UPS is a familiar name on trucks and doorsteps, not the kind of party normally found suing a national government. In 2000, United Parcel Service of America Inc. did exactly that, filing a formal claim against Canada under a trade-treaty mechanism built for foreign investors. What survives from that filing, in one particular archive, is … Read more
A Title Built Entirely Out of Initials Most Sandia National Laboratories reports take their names from a weapon system, a test series, or a place. This one is named for three letters that stand for nothing the title bothers to explain. The document is titled “The Origins and Evolution of S2C at Sandia National Laboratories: … Read more
The Paper Trail Michael Townley pressed his thumbprint into four handwritten documents and gave them to his wife to hide. He was an American-born officer of Chile’s Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA), built under Augusto Pinochet, and in March 1978 he believed his own agency might kill him before the FBI could take him into … Read more
Some documents about a military failure are dense with testimony, cross-examination, dissenting opinions. This one is a single page, typed, ending in a list of fixes and nothing else. One Page, One Reference Number The document is titled “Summary of Recommendations.” It was produced by M.O.12, a military operations branch of the War Office, and … Read more
Some FOIA releases end without a bombshell. They end where the paperwork ends, and the honest move is to say so plainly. The Black Vault, the archive run by journalist John Greenewald, has spent years teaching readers to tell a document that settles something from one that simply records a process underway. Two new releases … Read more
An F/A-18 Pilot, a Senate Briefing, and a Document the Navy Said Didn’t Exist A researcher asked the Navy for a specific internal email. The Navy said no such record existed. Two FOIA requests and roughly two years later, the document surfaced anyway, naming a fighter squadron, a Senate committee, and a date, but very … Read more
Box One: A Transmittal Slip, Two Boxes, One Accession Number The record begins with a shelf label. Between late 1967 and early 1968, NASA sent a batch of documents to the National Archives and Records Administration, NARA, the federal agency that stores and tracks government records once an agency is done using them day to … Read more
Nathan Reeve, The Record Seven months of paperwork from NASA contains two answers to the same question, and they don’t agree with each other. The subject was a three-year window of congressional briefings on the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). NASA’s first answer was that no such briefings had ever taken place. Its second answer, … Read more
The Plan Nobody Followed Up On The Pentagon writes a great deal of paper about aircraft that fly themselves. Most of it stays classified, or gets folded into budget documents nobody reads outside the building. The record examined here is different: a signed, dated, unclassified-looking planning document that sat unremarked for twenty-seven years before anyone … Read more
A War Diary Entry, Not a Report Written After The document held today at the National Archives in London under the catalogue reference WO 171/4773, titled “Report on Belsen Camp,” was not written with hindsight. It is a war diary entry, filed close to the events it describes, by Lieutenant-Colonel R.I.G. Taylor of the 63rd … Read more
