A Decade of Small Releases
For a little over ten years, the National Security Agency answered requests about a project called Intellipedia the ordinary way: page by page, some of it blacked out, but released. Then, in 2023, it stopped answering at all.
Intellipedia is a set of three internal wikis built by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, piloted in late 2005 and formally rolled out in April 2006. One version runs on JWICS, the government network carrying material classified Top Secret; one on SIPRNet, carrying material classified Secret; and one on Intelink-U, carrying material marked Sensitive But Unclassified or For Official Use Only. It functions, in effect, as the intelligence community’s internal encyclopedia.
Researcher John Greenewald Jr. who runs the FOIA archive The Black Vault, had been requesting pieces of it since not long after it launched. The NSA’s responses over that period give some sense of scale. After an appeal granted in March 2017, the agency eventually released a full page count for each wiki: 50,233 pages in the unclassified version, 114,502 in the Secret version, and 124,815 in the Top Secret version, with the last of that material not turned over until June 2018. The agency also closed out more than twenty separate FOIA cases tied to Intellipedia, spanning nine years of requests. None of that made Intellipedia’s contents public. What it did establish, case by case, was that the NSA was willing to process these requests and hand something over.
The Reversal
In 2023, new Intellipedia-related requests began coming back with a Glomar response, the formal FOIA answer in which an agency states it can neither confirm nor deny that responsive records exist. The NSA’s own wording, as reproduced in letters obtained by The Black Vault, was that it could “neither confirm nor deny the existence or nonexistence of any responsive material contained within the Intellipedia collaborative platform.” Over roughly three weeks, The Black Vault filed 132 appeals against these denials. All were rejected.
This is the incident itself: a documented change in agency posture, applied consistently across more than a hundred separate cases, after a decade in which the same agency had been releasing material from the same platform.
The Request About the Request
On April 14, 2024, The Black Vault filed a new request, narrower than the ones before it. It did not ask for Intellipedia content. Instead, it asked for the paper trail behind the 2023 shift: memos, emails, and presentations from 2021 forward that might explain why the agency’s posture had changed. Greenewald was not asking the NSA to hand over secrets. He was asking it to explain a decision it had already made in public, through its own denial letters.
The NSA answered on April 30, 2024, sixteen days later, with a full denial.
What the Letter Says
According to that letter, as reported by The Black Vault, the requested material “could reasonably be expected to cause serious damage to national security” and remains classified SECRET, a level defined under Executive Order 13526, the standing order governing how the U.S. government marks and protects national security information. The letter cites three FOIA exemptions: (b)(1), covering properly classified material; (b)(3), covering material protected under other federal statutes; and (b)(5), which shields internal deliberative material and attorney-client or attorney work-product communications. Those are the NSA’s stated legal grounds, and the letter offers nothing beyond them.
This particular letter has not surfaced in any government reading room, nor has it been independently corroborated by another outlet. What is known about its wording comes solely from The Black Vault’s own account of receiving it, an organization that has spent close to three decades publishing the FOIA correspondence it gets, this letter among it.
What the Letter Doesn’t Say
The letter names categories of harm and cites statutes of protection, but it does not describe what, specifically, in records about a policy decision would cause that harm. Nor does it explain why an explanation of a Glomar policy would itself need Glomar-level secrecy. And nowhere in the released correspondence does the NSA address the 132 appeals denied the year before, or tie them to the reasoning it gives here. None of that silence proves anything in particular. It is simply what is missing from the file.
The Ordinary Explanations
Agencies tighten disclosure for dull reasons often enough: an internal security incident, a revised classification guideline, a data-handling review. Intellipedia is a working analytic tool used across the intelligence community, and its handling could plausibly have shifted for reasons that have nothing to do with any single requester. That explanation is available in principle, but not in the record. No memo, briefing, or public statement from the NSA cites an incident, review, or guidance change as the trigger for the 2023 shift. The mundane explanation remains a possibility rather than a documented fact.
What Happens Next
The Black Vault has filed an appeal of the April 30, 2024 denial. No outcome exists yet in the public record, no released decision, no further correspondence. Whether the appeal changes the classification finding or is denied on the same statutory grounds is not something the file currently answers.
Greenewald’s Reading
Greenewald has argued, in comments reported around the time of the 2023 closures, that the shift “sets a concerning precedent,” since it suggests an agency can sidestep FOIA’s ordinary exemption framework simply by declining to say whether records exist at all. He has also written that the change was not driven by any amendment to the FOIA statute itself, but appears to be an internal agency choice, one that could let agencies redraw the boundaries of transparency without legislative or judicial sign-off. Those are his readings, offered after receiving the denials. They appear nowhere in an NSA document. They are interpretations of a pattern, made by the person who filed the requests, not findings in the paperwork itself.
What the paperwork actually shows is narrower, and stays that way: ten years of piecemeal releases, a reversal in 2023 that the agency has never explained, and a 2024 letter that classifies the explanation itself as SECRET, with an appeal now pending and no decision on file.