The reliable Katie Bo Williams reports from the bowels of the U.S. intelligence community (That’s “IC” to some; the “deep state” to others). In Defense One Williams has an update on U.S. drone wars. The Trump administration has breathed new life into the CIA’s covert drone program, which Obama sought to suffocate by shifting control...
Category: Transparency
Post
Post
How a High School Class Penetrated the Veil of Secrecy and Forgetting
A group of high school student from Highstown, New Jersey did something fairly amazing this year: They took effective action against government secrecy. They wrote a law, and, in a bitterly divided Congress, they got it passed. And President Trump signed it. The students in Stu Wexler’s American government class, persuaded Congress to preserve and...
Post
MuckRock’s Nine Years of Uncovering Secrets
The full-service investigative site MuckRock is nine years old, an apt moment to celebrate its remarkable journalistic achievement. Founder Michael Morisy had the ingenious idea of automating the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) process, so that anybody could take advantage of open government laws at the federal or state level. These laws are quite strong...
Post
CIA Ran Two Different Torture Programs, Psychologist Says
A recently declassified CIA study reveals that the agency had two different programs for the brutal interrogation of suspected terrorists, according to a retired psychologist and author of a book about Guantanamo. Writing in Medium, Jeffrey Kaye says that the two programs were run by different components within the CIA that had different approaches to interrogation....
Post
Influence Operation: ACLU Sues for Records of the CIA’s Haspel Nomination Campaign
The American Civil Liberties Union is suing the CIA for records pertaining to the Agency’s campaign to support Gina Haspel’s nomination as director of the agency. The Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, filed Thursday, seeks records related to “Haspel’s potential conflict of interest in serving as the classification authority over information about her own role in...