Legal Commentary

I ran across this piece in the Boston Globe, about a FOIA request that produced hundreds of never-before-seen memos on the FBI's highly restricted special file room.  According to the Globe, "for decades sensitive material has been stored separately from the bureau?s central filing system to restrict access severely and, in more sinister instances, some experts assert, prevent the Congress and the public from getting their hands on it."  The materials cover all sorts of things, including plans to relocate Congress in the event of an attack, dossiers on double agents and mob figures, information about gay rights groups and prominent individuals thought to be gay, as well as the FBI's own illegal domestic spying activities.

I happened to find the piece because it describes a term I hadn't heard before--"snitch-jacketing"--which refers to "an extremely sensitive counterintelligence technique, which apparently involved the FBI spreading false information that members of a targeted group were government informants in order to sow conflict within their membership."  More generally, however, it's a nice example of the robust power of information control--something I've worried about in the criminal system for a while.  To be sure, I recognize the limits of sunshine reforms--they're procedural, not substantive, they assume that making bad information public will lead to change, and so on.  But every public institution has a "special file room" of one sort or another into which problematic information disappears, and the criminal system has more than its share.  As the Globe wrote, "This was a system that allowed FBI officials to say we have searched our central records system and there is no record of illegal conduct by the bureau."