Documents / FOIA release
This is a declaration by Delores M. Nelson, the CIA Information and Privacy Coordinator, dated October 26, 2009. She filed it in support of the CIA's motion for summary judgment in Larry W. Bryant v. CIA, a FOIA suit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. Bryant had sought records of a 1987 FAA meeting about the November 17, 1986 Japanese flight 1628 encounter over Alaska. The declaration describes the agency's searches, which found no records of the meeting and three documents from other agencies about later airborne UFO encounters.
Approved for Release: 2025/06/10 C07083377 FOLA officers in PIPD review the request to ensure that it is perfected, that is, meets applicable legal and administrative requirements. Part of this review entails checking to see if the CIA has previously searched for and released records on the topic identified by the requester. If so, depending upon the volume, the requester is provided with copies of the responsive records or a listing of such records as well as with background on the search which generated the records. (See Exhibit B.) If a request is perfected and a search of CIA component records is necessary, PIPD officers determine which directorates7 of the CIA, reasonably may be expected to possess records responsive to the request and then forward copies of the requester’s letter to those directorates with instructions to search for any responsive documents. The tasked directorates then conduct searches among all directorate components and indices and databases that reasonably may be expected to have any information responsive to the request. Directorate personnel responsible for conducting these searches are professionals who regularly and routinely conduct CIA record searches, whether for another component of the CLA, the Director of CIA, Department of Justice, Congress or a FOIA requester. 23. After a tasked component locates documents in response to a FOIA request, officers must review those documents to determine whether they, in fact, respond to the request. Because of the nature of a particular records system, or the search tools, indices, or terms employed, a search may locate many documents that are not responsive to the request. In fact, it is quite connnon for the number of non- responsive documents to exceed the number of responsive documents. 7In the discussion of processing procedures in this Declaration, “directorates” will include the DIR Area. ' 10 Approved for Release: 2025/06/10 C07083377
FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 16 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.