The house standard, applied
What the agency did, recorded in one vocabulary.
Mysteria grades places with verification seals. Libra Esoterica attaches inclusion evidence to every book-tradition pair. Aletheca's contribution is a disposition, recorded on every request, in the same sixteen terms every time.
The disposition vocabulary
Before filing
With the agency
- Filed
Sent to the agency. Awaiting acknowledgement.
statutory clock running · not terminal · see all
- Perfected
The agency has acknowledged it and assigned a tracking number. The statutory clock runs.
statutory clock running · not terminal · see all
- Processing
In the agency's queue, with position and estimated date where the agency gives them.
statutory clock running · not terminal · see all
- Fee pending
Blocked on a fee estimate or a fee-waiver determination. The clock is tolled while it sits here.
clock stopped · not terminal · see all
- Referred
Handed to another agency or component. Spawns a linked child request.
statutory clock running · not terminal · see all
Answered
- Released in full
All responsive records released, no redactions.
clock stopped · terminal · see all
- Released in part
Records released with material withheld, each withholding tied to its cited exemption.
clock stopped · terminal · see all
- Withheld in full
Responsive records exist and all of them are withheld.
clock stopped · terminal · see all
- No records
The agency states that no responsive records exist.
clock stopped · terminal · see all
- Glomar
The agency will neither confirm nor deny that responsive records exist.
clock stopped · terminal · see all
Contested
- Constructive denial
The statutory deadline passed with no determination. Administrative remedies are exhausted.
clock stopped · not terminal · see all
- Appealed
Under administrative appeal.
statutory clock running · not terminal · see all
- In litigation
In court.
clock stopped · not terminal · see all
- Abandoned
Closed without resolution, with the reason recorded.
clock stopped · terminal · see all
Why the failures are the point
This is the direct application of the house’s third clause, and the thing most FOIA sites get wrong. A site that shows only its wins is not an archive, it is a highlight reel.
Glomar, withheld in full, no records and constructive denial are first-class outcomes here, displayed with the same weight as a release — the same pill, the same size, the same position on the card. A Glomar on a narrow, well-drafted question is frequently more informative than a hundred released pages. A missed statutory deadline is a fact about the agency. And the aggregate is a dataset nobody else has cleanly: per-agency scorecards built from requests whose full text is public and therefore auditable.
Someone will fund a request hoping for a smoking gun and get a release that plainly shows there was never anything to it. That release is published with exactly the same prominence as any other. Anyone who cannot live with that should not fund requests here.
Exemptions
Federal requests carry the specific exemption claimed for each withholding — b(1) national security through b(9) wells — so a reader can see the legal theory, not just the black bar. Where an agency produces a Vaughn index it is published alongside the release.
- b(1)National security — Properly classified in the interest of national defense or foreign policy.
- b(2)Internal personnel rules — Related solely to the internal personnel rules and practices of an agency.
- b(3)Withheld by statute — Specifically exempted from disclosure by another statute, which must be cited.
- b(4)Trade secrets — Trade secrets and commercial or financial information that is privileged or confidential.
- b(5)Deliberative process — Inter- and intra-agency memoranda: deliberative process, attorney work product, attorney-client.
- b(6)Personal privacy — Personnel, medical and similar files whose disclosure would be a clearly unwarranted invasion of privacy.
- b(7)(A)Enforcement proceedings — Law enforcement records whose release could reasonably be expected to interfere with proceedings.
- b(7)(C)Enforcement privacy — Law enforcement records whose release could constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.
- b(7)(D)Confidential source — Records that could reasonably be expected to disclose the identity of a confidential source.
- b(7)(E)Techniques and procedures — Techniques and procedures for law enforcement investigations or prosecutions.
- b(7)(F)Physical safety — Records that could reasonably be expected to endanger the life or physical safety of any individual.
- b(8)Financial institutions — Reports prepared for agencies regulating or supervising financial institutions.
- b(9)Wells — Geological and geophysical information and data, including maps, concerning wells.
Public by default — and the one exception
Every request is public: the draft, the correspondence, the disposition, the documents. The single exception is that a member on the highest tier may pay a per-request surcharge to embargo a request.
A transparency archive that sells secrecy is in obvious tension with itself, and it is better to name that than to discover it in a bad news cycle. Two guardrails hold it in place.
The existence of an embargoed request is always public.
Counts and per-agency totals are published, and embargoed requests count toward agency scorecards. Privacy conceals the subject, never the fact. Currently 1 embargoed.
It is an embargo, not permanent secrecy.
A default term of 12 months and a fixed maximum, after which the request joins the public catalog. This covers the real use case — a journalist who cannot tip off a competitor or the agency mid-story — without letting the archive become a private records-retrieval service with a public-interest paint job.
Provenance
Every document in the Reading Room carries its agency, request id, filing date, release date, exemptions cited and the response letter itself. A page with no traceable request does not go in. Aletheca does not host documents obtained by anyone else without the request record that produced them — an archive of unattributable PDFs is a folder, not an archive.
16 dispositions · 13 exemption codes · machine-readable at /api/v1/dispositions