CIA Says Redaction of Commodore Amiga Cost was an Error
The CIA should not have redacted the amount that was paid for a Commodore Amiga portable computer in 1987 from a recently declassified article, a CIA official said today. (CIA: Cost of Personal Computer in 1987 is a Secret, Secrecy News, September 29).
“The redaction of the cost of the Commodore Amiga computer was in fact an error,” said Joseph W. Lambert, Director of CIA Information Management Services.
“Although we would normally redact budget figures, this clearly does not constitute a budget figure and should not have been redacted. The mistake was made in a high volume court deadline environment,” he said, referring to a FOIA lawsuit brought by former CIA official Jeffrey Scudder.
“I have instructed my folks to make the appropriate corrections by lifting the redactions in question and then subsequently re-post the document to our website,” Mr. Lambert said via email. The revised document should be posted tomorrow. (Update: The document with cost figures restored is now posted here.)
The Scudder lawsuit was not settled by the latest releases of hundreds of articles from CIA’s Studies in Intelligence journal. The parties told the court on Monday that Scudder intends to challenge some of CIA’s withholdings.
The FAS Nuclear Notebook is one of the most widely sourced reference materials worldwide for reliable information about the status of nuclear weapons, and has been published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists since 1987.. The Nuclear Notebook is researched and written by the staff of the Federation of American Scientists’ Nuclear Information Project: Director Hans […]
On 14 April 2023, the Belarusian Ministry of Defence released a short video of a Su-25 pilot explaining his new role in delivering “special [nuclear] munitions” following his training in Russia. The features seen in the video, as well as several other open-source clues, suggest that Lida Air Base––located only 40 kilometers from the Lithuanian border and the […]
A photo in a Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) student briefing from 2022 shows four people inspecting what appears to be a damaged B61 nuclear bomb.
In early-February 2023, the Wall Street Journal reported that U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM) had informed Congress that China now has more launchers for Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) than the United States. The report is the latest in a serious of revelations over the past four years about China’s growing nuclear weapons arsenal and the deepening […]