Like many good stories, this one starts with a simple question and ends with a lesson.
First, rewind to last December. We knew GOP Senate nominee Carly Fiorina had at one point chaired an external advisory board charged with giving advice to the CIA (she's said as much on the stump). So naturally, we wanted to figure out a couple things: How often did she show up, and what did she do once she got there?
It sounded easy enough, so we fired off a FOIA request to CIA headquarters asking for attendance records and meeting minutes. Pretty standard stuff.
Remember: This was nine months and one hard-fought primary election ago. So imagine our delight earlier this week when a parcel arrived at the office, emblazoned with the CIA seal and filled with what appeared to be actual documents. Not a rejection letter, not a status update, but real, actual documents. From the CIA. They didn't even charge us for copies! Talk about luck! This was government transparency at its best.
By now, you know where this is headed.
They gave us documents, all right. About 30 pages of them. Problem was, most of them looked like this:
Yes, that's a blank sheet of paper. Or, more accurately, it's a sheet of paper that has been redacted from top to bottom. We think it's from some meeting minutes, but the only evidence of that comes from another page that lists two agenda items: "Opening remarks" and "Concluding remarks." The rest, of course, is also redacted:
So what were we able to learn from the records? Not much. It seems Fiorina attended the meetings on a regular basis, but it's hard to say. Some pages, like the one below, are basically just blank sheets with her name on them and no other context whatsoever.
To the CIA's credit, they did respond to our request. That's more than we can say about the State Department, with whom we filed a similar request last year. And we understand the argument that some information justifiably can be kept secret.
But this request also shows a common point of friction between the government and reporters. There's a constant balancing act between protecting legitimate secrets and being transparent as the law requires. In this case, the presumption on the part of the CIA seems to have been to redact the records as much as possible – at times to the point of absurdity.
For example, throughout the documents, the names of all other advisory board members besides Fiorina's were redacted. But if they're so secret, you have to wonder why they've been listed in speeches and press releases.
So what's the lesson? First, don't get your hopes up when you get a parcel of documents from the CIA. Based on their FOIA history, you're more likely to get turned down than not.
But second, and more important, is this: Reporters and government officials fight intense battles over the tiny bit of turf between private records and public records. You win some, you lose some.
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