I will have to tell you more about one of my hobbies sometime. Today I will briefly mention that I use (present tense) a LOT of stamps and envelopes to write Mandatory Declassification Review (MDR) requests for old, yet still classified documents from the U.S. government. For fun (and research purposes).*
I also have a penchant for trying to find information to fill the gaps… in life, puzzles, video games, documents… you name it. So when I see gaps inside a system, I try to find out why those gaps are there.
On February 22, 1995, the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) released information on early space-based reconnaissance gathering systems – namely Corona, Argon, and Lanyard (CAL) – as directed by Executive Order 12951. A number of years later, the NRO posted a collection of documents detailing information about the CAL systems – the eponymous “CAL Collection” – on their website (www.nro.gov). The index listed 2358 documents.
However, not all of these documents listed within the index were present. I took notice of this many years ago (mid 2010s), and asked the NRO Information Access and Release Team about this information gap. When pressed, they stated I should write a FOIA request to have the documents released… so I did.
Yet nothing new was posted to the CAL Records Collection website.
(Mea Culpa: I place a LOT of FOIAs and MDRs with them, so they have been understandably busy with other things… like launching and operating satellites, and reviewing my requests.)
This year, with the looming threat of a U.S. government shutdown, I decided to add stamps to envelopes and send MDR requests for the remaining 140+ documents that were listed – but not posted – from the CAL records collection.
Long story short – I did not make any friends in Chantilly, Virginia over the months of September and October.
However, if you view the image above, you’ll see there is a 2023 posting date for one document. If viewed in its entirety, the CAL Records Collection now has *many* 2023 posting dates listed.
But there is a happy ending to this story: one lone nut-job in Albuquerque can sleep peacefully tonight, for the information gap within that records collection no longer exists.
* While I call it “fun,” I read these documents to gain historical insight into the operations of this nation’s Intelligence Community and military services’ throughout the decades. But yes, it is exciting to receive a FedEx box with 200+ pages of something that very few people have read in the last 50 years. So, yes, I call it fun. 🙂 And I read every line of each document.
Joseph T. Page II 