Interesting searches of the cache include "LSD", "hacker", "Martin Luther King", and "psilocybin". After those searches, the resource was suddenly unavailable.
It's federal IT. I'm going to guess overload due to extremely resource-inefficient implementation before I guess "uh oh, somebody's curious about MKULTRA, better pull the search".
I haven't gotten the search to work at all, assuming that search bar is for the documents (the UX isn't great). I've been getting "CIA.gov is Temporarily Unavailable" each time.
That said, there are some interesting (and mildly terrifying) documents you can find from some general browsing of the categories.
I wonder if that's actually the motivation behind opening it up now rather than weeks or months from now. There are apparently efforts underway at other federal and federally-funded bodies (e.g. EPA, NOAA, NASA, some federally-funded college departments) to get backups of raw data into safe places in case Congress or the Trump administration orders it taken offline or even deleted [1].
Is there anything in this article that actually links the deletion to President Obama or explains why the deletion was ordered? Or even any evidence that this happened?
Edit to be clear: I'm not implying the Obama administration did not do things like this but this read more like an anecdote by someone with political leanings. We also have no information about why they were deleted or modified and don't know if the author had access to the full picture. Perhaps they were merged with another record, therefore improving the "haystack" etc.
The author made that connection: "the Obama administration was ordering they be wiped away."
I haven't seen any followup on this story. Liberal media seems to have ignored it entirely, conservative media reports it without further details.
The author, Philip Haney, has been a vocal critic, appearing on Fox and writing numerous articles, so there's been ample opportunity for the Obama administration to respond if there was indeed an explanation such as you suggest, but I haven't seen any response.
I'm sure the Obama administration is just far too busy with finally getting around to the FEMA camps and gun confiscation to answer every little conservative conspiracy claim.
You can't say he didn't try. But the Republican response was so over the top, portraying the prisoners as some sort of supervillains with superpowers, that it never happened. I don't know why the Republicans are so scared of these prisoners.
Just one example: "The day before the Archives speech, the Democratic-held Senate dealt Obama’s plans an even harsher blow. By a blowout bipartisan margin of 90-9, the Senate rejected financing the closure. A Senate leadership aide at the time, stunned by what she considered White House lassitude, explained why even people inclined to help Obama would vote against the measure: Obama had decreed Guantánamo be closed without presenting lawmakers with a specific plan they could defend to skeptical constituents."
To be fair though, there's a lot in that article to justify getting angry at both Democrats and Republicans. For example:
"As implied by the term, Graham spent the summer of 2009 looking beyond Guantánamo. His basic proposition to the White House, reported in detail in Charlie Savage’s 2015 book Power Wars, was to deliver the votes in the Senate for shuttering Guantánamo and opening a replacement facility. In exchange, Graham wanted a broader wartime detentions policy than Obama was willing to embrace. It would allow the US military to continue making captures far beyond the declared battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, sending them to the alternative site. When trial was an option, it would occur in the military commissions."
Dirty politics, absolutely unacceptable (to me).
These things are extremely complicated. I really dislike this simplistic recurring narrative (not you specifically, I'm speaking in general) that everything is the Republican's fault. I have no problem believing this is usually true, it is the implicit assertion that it is always true that bothers me.
Although, the Republicans now have a historic opportunity to show their true colors with no excuses....I am ready to be extremely disappointed.
If you are actually interested in getting an understanding of what happened, you may want to read the declassified source document instead of reading the EFF's take on an incorrect portion of the NYT article.
There is no equivalency between deleting criminal justice records, which should and normally do remain private unless used in a court of law, and removing information that's been released the public sphere.
"After leaving my 15 year career at DHS, I can no longer be silent about the dangerous state of America’s counter-terror strategy, our leaders’ willingness to compromise the security of citizens for the ideological rigidity of political correctness—and, consequently, our vulnerability to devastating, mass-casualty attack."
Both are stories about deleting information that doesn't fit a political agenda.
There's an option between releasing and deleting information about suspected terrorists.
Unless you're saying the suspected terrorists were cleared? If so, what's your source?
> Both are stories about deleting information that doesn't fit a political agenda.
One set of information is public, one is private.
The information we're discussing is public - this recently released trove of CIA documents and NOAA & NASA climate data for instance. The DHS' internal database of terrorism suspects is private unless used specifically to prosecute individuals for crimes.
If your claim is that the DHS should publicly release data about terrorism suspects, that's another debate, although a spurious one. We've done that before, it was called McCarthyism, and it left an indelible negative mark on the US government. If DHS were to engage in such behavior it would likely be challenged and reversed on 6th amendment grounds.
Would it even be legal to delete existing data sets? Surely it belongs to the US public, as it was collected using taxpayer money?
(A more likely scenario would be that the programs collecting data the new administration doesn't like gets the budget axe, creating a hole in the data series for posterity to wonder at. ("Say, ma, how come we have climate records from 1870-2017 and then again from 2021 onwards?")
CIA.gov is Temporarily Unavailable
CIA.gov is temporarily unavailable. We apologize for the
inconvenience. Please try again later.
Posted: Aug 27, 2012 04:31 PM
Last Updated: Aug 27, 2012 04:31 PM
That was the result of my search 'Nicaraguan contra'
Federal IT. Betting it's chock-full of easy wins for a savvy dev, and those do tend to turn up with a GS number from time to time. They rarely seem to stick, though, which I gather is part of what 18F is trying in a small way to change.
Since the landing page required everyone interested to enter a keyword to search, the back-end server can record all query and ip-addrs.
I doubt if WikiLeaks.org use this exact same method to study what document attract traffic|attention. WikiLeaks' new releases are not signed by PGP anymore, I take that as either a Warrant Canary or some kinds of warning.
Of course, if everything packed in a torrent, then there's no way to conduct such a study.
CREST has been available to the public for a while now, though not online. ODCI/DI would be interesting to look into but I won't hold my breath finding anything outlining the bastardly of the early 60s. [0]
First terms I looked up, "Budget Hawkeye" for 1963-64. Found some details, hard numbers were redacted. NPIC ^grew^ a lot post '63 judging by the budget requests. Lots of files referencing "Brass Knob" in '63 (daily Cuban flyover). The other interesting details were NPIC monthly memos detailing the daily operations.
