WSPF and the 1977 Firewall Between Evidence and Publics
The American people were promised an open accounting of the Nixon crimes, but the WSPF's administrative machinery worked to isolate the evidence from the narrative.
By Constance Bell ·
FOIA
Watergate Special Prosecution Force and the Paper Wall of 1977
Citizens fought for years to pierce the secrecy of the Nixon era, only to find their requests managed by a clerical firewall designed to curate the truth
By Marcus Boone ·
CIA and the 1986 Operational Projects Blackout
For fourteen years, these "operational projects" remained hidden; now released, the record is a void of noise and repeated stamps that masks who was burned in 1986.
By Harlan Pryce ·
Leonard Perroots and the CIA's War on a Public Record
The CIA erased text already published by the State Department to hide the contents of a 1989 report, scrubbing even the portions marked unclassified.
By Harlan Pryce ·
August 9, 2000, and the CIA's Gift of Digital Noise
A FOIA request for government secrets returned a page of illegible character strings, keeping the truth hidden behind a stamp of approval for twenty-four years.
By Constance Bell ·
Mohammad Mosaddegh and the Eleven-Year Silence of the CIA
For over a decade, the Agency released versions of its history of the 1953 Iranian coup that were functionally identical in what they kept blacked out.
By Harlan Pryce ·
Henry Kissinger and the 1976 Fight to Bury His Telephone Records
A legal strategy crafted in 1976 sought to shield the secrets of a National Security Advisor by claiming his calls weren't official records, keeping them hidden from FOIA.
By Desmond Okafor ·
Harold Weisberg and the Courtroom War for the 6.5mm Shell
A former reporter spent decades suing the CIA and FBI to break the seal on the 1963 murder, uncovering a physical shell casing in a paper trail of redacted files.
By Theo Marchetti ·
Paul Niemeier and others sued Watergate Special Prosecution Force for files
From 1976 to 1977, citizens and news syndicates fought in court to force the special counsel tasked with the Nixon investigation to surrender its secrets.
By Desmond Okafor ·
CIA Bet $800 Million on a Lie to Snatch a Soviet Submarine
For years the agency hid a secret mission to salvage a lost vessel, eventually using a legal loophole to block Harriet Ann Phillippi and deny the existence of government records.
By Desmond Okafor ·
CIA Official Fought FOIA to Hide 600-Pound Uranium Loss
Unwitting LSD subjects and a 600-pound uranium loss were treated as brand threats by an official seeking to limit public access to Agency records.
By Desmond Okafor ·
CIA Hides Operational Intelligence Behind 19 Release Stamps
High-level technical intelligence remains blacked out in a record where a release date appears nineteen times amidst a sea of corrupted text and digital noise.
By Harlan Pryce ·
CIA Project 'Other A' Warps and Scours Secret Matrix Targets
Targets became blackened, warped and pitted during a high-energy test, though the identity of the facility and the final analysis results remain missing from the record.
By Miriam Adler ·
CIA Loses Intelligence Notes In Public Archive
Raw intelligence and analyst thinking vanished during digitization, leaving only a repeated release stamp and digital dust in a file open since August 9, 2000.
By Constance Bell ·
CIA tracked Soviet flying saucer claims in 1952
Soviet flying saucer claims stayed out of public view until 1978, but the actual substance of what the USSR said remains a gap in the record.
By June Hargrove ·