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(27,509 posts)
Mon Jan 20, 2014, 07:18 AM Jan 2014

CIA Cuts Off Public Access to Its Translated News Reports

http://blogs.fas.org/secrecy/2014/01/fbis-wnc/

CIA Cuts Off Public Access to Its Translated News Reports
January 8, 2014 Steven Aftergood

Beginning in 1974, the U.S. intelligence community provided the public with a broad selection of foreign news reports, updated daily. These were collected and translated by the Central Intelligence Agency’s Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS), which was reconstituted in 2004 as the Open Source Center (OSC).

But the CIA has now terminated public access to those news reports, as of December 31. The Open Source Center cut off its feed to the National Technical Information Service’s World News Connection, which was the conduit for public access to these materials (through paid subscriptions).

Translation of foreign news reports had been one of the few direct services that U.S. intelligence agencies offered to the American public. Many journalists, scholars and researchers benefited from it, and citations to old FBIS translations can be found in innumerable journal articles and dissertations. The utility of this public service was diminished somewhat in recent years by copyright constraints on publication. But it remained a valuable if eclectic source of alternative perspectives on regional and international affairs in a searchable global database that extended across decades.

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The original 1974 decision to allow public access to FBIS products was “a particularly significant event,” said FBIS deputy director J. Niles Riddel, speaking at a 1992 conference organized by Robert Steele‘s Open Source Solutions. Public access enabled “expanded participation in informed analysis of issues significant to U.S. policy interests,” he said.

In fact, in the climate that prevailed in the early 1990s, public access to FBIS products was actually promoted by intelligence community officials. Mr. Riddel said then that it was “strongly supported by our customers in both the Intelligence and Policy Communities who value the work of private sector scholars and analysts who avail themselves of our material and contribute significantly to the national debate on contemporary issues such as economic competitiveness.”

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