Jesse Ventura - 63 Documents the Government Doesnt Want You to Read

If youre interested in following the document trail in the future, there are plenty of places to look, including those listed below. I found these links especially useful in putting together this book. Its time we used the information age to our advantage, in reclaiming our democracy from the secret-keepers.

*WIKILEAKS : By the time this book is published, who knows where youll find Julian Assanges team? Right now, you can look at www.mirror.wikileaks.info . They have a list of the growing number of mirror sites that plan to publish the State Department cables and other documents. WikiLeaks is a nonprofit organization that launched their website in 2006 and, within their first year of existence, had a database of over 1.2 million documents. They publish submissions of private, secret, and classified documents obtained from anonymous sources and news leaks.

*CRYPTOME : Their website has been around since 1996, hosted in the U.S.A. Cryptome welcomes documents for publication that are prohibited by governments worldwide, in particular material on freedom of expression, privacy, cryptology, dual-use technologies, national security, intelligence, and secret governanceopen, secret and classified documentsbut not limited to those. Theyve hosted more than 54,000 files, including suppressed photos of American soldiers killed in Iraq, purported agents for Britains MI6, and much more. They have two DVDs loaded with hard-to-find documents leaked by whistleblowers both government and private, available for a $25 donation. Check out http://cryptome.org for some fascinating browsing.

*NATIONAL SECURITY ARCHIVE : This is an independent research institute and library, located on the George Washington University campus. They are an amazing repository of government records listed by topic, historical and contemporary, from the Cuban Missile Crisis to the war in Afghanistan and more. They get their documents by a variety of ways, including the Freedom of Information Act, Mandatory Declassification Review, collections of presidential papers, congressional records, and court testimony. The Archive was behind the groundbreaking legal effort to preserve millions of pages of White House email records from the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton administrations. Check out www.nsarchive.org to find the vast amount of material that theyve gathered.

*GOVERNMENT ATTIC : This website posts electronic copies of hundreds of interesting federal government documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. They recently revamped their document menu to consist of four distinct parts: Department of Defense; Department of Justice; Executive Branch Departments, the White House and Legislative Agencies; Independent Federal Agencies, Govt. Corporations and State/Misc. Records. Go to: www.governmentattic.org .

*PUBLIC INTELLIGENCE : Administrator Michael Haynes tells us: This is an international collaborative research initiative working to facilitate equal access to information by enabling anyone to anonymously submit documents or information for online publication. In less than two years of operation, the site has published thousands of restricted documents related to issues of national security, the war in Afghanistan, banking and international finance, as well as government and corporate surveillance. The site maintains one of the largest collections of documents produced by U.S. fusion centers available to the public. Go to: http://publicintelligence.net .

*THE MARY FERRELL FOUNDATION : This nonprofit is your best source for documents about the assassinations of the 1960s, the Watergate scandal, and the post-Watergate investigations into intelligence abuses. The digital archive contains over 1.2 million pages of documents, government reports, books, essays, and multimedia. Go to: www.maryferrell.org .

*OPEN THE GOVERNMENT : Its a coalition composed of journalists, consumer and good government groups, library groups, environmentalists, labor and others coming together to make the federal government a more open place. Theyre non-partisan and include progressives, libertarians and conservatives. Go to: www.OpenTheGovernment.org .

*OPENLEAKS : This is a new website scheduled to be up-and-running in 2011. Its founders have been closely linked to WikiLeaks in the past, but have since parted ways and are describing themselves as more of a technological service provider to media organizations than as a central hub for leaks. Go to: www.openleaks.org .

*DOCUMENTCLOUD : Program Director Amanda Hickman tells us: DocumentCloud ( http://www.documentcloud.org ) is a catalog of primary source documents and a free and open-source tool that reporters use to annotate, analyze, organize, and publish documents theyre reporting on. DocumentClouds catalog, assembled by reporters, archivists, and researchers, includes everything from FBI files to sample ballots, Coast Guard logs to legistation, and court filings. The project is designed to help reporters publish more of their primary source documents online, and to make those documents accessible to the general public in an indexed catalog.

*CIA : The Central Intelligence Agency has a digital database called CREST that consists entirely of declassified documents. A finding aid is located at: www.foia.cia.gov/search_archive.asp .

*OPEN SECRETS : This is your prime resource for tracking money in American politics and how it affects elections and public policy. Its part of the Center for Responsive Politics. Go to: www.opensecrets.org .

*THE FEDERATION OF AMERICAN SCIENTISTS ( www.fas.org ) offers a rich archive of resources on national security policy. The Federations Secrecy News blog ( www.fas.org/blog/secrecy ) produces original reporting on U.S. government secret policy and provides direct access to valuable official records that have been withheld, withdrawn or are otherwise hard to find.

*THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES ( www.archives.gov ) is the repository for millions of government documents, and their Archive-It FOIA Collection lists sites that deal with FOIA requests at: www.archives.gov/ogis/foia-records.html .

Now get thisthere are 407 million pages of classified documents waiting to be opened to the public at the National Archives. Mostly these consist of a backlog of historical records more than twenty-five years old and its a slow-moving process. But they do have a National Declassification Center that was created by President Obamas Executive Order at the end of 2009. For example, the CIA still has around 50,000 pages of classified records related to the Kennedy assassination. What could the CIA still be protecting after almost fifty years?

Of course, you can always file Freedom of Information Act requests yourself, and this is an important tool of democracy. Theres a report called Rummaging in the Governments Attic: Lessons Learned from 1,000 FOIA Requests from 2010, available at: www.governmentattic.org/3docs/Rummaging_2010.pdf .

And just in case youre wondering what the feds might have on you, check out www.GetMyFBIfile.com .