Documents / FOIA release
This is a declaration by Delores M. Nelson, the CIA's Information and Privacy Coordinator, signed January 22, 2010. It was filed in support of the CIA's motion for summary judgment in Larry W. Bryant v. CIA, Civil Action No. 09-0940 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. It covers Bryant's FOIA request about a 1987 FAA meeting on the November 17, 1986 Japan Air Lines Flight 1628 encounter over Alaska. It also covers later airborne UFO cases, the dispute over his fee category, and the CIA's searches. The CIA found no records of the meeting and three records from other agencies, which it referred to the State Department and NSA.
“CIA”15 pages
23. Approved for Release: 2025/06/10 C07083373 FOIA 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 CLA 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 CLA component records is necessary, PIPD officers determine which directoratesfi 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 CLA record searches, whether for another component of the CIA, the Director of CIA, Department of Justice, Congress, or a FOIA requester. After a tasked component locates documents in response to a FOIA request, \ officers must review those documents to determine whether they do, 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 common for the number . of non-responsive documents to exceed the number of responsive documents. 6In the discussion of processing procedures in this Declaration, “directorates” will include the DIR Area. A 10 Approved for Release: 2025/06/10 C07083373
FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is under it. 17 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.