Background Since the breakup of the Soviet Union, we have witnessed the dissolution of an empire having over 40,000 nuclear weapons, over a thousand metric tons of nuclear materials, vast quantities of chemical and biological weapons materials, and thousands of missiles. This Cold War arsenal is spread across I I time zones and lacks the Cold War infrastructure that provided the control and financing necessary to assure that chains of command remain intact and nuclear weapons and materials remain securely beyond the reach of terrorists and weapons-proliferating states. This problem is compounded by the existence of thousands of weapons scientists…
Author: John Greenewald
Background On the morning of September 11, 2001, nearly 3,000 people were killed in a series of coordinated terrorist attacks in New York, Pennsylvania and Virginia. The attacks resulted in the creation of the Transportation Security Administration, designed to prevent similar attacks in the future. Driven by a desire to help our nation, tens of thousands of people joined TSA and committed themselves to strengthening our transportation systems while ensuring the freedom of movement for people and commerce. The Aviation and Transportation Security Act, passed by the 107th Congress and signed on November 19, 2001, established TSA. Through the Freedom…
Background Referenced within the U.S. Department of Labor 2011 Chief FOIA Officer Report, located at: https://www.dol.gov/sol/foia/2011ChiefFOIAOfficerRpt.htm, there was a reference to a Internal FOIA Desk Reference Guide. Seemingly never published publicly before, I requested the record in November of 2016. In March of 2017 — I received the document, no available for download below. According to the document’s introduction: The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) provides that any person has a right, enforceable in court, to obtain access to federal agency records, except to the extent that records or portions of them are protected from public disclosure based upon one of nine exemptions.…
Background The Internal Revenue Service created a video parody of Donald Trump’s television show “The Apprentice” which was broadcast at a 2011 conference held by the IRS’s Small Business/Self-Employed Division (SB/SE). The video features a group of IRS employees impersonating contestants on the program and one impersonating Donald Trump, Ivanka Trump and contestants of the competition show. The video was obtained via a Freedom of Information Act Request by The Black Vault, and still outstanding on the FOIA request, are documents relating to the budget, drafts or the scripts, outtakes, etc. This page will be updated, as those documents come…
Background In June of 2014, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) FOIA online submission tool went down. It created quite a few problems and frustrations for frequent requesters such as myself. So, I thought it would be interesting to see what they had internally regarding the incident. So after the site went back online, I filed a a request on July 1, 2014 for the following: “…all records pertaining to the temporary problem that brought down the CIA’s FOIA web site, including the ability to submit online FOIA requests, in June and July of 2014… {snip} which would include, but not be…