Privacy and Security

Public Service Site

The Electronic Reading Room is provided as a public service by the Central Intelligence Agency and its Office of Information Management. This site provides basic guidance to assist members of the public in exercising their rights and is not intended to be a comprehensive treatment of the complex issues associated with the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and the Electronic FOIA Amendments of 1996 (E-FOIA), the Privacy Act (PA), and Executive Order 12958 (EO). We have provided, however, the complete text of these laws as links in the relevant sections for the public's convenience.

Using Information From This Site

Information presented on this WWW site is considered public information and may be distributed or copied. Use of appropriate byline, photo, or image credits is requested.

Information Collection at This Site

For site management, information is collected for statistical purposes. This government computer system uses software programs to create summary statistics, which are used for such purposes as assessing what information is of most and least interest, determining technical design specifications, and identifying systems performance or problem areas.

Monitoring Usage

For site security purposes and to ensure that this service remains available to all users, this government computer system employs software programs to monitor network traffic to identify unauthorized attempts to upload or change information, or otherwise cause damage.

Preserving Privacy Rights

Except for authorized law enforcement investigations, no other attempts are made to identify individual users or their usage habits. Raw data logs are used for no other purposes and are scheduled for regular destruction in accordance with National Archives and Records Administration General Schedules.

Unauthorized Changes or Additions

Unauthorized attempts to upload information or change information on this service are strictly prohibited and may be punishable under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986 and the national Information Infrastructure Protection Act. While the CIA exercises every effort to ensure the security of this site and the accuracy of its information, we cannot be held accountable for unauthorized changes because the Internet is an inherently unsecured environment.

If you simply browse our Web site:

When you visit the Central Intelligence Agency Electronic Reading Room Web site [hereafter, the Central Intelligence Agency Web site] to browse information it contains, you do so anonymously unless you choose to provide us information about yourself. If you do nothing during your visit but browse through the Web site -- reading pages, viewing photographs, or downloading information for example -- we will gather and store certain information about your visit automatically. This information does not identify you personally.

This gathering and storing of information is separate from the activity described as monitoring in our Security Notice.

Information gathered automatically is used for only two purposes: site management and, in the case of suspected unauthorized activity, for law enforcement and possible criminal prosecution (see Security Notice).

The Central Intelligence Agency Electronic Reading Room Web site automatically logs visitor information from which summary statistics are created. We use the summary statistics to help us make our site more useful to visitors, such as assessing what information is of most and least interest to visitors, and for other purposes such as determining the site's technical design specifications and identifying system performance or problem areas.

The following fields are automatically collected and stored for each file you download:

• the Internet domain and Internet Protocol (IP) address from which you access our Web site;
• the type of Internet browser and the operating system of the computer you use to access our site;
• the date and time you visit our site, and how long you spent on the site;
• the pages, images, and documents you visit on our site;
• if you linked to our Web site from another Web site, the address of that Web site;
• if you linked to our Web site from a search Web site, the address of that Web site and the search term you used.
• the protocol (e.g. HTTP) that you used to request the file