Accuracy in Media v. Cent. Intelligence Agency (D.C. Cir.) — in a 21-year-old case about records of American prisoners-of-war and others missing from action in the Vietnam War, reversing the district court and remanding; concluding the CIA’s “truncated search terms could not reasonably have been expected to capture relevant records” due to “notable omissions,” an “unexplained mismatch” between the “identified search terms” and “the scope of the FOIA request,” and failure to explain why the use of “singular or plural forms” of the employed terms was irrelevant insofar as “the use of one [might] exclude[] the other”; noting, “[t]he CIA’s worry about further narrowing the search is no answer to the problem of it not being broad enough to begin with,” especially since the agency “failed to adequately explain why fewer search terms would yield more results when, in this case, logic suggests the opposite is true.”
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