13 November 2017|For the numbers people among us, I’ve updated the 2017 Documents Project page above to break down the 4 document releases so far, by formerly withheld vs. redacted, and by agency within each group. Some interesting findings while compiling it. See the table at the top of the linked page.I found numerous errors in the online download page – record number column not matching the pdf filename for more than a dozen of them. I also discovered that 13 documents in the Oct 26 have since that date been recategorized from “formerly withheld in full” to “formerly redacted” (now 39 withheld and 2852 redacted; on Oct 26 there were 52 and 2,839).
I ran some other tests on the data and found a few more surprises. Prime among them was that it appear that 375 of the documents released do not appear in the NARA online database at all. Many of these are from the “withheld in full” set, and don’t appear on the supposedly-definitive 2016 FOIA spreadsheet of 3,571 records. I can find no NSA records in the online database, for example, but 244 of them have been released now. Similarly for Army INSCOM files (none in NARA db), though I know some have already been out in Archives in paper form since Joan Mellen’s DeMohrenschidt book references a few of them.
Thus it is becoming less and less clear what the universe of documents being processed really is, nor how we can ascertain it.
Read more at Mary Ferrell Foundation HERE.