While the Central Intelligence Agency’s efforts to recruit more people of color stretches back decades,those efforts were unfortunately tainted by racism, as demonstrated by memos from the Agency’s chief recruiters in the ‘60s and ‘70s. In one sentence, the Agency recruiter declared that the age of hiring token POC was over. In the next, they declared that hiring POC meant passing over white applicants who were “better qualified.”

Over the years, a number of requesters, researchers, and members of the public have asked whether we think who the requester is impacts how requests are handled. Under the law, every requester should be treated the same, but we’ve seen a number of cases where different requesters get different answers (and prices, and response times) for largely identical requests.

So we decided to analyze our data to see if one factor - predicted ethnicity based on name - swayed how requests were handled.