An interesting article was posted in the Washington Post site yesterday. The article deals with files on soldiers, celebrities, and non-celebrities alike that are easily available through the Freedom of Information Act. The info came from the GovernmentAttic.org website initially. Two major files are dealt with in the article:
The VIP List:The National Personnel Records Center has released a list of some 3,000 prominent former military service men and women whose service records may be obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. This list is made up of actors, singers, socialites, medal-of-honor winners, and other well-known folks. The list has about 3000 people on it.
Following is an example of 1 of the pages (page 42 of 159). I picked the page, as it includes an entry for Desmond Doss – one of my childhood heroes of WWII.
The RIDS Dead List: This a list of the 17,000 people the FBI understands are deceased. It amounts to a list of notable or famous individuals for whom there are FBI files (usually) or cross references to FBI files. A word of warning – this listing is huge (809 pp) and takes quite a while to download – even if you have a high-speed connection. So be patient. You’ll have a black screen with seemingly nothing happening for a long time. I think it was a 5 to 10 minutes download for me, and I use Comcast cable.
The following image is page 127 of the 809 page file. I took a screen shot of it, as it contains a line on Cass Canfield.
If you download the FBI Dead List by doing a right-click, save, it will download faster and more reliably. That saves it directly to your computer rather than try to open it as a browser window in Adobe Reader.