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October 1999

• Additions to FBI FOIA Web Site, FBI press release, October 29. "The Federal Bureau of Investigation announced today that it has added seven items to the Espionage, Historical Interest, and Famous Persons categories of its Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Electronic Reading Room.
• Portions of Nixon Tapes Available for Sale, NARA press release, October 28. "In January 2000, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) will begin to make available for sale, for the first time, a select group of tape recordings of conversations from the Nixon Presidency."
• Statement of Senator Moynihan on the "Public Interest Declassification Act of 1999", October 27. "This bill creates a mechanism for comprehensively reviewing and declassifying, whenever possible, records of extraordinary public interest that demonstrate and record this country's most significant and important national security policies, actions, and decisions."
• UK Announces Release of WWII Special Operations Executive Histories, October 26. "This is seventh release of documents relating to the Special Operations Executive (SOE), the British war-time sabotage and subversion organisation."
• Statement of Rep. Tom Bliley on Site Security at DOE Labs, House Commerce Committee press release, October 26. "Part of the [problem] lies, however, with an Administration that purposefully de-emphasized security at our labs ... mandating the de-classification of millions of pages of sensitive information."
• Full Disclosure on Chile, Congressional Record, October 26. Senator Kennedy introduces two articles from the Washington Post on the CIA's role in Chile.
• President Clinton Renews Info Disclosure Exemption for Groom Lake, Federal Register, October 26. "I find that it is in the paramount interest of the United States to exempt the United States Air Force's operating location near Groom Lake, Nevada...."
• Is Big Brother Reading Your E-mail? by Rod Dreher, New York Post, October 21. "Even if the whole Echelon story is a hallucination or a hoax, it is nevertheless the responsibility of Congress to get to the bottom of it."
• United States Secretly Deployed Nuclear Bombs In 27 Countries and Territories During Cold War, Natural Resources Defense Council press release, October 20. "Newly declassified history reveals that the United States stationed nukes in "non-nuclear" Japan, Greenland and Iceland. Other countries unknowingly hosted U.S. nukes."
• Where They Were: US Nuclear Weapons Deployments by Robert S. Norris, William M. Arkin & William Burr, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, November/December. "Between 1945 and 1977, the United States based thousands of nuclear weapons abroad. The weapons' hosts did not always know they were there."
• Senator Harkin Calls on President to End Nuclear Secrecy Policy in Iowa, press release, October 19. "Even mentioning that nuclear weapons once existed at the Iowa Army Ammunition Plant is considered a national security secret."
• Spy in the sky? That could be Echelon; Some fear snoops target e-mail, calls, By Kathryn Balint, San Diego Union-Tribune, October 17. Is the government listening in on your phone calls? Reading your e-mail for words like "plutonium," "Clinton" or "terrorism"?
• The CIA's Operation Hollywood, by Vernon Loeb, Washington Post, October 14. "Never before has the CIA so fully embraced a movie.... And never before, it's fair to say, has a film been quite so to the agency's liking."
• World News Connection in Jeopardy. In a recent note to subscribers, the Department of Commerce's World News Connection announced that "we have deleted sources from the countries contained on the U.S. Department of State embargoed list and, in addition, refined the representation of sources previously provided."
• New Archival Evidence on Taiwanese "Nuclear Intentions," 1966-1976 by William Burr, National Security Archive. "Recently declassified documents, unearthed by the National Security Archive, provide new and significant details about ... efforts to forestall a nuclear-armed Taiwan."
• National Archives to Make Available Alger Hiss Grand Jury Material, NARA press statement, October 11. "The National Archives and Records Administration will make available certain formerly secret Grand Jury testimony from the Alger Hiss case."
• U.S. Releases Government Files on Pinochet Era in Chile, White House press statement, October 8. "Today the Department of State, the Department of Defense, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the National Archives and Records Administration are releasing newly declassified and other documents related to events in Chile from 1968-1978."
• Back Channels: The Intelligence Community by Vernon Loeb, Washington Post, October 7. "The federal government declassified more than 193 million pages of historical documents in fiscal 1998."
• Agencies' Efforts to Declassify Documents Reversed by Katy Saldarini, Government Executive, October 6. "Congress included language in the 1999 defense authorization bill that not only stops [automatic] declassification efforts but makes agencies check to see if they have already declassified too many documents already. President Clinton signed the bill Tuesday."
• CIA Declassified 3 Million Pages in 1999 by Tabassum Zakaria, Reuters, October 5. "The number of pages declassified was triple the one million sent to the National Archives last year."
• CIA Releases 3 Million Pages of Historical Documents, CIA press release, October 5. "The CIA announced today that it has shipped 3 million pages of historically valuable records to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) this year."
• The Public's Right to Know: Principles on Freedom of Information Legislation, prepared by Article 19 (London), June 1999. For those countries considering the adoption of FOI legislation, "These Principles set out standards for national and international regimes which give effect to the right to freedom of information."
• Bingaman Amendments on Polygraph, September 30. Two proposed amendments offered by Senator Bingaman would assess the validity of polygraph testing for employee screening, and the potential use of countermeasures.
• Pentagon News Briefing on Alleged Korean War Atrocity, September 30. "We owe the American people, our veterans, and the people, our friends and allies of the Republic of Korea, a full accounting of these matters."

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