General Declassification Schedules?
Asked by R. M. Seibert on June 21, 2015.
6 answers from R. M. Seibert and Jack R-W.
Executive Order 11652 (circa 1972) made General Declassification Schedules a requirement., and I have a few FOIA-noob questions about this.
Are the General Declassification Schedules public records?
Are they published online somewhere? (I searched obvious places like DOJ, NARA, FBI Vault but found none)
Are the “GDS” court case citations that show up in old OIP Annual Reports and other DOJ archive documents referring to General Declassification Schedules? Example: http://www.justice.gov/archive/oip/foiacase2.pdf
Depending on the answers to the above questions, my last question is probably obvious…
Can I FOIA request old General Declassification Schedules (if they’re not available somewhere) to find out what the heck those OIP “GDS” case citations reference? (assuming “GDS” refers to General Declassification Schedule since it doesn’t appear to be a bluebook standardized court reporter abbreviation)
TIA!
I’m not sure I fully understand your question. The General Declassification Schedule (there’s only one) sets the schedule for documents to become less classified, until they are no longer classified. It can be found here: https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/18/3a.22 If this answers the first part of your question, please let me know.
Ahh! Thank you Jack, That does answer my first question. I was reading more into this than what was there.
So I only have one relevant question left - the third one about “GDS” court case citations referring to the same thing, or something different?
Not sure. It could be government disclosure service, per http://lib.law.washington.edu/dir/PAH/LRSQ/brcharter88.pdf although I’m thinking it could be some obscure DOJ legalese.
Yup, government disclosure service. http://www.justice.gov/oip/blog/foia-update-gds-discontinued
And just because I’m such an completist, all three volumes of Government Disclosure Service can be found here: http://nationalsecuritylaw.org/other_publications.html