After MuckRock FOIA lawsuit, CIA publishes declassified documents online

By Alex Howard, Sunlight Foundation, Jan. 17, 2017

When the Sunlight Foundation received an inquiry from the Central Intelligence Agency last week, we weren’t sure what to expect, given the recent pace of world events. The news turned out to be straightforward: the CIA was going to publish approximately 12 million declassified pages from its CIA Records Search Tool (CREST) on the Internet.

This afternoon, the CIA carried through on its commitment from October 2016, making nearly a million individual archived documents available to the public online in its Freedom of Information Act reading room.

The CREST collection goes back to the 1940s and the origins of the CIA, covering the Cold War, the Vietnam and Korean wars, the Berlin Tunnel project, aerial reconnaissance, and more. There’s even a section on a STARGATE project, which might lead to renewed speculation about what our federal government knows about extraterrestrial life.

Read more here.