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Last week, the Congressional Research Service issued a report about “The Arsenal Act,” a peculiar and little-known law dating back to 1854 that authorizes the Secretary of the Army to “abolish any United States arsenal that he considers unnecessary.” If you wanted to read that report you could purchase a copy for $29.95 from a commercial vendor. Or you could write to your Congressman to request that a copy be sent to you. Or you could simply read the report right now for free on the Federation of American Scientists web site.
We do not charge anyone for access to this or thousands of other valuable, hard-to-find government records that are highlighted in nearly every issue of Secrecy News. The whole point of our work is to make such records more easily available.
But we do incur costs in gathering and publishing the records. We also invest time and resources in probing the boundaries of the national security secrecy system and reporting our findings to the interested public. We engage in advocacy to promote a real, measurable reduction in the scope of secrecy through the Fundamental Classification Guidance Review and other mechanisms. And we assist reporters and researchers dealing with questions of access to government information.
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