This is the third and final post in a series looking at redacted records in the JFK ARC as of February 2025. This note tracks redacted records from agencies other than the CIA. There are about 1000 non-CIA records that still have some information held back.

Other major points in this note:

• Redacted content is even more miscellaneous than in CIA records
• The largest single redaction category is personal info
• The majority of redactions are for CIA supplied info
• MLK and DOS redactions include whole page redactions

The overall takeaway for the series: the total number of redacted records in the ARC is one third less than usually claimed: ~2400, rather than ~3600. This count includes hundreds of records that redact ONLY social security numbers of living people, information which is irrelevant to the JFK assassination.

The JFK Act calls for the release of these redactions and this commitment to government transparency should be fulfilled. However, very little of the redacted material in these records will provide new revelations concerning the JFK assassination.

What is a redaction?

I will repeat my definition of redaction: “redacting” refers to removing information (usually text) from a document and replacing it with a “holder” that indicates something has been removed. The ARC uses a blank box as a holder. One blank box = one redaction.

Departments and agencies with redactions

To understand the overall amount of redaction left in the ARC, see the first note in this series, available here.

The second note in this series covered CIA records. That note is available here. I found 1484 CIA records that still have redactions in the ARC. I have now corrected that number to 1482.

For non-CIA records, I have found 1000 that still have redactions. I originally said that there were a total of 2544 redacted records in ARC. This new figure means that there are in fact 2482. (See earlier notes for important qualifications on this statement.)

Once again: records in the ARC are identified by record numbers; the first three digits in each number denote the source of the record. The record numbers for redacted CIA docs all begin with the prefix 104-. Here is a table of prefixes and counts of the non-CIA redacted records:

agency prefix	agency name	count	pct
119	Department of State	1	0.1
124	Federal Bureau of Investigation	230	23.0
144	National Security Agency	207	20.7
157	Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Activities	68	6.8
176	John F. Kennedy Library	54	5.4
177	Lyndon B. Johnson Library	23	2.3
178	Gerald R. Ford Library	21	2.1
180	House Select Committee on Assassinations	229	22.9
194	US Army Staff, ACSI G2	151	15.1
197	HQ Files Pentagon Telecommunications Center	1	0.1
198	Office of the Secretary of the Army	11	1.1
202	Joint Chiefs of Staff	4	0.4

I have already posted an excel file listing all the redacted CIA records in the ARC. I will do the same for these non-CIA records.

Redaction Categories

What types of material are still redacted in the ARC? That depends on which departments and agencies supplied the material. As I noted in my previous note, CIA records still redact three categories of information: information relating to 1) people, 2) locations, and 3) operational details.

Not only is this information redacted in records belonging to the CIA itself, it is also redacted in records where the CIA supplied this information to other agencies. This means that departments and agencies providing records to the JFK collection have to verify which of their records have information supplied by the CIA. Redactions in these records are then requested by the CIA.

This arrangement works the same way for each department and agency (D/A) providing records to the ARC. Five D/As submitted lists of redaction requests. Each record could thus potentially have information from as many as five different sources. Each agency had to identify what kind of info they wanted to redact in which records, and explain the basis for their requests in the JFK Act, the law governing the JFK collection.

Note that different agencies requested redaction of different types of information. I call these different types of information “redaction categories.” Since the records discussed in this note come from four different agencies, there are more redaction categories in this set than there were in the CIA set we looked at last time.

These categories include:
1) the three CIA categories. There is a great deal of CIA info in records from non-CIA departments and agencies. Of the 1000 records in this set, the CIA requested redactions in over 300.

2) three FBI categories. The FBI asked to redact 1) information identifying confidential informants (CI) who are still alive; 2) information on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (MLK) which is under court seal until 2027, and 3) social security numbers (SSN) of living persons.

3) one NARA category. NARA asked permission to redact the social security numbers and military service numbers of hundreds of living persons, as well as some very miscellaneous personal information, such as bank account numbers, arrest records, and finger print charts. I have labeled all of this as just SSN.

4) three DOD categories. The Department of Defense reviewed the records of several of its components. It did not give precise categories for redaction, so I have assigned three categories myself, based on DOD descriptions. These include signal intelligence information from the NSA’s own records (SIG), identification of intelligence sources (IIS), which includes NSA information cited in FBI records, and military information (MIL), which includes military estimates and survey numbers.

5) one DOS category. The State Department gave the poorest description of the information it wanted to hold back. Instead, it identified two sets of records which involved operations it conducted jointly with the CIA and with the FBI.

I believe that the “operation” conducted with the CIA actually refers to diplomatic cover provided for U.S. intelligence officers stationed overseas. This is an extremely sensitive subject with strong potential to damage diplomatic relations, and State phrased its description as indirectly as it could.

The “operation” conducted with the FBI refers to a counter-intelligence program dating back to the 1950s. This sometimes involved surveillance and technical coverage of foreign embassies in the United States, which again is a very sensitive subject with the potential to disrupt diplomatic ties, even though most of the activities described apparently took place decades ago. I denote info about both these programs as just DOS.

Redaction counts

How much information is still redacted in these 1000 records? Repeating from my earlier posts, there are two ways we can answer this question. First, how many redactions are in the records? Remember, one redaction = one blank box.

Second, how much space does the blank box take up? This is only a rough estimate, of course, and some boxes may be covering non-textual items. Redaction boxes covering locations, people’s names, and social security numbers are all quite short, and in almost all cases cover only one specific item.

The largest redaction boxes cover an entire page; I call these whole page redactions (WPRs). There is a fuzzy border between large boxes covering most of a page, and WPRs, but the distinction is worth keeping.

My count for the non-CIA documents found 450 records with one to two redaction boxes. This is a little less than 50 percent of the records. Many of these redactions are for people, locations, and SSNs, i.e. very short, single item redactions.

In my count of CIA records, I found 821 records out of 1482 had one to two redactions. Added together, about 50 percent of the redacted records in the ARC are thus very lightly redacted.

CIA records still have about 600 WPRs. Non-CIA records have many fewer. Most of the MLK records have WPRs, there are a total of perhaps 50 or more pages for this category of redactions. DOS WPRs are even more extensive, though some of these are “fuzzy”, i.e. close to a whole page but not quite. A high estimate wold be about 200 whole pages.

Comments on record sets

Four sets of records are worth extra comment. First, NSA records have more redactions than other records, but these are often quite short bits of text. Almost all of the NSA records are individual memos describing specific signal intercepts. Based on recent releases, remaining redactions probably conceal type of intercept, locations, and in some cases foreign government acknowledgements. The latter are extremely sensitive. Uncoordinated release of these would doubtless violate formal agreements.

Church Committee records also have more redactions than average. A few of these are lengthy, covering a page or more. Some of these are not relevant to the JFK assassination, such as James Angleton’s testimony concerning U.S. Israeli intelligence relations. (see Fred Litwin’s post on this document)

Another heavily redacted record (157-10014-10144) concerns CIA “proprietaries”, i.e. companies established or controlled by the CIA for administrative or cover purposes. This has nothing to do with the JFK assassination. It is just another example of Church Committee records seeping into the ARC.

There are also the Martin Luther King records. These are electronic surveillance transcripts or summaries incorporated in various FBI records. I have had trouble tracking these down, and my count of these is tentative.

The MLK docs are the subject of a 50 year court seal that expires in 2027. They will not be released before then. These docs are utterly irrelevant to the JFK assassination, and I will eventually put up a note on how they were mistakenly incorporated in the ARC.

Finally, there are records with one or more social security number redacted. Currently, the rule is that an SSN is redacted for a living person and released for a deceased person. This rule is due to the efforts of NARA.

You may well wonder, however, why are there so many SSNs in the ARC?

First, the ARC contains several hundred HSCA personnel records. These contain both individual docs and lengthy lists of social security numbers. Many HSCA staffers are still alive. Their SSNs thus necessitate numerous redactions.

Second, the SSN is the de facto national identity number. When CIA and other government agencies issue security clearances for government staff, they compile lists of staff members together with their SSNs. These lists are sometimes nine or teen pages long for the Church Committee staffers. I label these long lists “SSN LIST” and count each page as one redaction.

Third, FBI tracks people by their SSN when they need to identify them. When the HSCA interviewed people, it did the same thing.

In fact, there are actually thousands of people’s SSNs in the ARC. For deceased people, NARA releases SSNs. Just compare earlier SSN releases and later releases to see how more and more are available. Released = deceased.

Living persons’ SSNs are held back. This is the only reasonable way to do this. SSNs are not specifically exempted from release in the JFK Act, but that doesn’t mean it is necessary or even reasonable to do so for people still using theirs.

NARA asked Presidents Trump and Biden to postpone the release of living persons’ SSNs and they did so. This is a small victory for privacy. Those who advocate the release of living persons’ SSNs are enemies of privacy.

In fact, I believe the JFK Act could have withheld ALL SSNs. SSNs are worthless for researching the JFK assassination, whether the subject is dead or alive. If you disagree, show me an example of JFK research which made use of even one SSN.

As you might expect, SSN redactions significantly inflate redactions in the ARC. Adding up all the SSN lists and individual SSNs, the total is 368. SSNs are the only thing redacted in these records. This is about 15 percent of the total number of redacted records.

Why have my estimates of redacted records changed?

My counts of records with redactions are based on the “postponement documents” which the five department and agencies that still want to hold back information in the ARC submitted to President Biden in 2022.

For various reasons, those documents did not reflect all of the material that was ultimately released in 2022 and 2023. I previously relied on these documents too much. This time I have attempted to track down every page that has a redaction.

There are also real errors in the postponement documents. For example, the DOD postponement index lists a non-existent FBI record number, and there are at least a couple of docs in the FBI’s index which do not actually have redactions. Contrariwise, I have found at least one redacted FBI record that is NOT in the index. I believe such errors are very few.

And once again, these notes only deal with records that are actually in the ARC. Anything not in the collection is a subject for another day and another note.

My two cents

There is very little left in the ARC cupboard. Don’t believe me? Click on the links in the spreadsheets I put up. See for yourself.

Did I miss something? Maybe. I might have missed redactions in 1 record. I might have missed redactions in 10 records. But my count is still far better than people who say there are redactions in 3600 records. They’re wrong by over 1000.

Why do so many people still think there is a large amount of unreleased material in the JFK Assassination Records Collection? They have been misled by people they thought were experts on the collection. They didn’t want to look for themselves.

Unfortunately, some “experts” are just not experts. Some experts are sharply focused on particular subjects. My subject docs have redactions? There are way too many redactions! And some experts have conflicts of interest. Exaggerating the number of redactions may better serve their goals, or their own self-interest.

The moral of this series: first of all, caveat lector! Second, look at the records for yourself.