CIA closes office that declassifies historical materials.

Well damn.

reply to post by Aazadan

It's far more difficult to alter a document if it's placed online and possible to download. There would be groups and individuals that download everything placed online, I'm one of them.

You're certainly not alone.

I agree that this is a good thing. True, as one points out, online documents can be altered. The flip side for how it's been is that average people never see the documents at all, anyway. FOIA or not, unless we personally filed it. So this is a step forward however anyone looks at it.

It's not like they are truly going off paper records in their own systems anyway. If anyone thinks Uncle Sammy trusts everything to any 1 or even 3 different systems when it really matters? They're nuts... This is just for the public/scholars to access everything and stop ringing their phones for the same requests 100 times a year, the more I think about it.

Originally posted by MrSpad

Originally posted by WhiteAlice
Way to create a backlog, CIA. FOIA requests previously took a while to handle (I think my mother's took about 6 weeks). Wonder how long that backlog is going to be now that the historical archives duties have been funneled into the FOIA office? It's a petty move. I find it amazing that other departments that have faced sequester cuts aren't pulling these kind of moves but the ones in the DoD? They're choosing to penalize the public for the sequester. Kind of says something there.

Its the CIA of course your going to cut things that are not imporatant to your mission. Sure the office is nice PR and give people something to read about the old days but, its not going to gather any intel for you. FOIAs can be easy or a pain. When I would get stuck doing them I aways hoped for something off the wall so we would have nothing on it that needed reviewed.

My mother's request was quite personal so it's not always about the "old days". Her request wasn't directed towards the CIA but the military and it was her life (and her parents) that she ended up having to do the FOIA requests about. Whereas it could be a historian looking for some answers, it can also be families looking for answers, too, and for intensely personal reasons. Considering that 3/4's of her requests were denied or entailed destroyed records and ergo, denied, I think that the FOIA process is sometimes just a tool to make it look like there is transparency when there is none as a shredder is a fantastic way to avoid disclosure. Two of the denied due to destruction of records requests were her and her deceased mother's medical records from the military. Like I said, sometimes these kind of requests are deeply personal.

I wouldn't bother to be too concerned over this on its own, what bothers me is the FOIA requests being chased relentlessly that one day there will be no one alive no method no secret that can be justifiably a reason for continued classification. As such there will need to be a fresh excuse. That excuse will be WORLD TRADE CENTER 7. Housing so much of the documentation from CIA and NSA those two alone have or i should say, HAD files, files of state secrets,files that needed destroying like mkultra needed destroying. This, this is a new excuse to reduce the capacity to respond, and thus make it ever more pointless trying. The gates are closing and when they are fully closed, then we will be trapped inside a city full of vampires. Unless people wake up and do more than talk about it. It is time we do something while the choice still rests with us, power to vote, power to strike, power to demonstrate. Soon, none of those will be with us, and on that day, some of the last secrets will come out, and we will know how right we were, and those who label us nutters etc, will be sorry they were so easily hoodwinked

There are already a variety of ways to keep info out of FOIA. For example.

From the 1970s to the 1990s there were a variety of programs and projects in various government areas related to research on psychic ability, particularly a format with a science protocol called "remote viewing." Many of those overlapped, some were far more secretive than others. There was also at least one science program which existed to do research and serve the intelligence programs.

Over time, the intelligence unit became more and more estranged from the science protocol, which was reflected predictably in their results, and gradually instead of that group being the program everyone wanted, it became the program nobody wanted. It was still utilized by everyone, as most the intell apps work had shifted to people working on the science side so was still getting done well, but that even further marginalized the personnel in the semi-military unit (the main change occurred when the ownership of the unit shifted to the DIA and devolved from there).

Eventually it was a bit of an albatross, although the science side of things, with the apps work happening there, was still moving along. There was always some concern about the public finding out, columnist Jack Anderson had made it the worst kept secret ever, but there were all kinds of contracts with all kinds of agencies that would keep it private anyway, or should have.

Then one day after the CIA had previously been trying to get the program for eons -- but at which point they now didn't want it anymore -- they got it anyway. Worse, now they not only didn't want it, but it wasn't really a secret and it was likely to blow up in their face as a public relations issue. But on the bright side, this occurred just as the CIA had had a major budget cut, and the program came already-funded with quite a few headcount built in.

So the CIA arranged the fastest and most ridiculously constructed 'science review' ever, which by the way reviewed a) almost nothing of the program, b) the reviewers weren't cleared for anything useful, and c) the particular science they reviewed wasn't even asking the question they were attempting to review for (and there's more that makes it an obvious setup), and within 3 months they had arranged the answer they wanted ("Sorry, 20 years of annually-renewed funding, and repeat work from every agency that exists including us, but it turns out it was nothing. Ha!Ha!") and they closed the program -- immediately taking its pre-funding and headcount for their own personnel, announcing publicly that the program had existed but had no results they so closed it (nobody could then "discover" it and "out" them) and that was that.

So after that, it took quite awhile for them to get down to what amounted to the

reply to post by RedCairo


Could you give specific examples? That sounds really interesting, but tbqh everyone on this site makes references to "remote viewing" when that seems to be misinformation on "remote sensing" which was receiving an incredible amount of attention in the same time frame and which has been very fruitful.

And, as a workaround to the "STARGATE" redirect issue, wouldn't looking up pertinent dissertations/scientific articles and then going through their bibliographies work? Any one article may not have useful information in the bibliography, but surely using this method repeatedly to fish information would work?


*EDIT* of course, maybe it is a double bluff, remote viewing does exist, and was deemed to be too much of a threat to other projects security.

The example I gave was entirely specific, so I'm not sure what you are asking for. Every bit of it is literal. I've spent nearly 20 years involved with the topic and know several of the personnel from various of the projects both intell and science.

Wiki is generally the best source on basic stuff and the worst possible source on anything non-mainstream, as it is dominated by religious-zeal scoffers who have nothing better to do with their time, but here is its page on that topic:
en.wikipedia.org...

Be advised that this had disinformation preplanned and implemented from long prior to the date it was even made public. As a result, nearly everything you hear about it in public ranges from fraud to disinformation, misinformation, wishful thinking, and endless amounts of confusion.

There is a legitimate core to all this, both in the practice and in the referenced projects, but it's damn near homeopathic comparatively, and since this happened almost entirely on the internet -- where histories are completely revisable -- I don't envy anybody trying to find a path through it now.