I first spent time with Dan Ellsberg at a writer’s retreat in 2016. I was writing The Ghost about counterintelligence chief James Angleton. I asked Ellsberg about him and quickly learned everything I heard about Ellsberg was true. He is a profound student of U.S. policy and U.S. empire. He combines an encyclopedic yet personal...
Category: Transparency
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MuckRock’s Guide to Getting Your Own FBI File
A self-request falls under the Privacy Act and not the Freedom of Information Act. It requires a special Department of Justice form stating, under penalty of perjury, that you are who you say you are.The request should state clearly that you are requesting all documents with your name and any aliases in them. It...
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DDoSecrets Publishes the Email From Russia’s Ministry of Culture
Distributed Denial of Secrets is a transparency collective with an unusual mission in the age of PeakTwitter: “avoid political, corporate or personal leanings.” They say they don’t do hacking but they have posted the result of a hack a trove of 230,000 emails from Russia’s Ministry of Culture. DDOSecrets lives on the so-called Dark Web,...
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6 Startling Revelations From Declassified U.S. Government Documents
From HowStuffWorks “The [public] tolerance for the secrecy of these organizations has become smaller,” Pfeiffer says. “There’s a demand by people to have a greater understanding of what their intelligence agencies actually are up to … And the intelligence agencies are incredibly powerful and outrageously secret. So over time, for the intelligence community to...
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Transparency and National Security: What News Editors Need to Tell Their Reporters
Dan Froomkin at PressWatch on journalism after January 6. The most important lesson of the Bush/Cheney years is that we should never assume government officials are telling us the truth, especially when it comes to matters involving war and national security. This is hardly an original lesson, and yet nonetheless it bears repeating. We should...