freedom of information act

Shadowproof obtained 28 pages of FBI records regarding Gil Scott-Heron under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Born in Chicago in 1949, Scott-Heron was a renowned African-American poet and musician, perhaps most famous for his 1974 album, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.”
The declassified records include a memo to the FBI Director about a party thrown by the socialist All African People’s Revolutionary Party, at which Scott-Heron was scheduled to speak. The memo states that its contents concern an “extremist matter.”

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and other government agencies have no right to “resist disclosure” if a requester fails to adequately describe records they are seeking in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. They also must make a “good faith” attempt to define a request properly, a federal appeals court ruled.
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a decision by a district court, which maintained a FOIA request for records on CIA personnel or affiliates that engaged in torture “constituted a question” instead of a legitimate request.

The CIA inspector general’s office has said it “mistakenly” destroyed its only copy of a comprehensive Senate torture report, despite lawyers for the Justice Department assuring a federal judge that copies of the documents were being preserved.
The erasure of the document by the spy agency’s internal watchdog was deemed an “inadvertent” foul-up by the inspector general, according to Yahoo News.

WASHINGTON  — The Defense Department does not have to produce records related to its handling of classified material allegedly disclosed in a bestseller about the killing of Osama Bin Laden.
Tuesday’s ruling stem from a Freedom of Information Act dispute between the department and the James Madison Project, a Washington-based government watchdog.

Hellfire missiles being loaded onto a US military Reaper drone in Afghanistan. (Photo: Staff Sgt. Brian Ferguson/U.S. Air Force)
Published in partnership with Shadowproof.
The FBI conducted an espionage investigation into the Stockholm International Peace Institute (SIPRI), a renowned arms monitoring group.

The Ohio National Guard moves in on protesters at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio, May 4, 1970. (AP Photo)
WASHINGTON – A federal judge hastened completion of a documentary decades in the making about the FBI’s role in the Vietnam anti-war movement Thursday by ordering the agency to churn out nearly 3,000 pages of documents a month.
According to an internal policy, the FBI was only releasing requested records in chunks of 500 at a time to Nina Gilden Seavey, a filmmaker and professor at George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs.

A composite showing some of the images of torture contained in a portion of a Senate ‘torture report’ released by the Department of Defense as part of an ACLU lawsuit.
BROOKLYN, N.Y. — From destroyed videos to disappearing emails and now an endangered torture investigation, a New York-based law professor has found himself at the center of yet another legal battle to preserve records the CIA wants to forget.

DNC staffer Seth Rich was shot and killed in his Washington, DC neighborhood on July 10, 2016.
WASHINGTON – Describing a shroud of secrecy over the death of Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich, a Virginia-based group brought an open-records complaint against D.C.’s mayor and attorney general.

(COMMONDREAMS) A watchdog group on Monday stepped up its efforts to get the Trump administration to answer for its military strike on Syria in April.

Senate Environment and Public Works Committee member Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., points to a chart as he questions Environmental Protection Agency Administrator-designate, Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, Jan. 18, 2017, during Pruitt’s confirmation hearing before the committee. (AP/J. Scott Applewhite)