Years ago, I filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for my FBI file, not expecting much. In their interim responses, the FBI told me they found hundreds, if not thousands, of pages. After years of waiting, the FBI finally responded – by making it disappear.
I’ve misplaced the original request in the several years since submitting it, but have obtained a copy of what the FBI entered into their system, though there seem to be problems and inconsistencies with that.
First, the fee information appears incorrect. It’s unlikely that I would agree to a two hour search time and one hundred pages, especially when FBI’s failure to obey the statutory time limits means that as a journalist, they have to provide me with the search time for free and up to 5,000 pages for free. Note that the text shown is one of the standard options using the FBI’s online FOIPA submission portal.
Second, the FOIPA number shown – 1407192-000 – indicates that the FOIA was received and entered into their system on June 4, 2018, based on comparisons to other FOIPA numbers in the FBI’s public FOIA logs. While I believe I filed a FOIA for my FBI file at this time, it could not be the FOIA request that the FBI processed. The request that the FBI entered into their system and processed appears to be an odd – and notably unnegotiated – amalgamation of multiple requests. Revealingly, it included “a list of FOIA request and appeal numbers is attached.”
This list did not exist in June 2018, and in fact would not be created until June 2021 three years later. The list was created after the FBI closed all of my pending FOIAs – about 5% of their backlog – and unsuccessfully tried to ban me from FOIA. The list was generated by the FBI to help reopen my FOIA requests, and to ask me to put them into a priority list. The request for my file was given top priority. As I noted in December 2022, the FBI initially claimed they lost the list before later finding it and reopening the FOIA requests.
This would indicate that the FOIA was submitted on or before June 2018, and then submitted again in or after June 2021, with the language expanded to include not only my FBI file but emails discussing the FOIAs that had been closed in bulk. Emails from the FBI’s FOIA office shed a little more light on the processing of the request.
It was consistently placed in the “large” processing track, which in 2022 indicated that there were “951 pages or more.” When the FBI later added an “extra-large” processing track, the FOIA request remained in the “large” processing track which was then designated for “501 to 4,999 pages.” Therefore we can see that the FOIA request fell between 951 pages and 4,999 pages and that between 799 pages and 4,897 pages are unaccounted for.
The FOIA release was mailed to the wrong address, despite the Bureau having been repeatedly given the correct address. In their response letter, the FBI said they found, reviewed, and released 102 redacted pages. The letter does not acknowledge any missing or removed pages, nor does it – as it would be required to – acknowledge that there may be more potentially responsive pages.
The closest it comes to acknowledging this is in the FBI’s standard FOIPA attachment, where they acknowledge that law enforcement, national security and intelligence records are automatically excluded and not confirmed or denied (a GLOMAR response). While the Bureau states that “this is a standard response and should not be read to indicate that any such records do or do not exist,” there are several reasons to believe that this is precisely what happened to the missing pages.
First, the FBI has detained me and investigated me before. In 2013, the FBI and Israeli security detained me in New York City due to confusion over my identity and a knife that was mistakenly left in my pocket when I went through a security check point. Second, in 2017, the FBI investigated and considered prosecuting me after I requested the files on several thousand deceased FBI agents, using the Bureau’s publicly released “Dead Lists.” The FBI incredulously claimed to be unable to find records about BlueLeaks, despite being the government agency responsible for leading the investigation.
Not only was I associated with BlueLeaks because of my role in Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoSecrets), but I was personally targeted by the government’s over-reaching investigation. In 2020, members of Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), a component of ICE and DHS, began questioning archivists who had discussed BlueLeaks. One of these archivists, “Meghan,” was unknown to me when she was approached by agents who asked about me, tried to recruit her as an informant and offered to pay her for information.
A year later, the FBI gave a GLOMAR response to a FOIA request for the file on DDoSecrets, claiming it could not confirm or deny the existence of an ongoing investigation under b7A and b7E. Late last year, the FBI admitted the existence of an investigation involving DDoSecrets, exempting them from release under b7A and b7E.
Perhaps someone could argue that all of this means nothing, and that outside of the FBI’s FOIA office, my name has never come up at the Bureau. After all, I am neither BlueLeaks nor DDoSecrets, the FBI is not DHS, and it’s theoretically possible that the incident in New York City might not have made its way past the files of the NYPD and the Israelis. However, covertly recorded audio reveals that the FBI had an interest in me and tried to recruit at least one informant – Val Broeksmit – to try to entrap me and report on me.
During a four hour meeting with the FBI on August 12, 2020, an FBI agent asked about me by name. While Val had mentioned my first name earlier, my last name was not mentioned until the FBI agent brought it up. Val, no more credibly than usual, claimed that I said I was CIA – an idea that I had loudly mocked since at least early 2019. In the same exchange, Val also speculated about my and my partner’s genders, then complained that we repeatedly called him a snitch. In another exchange with the FBI, he describes a failed attempt to entrap me. (A fuller exploration of Val Broeksmit is underway and will be published when it is ready.)
Notably, the meeting was led by Special Agent David Ko from the Houston Field Office, which coordinated the BlueLeaks investigation. One of the other agents in attendance was Boeing Shih, from Los Angeles, where the Task Force investigating BlueLeaks was based. Since we know that not only did the meeting take place within the FBI’s Los Angeles offices but it was memorialized in FBI documents, it’s inconceivable that the Bureau would have no record of a topic that they had some familiarity with and deliberately brought up.
So we’re left with a simple question: is the FBI deliberately burying between 799 pages and 4,897 pages of my file behind a GLOMAR, or is this yet another case of “failure by design” at play in FOIA as Ryan Shapiro of Property of the People would say? Either way, the FBI made hundreds or thousands of pages of my FBI file disappear. As is the way, I’ve filed a new FOIA request to try to get to the bottom of the last one.
