on the principles announced by President [...]

Obama Administration Declares Proposed IP Treaty a ‘National Security’ Secret

President Barack Obama came into office in January promising a new era of openness. But now, like Bush before him, Obama is playing the national security card to hide details of the controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement being negotiated across the globe. The White House this week declared (.pdf) the text of the proposed treaty a [...]

Psychological Operations (PSYOPS) against Venezuela: Washington and its war on the Bolivarian Revolution

A secret document of the US Army National Ground Intelligence Center, recently declassified in part, through the application of the US Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), confirms that the Pentagon’s most powerful team for psychological operations is employing its forces against Venezuela.1 The document, dating from the year 2006, analyses the border situation between Colombia [...]

DEA’s Operation Xcellerator is Another Justice Department Dog and Pony Show

Despite the  “Largest and Hardest Hitting Operation to Ever Target” the Sinaloa Cartel, the DEA is Merely Treading Water in the War on Drugs On February 25, the US Department of Justice (DoJ) held a press conference celebrating the culmination of Operation Xcellerator, which it says resulted in the arrests of 755 Sinaloa Cartel members [...]

U.S. Navy Classifies Ship Inspection Reports

The U.S. Navy has classified regular reports about the material condition of its fleet, an about-face from when the reports were accessible as public documents under the Freedom of Information Act. The reports, filed by the Board of Inspection and Survey, or InSurv, contain the findings of meticulous, days-long inspections that cover every detail of [...]

Propaganda Machine: 27,000 Work in Pentagon PR and Recruiting

As it fights two wars, the Pentagon is steadily and dramatically increasing money spent on winning what it calls “the human terrain” of world public opinion. In the process, concerns have been raised that this is spreading propaganda at home in violation of federal law. An Associated Press investigation found that over the past five [...]

Filing FOIA requests

I’m often asked – in interviews and from this site’s readers – how to file a Freedom of Information Act t request. It’s a fairly simple procedure – you don’t need a special form or a lawyer. I keep meaning to write and post a guide, but until that day arrives, here are some guides [...]

Rumsfeld’s Plan to “Fight the Internet”

A newly declassified document gives a fascinating glimpse into the US military’s plans for “information operations” – from psychological operations, to attacks on hostile computer networks. Bloggers beware. As the world turns networked, the Pentagon is calculating the military opportunities that computer networks, wireless technologies and the modern media offer. From influencing public opinion through [...]