Cia Freedom of Information Act Electronic Reading Room

Posted4 months agoActive4 months ago

bookofjoe

161 points

36 comments

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calmmixed

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Cia

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Declassification

The CIA has launched an electronic reading room for Freedom of Information Act requests, sparking discussion about the website's design and the content of the declassified documents.

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01Story posted
Sep 16, 2025 at 9:10 AM EDT
4 months ago
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02First comment
Sep 16, 2025 at 10:26 AM EDT
1h after posting
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7 comments in 1-2h
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04Latest activity
Sep 16, 2025 at 11:20 PM EDT
4 months ago
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Discussion (36 comments)

Showing 36 comments

marginalia_nu

4 months ago

9 replies

I don't know what sort of MKUltra-esque psyop is going on with the font rendering on this website, but it is exceptionally trippy[1].

[1] https://imgur.com/fpruTB9

LargoLasskhyfv

4 months ago

2 replies

They are trying to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLIT_(short_story) you :-)

j/k. For me that occurs only when I zoom the site on FF under Linux, but not when I leave it at normal scaling, and use the 3 letters on the upper right side to change the font size instead.

airstrike

4 months ago

1 reply

Oh, that looks like the original Snow Crash. Time to read it.

sunrunner

4 months ago

It made me think of Infinite Jest too.

> Time to read it.

Nice knowing you.

ManualEntry

4 months ago

3 replies

BLIT is interesting, but I wonder if precedence already exists in photosensitive epilepsy and sending flicker/stroboscope videos/gifs. Of course with a lot of caveats (rarely deadly, affects few), but the idea seems similar to me.

Apparently it is illegal in the UK to do that and I'd guess it is illegal in most countries. https://www.epilepsy.org.uk/news/sending-triggering-images-o...

edit: Didn't find a case, but it is illegal in the UK at least.

LargoLasskhyfv

4 months ago

You mean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subliminal_stimuli as claimed by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Vicary / https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-30878843 ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_the_Nation%3F

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Live !

Now playing Tiga & Zyntherius - Sunglasses at Night https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kE8565_xrc

(Corey Hart 1983 cover https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunglasses_at_Night )

rcxdude

4 months ago

More or less, though pushed to some extremes (similar, to some extent, to the idea of antimemes, i.e. ideas which hide or prevent their own propagation). The question is whether there's something which is actually universal there. I would guess, given the wide diversity in thought patterns in people, it's not very likely. Roko's Basilisk, I think, kind of falls into the epilepsy category: it came about after an attempt to think of ideas which would work like this, but it only really affects a small part of the population with very particular thought patterns and beliefs (and, due to it's nature, isn't really going to have the same kind of effects, though if anything they could be more harmful. The antidote is more or less the arguments against Pascal's Wager, if you are particularly taken by the idea).

cwmoore

4 months ago

I hope this includes aftermarket LED headlights and anime and spotlights and not my https://www.ouruboroi.com/ --black and white, grayscale flashes warning, as labelled explicitly on my https://www.curtiswmoore.com/circTao/. Thank you UK.

zibw

4 months ago

2 replies

I run into this on some other websites, I think it's just a font and Linux issue.

bangaladore

4 months ago

1 reply

It's terrible with Edge on Windows, not vertically misaligned terrible, but terrible, nonetheless.

rolph

4 months ago

i think thats a general case

twic

4 months ago

Looks ok to me in Firefox on Fedora 42: https://imgur.com/a/7IQ5hwJ

EDIT Oh, it does look busted in Chrome, though. But you can just not use Chrome.

Xiol32

4 months ago

1 reply

I have been having this exact same issue across multiple websites recently, most of the time it's monospace fonts that have the issue - Github is a nightmare. It only started after I upgraded to Fedora 42.

Haven't got to the bottom of it yet. I set Victor Mono as my Monospace font in Chrome and that has fixed it for things like the HN comment box, for instance, but Github and such still all look weird.

marginalia_nu

4 months ago

I've can't remember ever seeing this particular glitch before in my 20+ year Linux usage history. Very weird.

diabllicseagull

4 months ago

fine on firefox and safari under macos

Terr_

4 months ago

Perhaps it's a way to encode user and time-of-access into the document, so that even scanned leaks can be traced back to a person. :p

sunscream89

4 months ago

Hey, go grab those Gateway files, I’m sure they have copies at the desk!

Gateway II is disappointing and the hidden plot line is that these experiences are curated by superior handlers and these are the accounts as ordinary man would interpret them.

Btw, were you being satirical? They won.

The28thDuck

4 months ago

This actually messed with my head. I now see the comments misaligned on HN.

wlkr

4 months ago

It's not quite as pronounced for me, but it still seems to be a bit off. The CSS suggests that the intended font is GT America Extended.

carlcortright

4 months ago

this made me laugh out loud

hoistbypetard

4 months ago

2 replies

It's interesting that they chose to redact some of the markings on the document. (e.g. you see "SECRET" and below that there's a redacted mark.)

psunavy03

4 months ago

3 replies

That generally means that while the document was declassified, parts of it weren't, and the still-classified info obviously gets redacted.

Information generally gets declassified after 25 years, but there are exceptions for when arbitrarily declassifying things could jeopardize capabilities that are still in use, burn intelligence sources who are still alive, etc.

hoistbypetard

4 months ago

1 reply

That makes sense. I just found it interesting that the markings were considered something that could fall into that category. I thought those were usually so broad (e.g. NOFORN) that they wouldn't be.

psunavy03

4 months ago

1 reply

The existence of certain programs, or the tying of certain codewords to their subjects, can sometimes itself be classified. Sometimes just the fact that a program exists under a given codeword is itself classified information.

buildsjets

4 months ago

1 reply

The material is classified. Its composition is classified. Its use in the weapon is classified, and the process itself is classified. But at least we know it's called FOGBANK.

psunavy03

4 months ago

It's easy to joke about, but one of the other problems is that if Government X knows that the US has found out specific facts A, B, C, and D, they can then determine that the only person who could have provided those pieces of information is Person Z.

And now Z (and maybe their entire family) get literally taken out back and shot in the head. Now you not only lose the source of intelligence, you disincentivize anyone else to provide intelligence to you.

Or they find out that it could have only been gathered by obscure technique Q, they take specific countermeasures to mitigate against Q, and there goes millions or billions of dollars of R&D.

kevin_thibedeau

4 months ago

There is an Obama EO that now encourages using ten years for less sensitive material as part of an effort to let in more sunshine. The new procedures also require the declassification date to be determined upon creation so that it isn't left to a non-SME 25 years later.

ricksunny

4 months ago

Like the fact that up to 50% of the State Department was actually CIA, as noted by Arthur Schlesinger Jr and only declassified this year, 63 years later, as part of the recent trove of JFK files releases.

https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/2025-03-19/cia-cover...

(Even this much was the result of decades of sustained political support for disclosure since Oliver Stone’s landmark 1991 film.)

Key takeaway is that if the unaccountable minders thumping national security don’t want something released - ever - it won’t be releases.

nonameiguess

4 months ago

2 replies

Portion markings in the IC, at least in the modern era, will include both the classification and a compartment. The compartment is specific to the collection method, i.e. SI indicates signals intelligence, TK indicates satellite data. Since those can reveal the source of the data, that reveals capabilities that the agency may not want to reveal, even if the data itself is no longer sensitive enough to classify.

mschuster91

4 months ago

> Since those can reveal the source of the data, that reveals capabilities that the agency may not want to reveal, even if the data itself is no longer sensitive enough to classify.

Always 'member Trump and his release of a high resolution photograph from a satellite [1]. It took mere hours for people to work out which exact satellite was used to create the photograph and established a lower bound on its imaging capabilities.

[1] https://qz.com/1699833/what-we-can-learn-from-the-spy-satell...

MrMorden

4 months ago

Compartments are just for SCI. IC agencies do like putting all the classification markings on cafeteria menus, but they do non-SCI as well.

Both SAPs and SCI control systems can be unacknowledged/unpublished, and foreign releasability markings can easily be classified because they show that the country in question has an intelligence relationship with the US that covers a specific topic.

lawlessone

4 months ago

1 reply

That bird drone looks cool , very similar tail to many current drones.

kjkjadksj

4 months ago

Makes you wonder about the current state of the art in the bird drone program.

carlcortright

4 months ago

This should come with a warning on how dizzy it makes you before you read it. Nuked my afternoon of productivity

dannyw

4 months ago