Government claims "national defense" excuse to keep Mandela files secret MIT researcher Ryan Shapiro filed suit against NSA, CIA, FBI for failure to comply with Mandela files FOIA requests

Prolific FOIA requester and MIT researcher Ryan Shapiro has been seeking information about the U.S. intelligence community's role in the 1962 arrest and placement on the U.S. terror watchlist of Nelson Mandela. Following government agencies' refusal to comply with his FOIA requests, Shapiro filed suit against the NSA, the FBI and and the Defense Intelligence Agency Tuesday, adding to an ongoing suit of the same nature against the CIA.

While Shapiro aims in his research to explore the U.S.'s potentially historic role in undermining anti-apartheid activism in South Africa, he has been met with a series of disturbing roadblocks. The NSA, for example, invoked both the Espionage Act and "national defense" to deny Shapiro's request for files. Shapiro's wide-ranging FOIA efforts (which led to the FBI declaring his MIT Ph.D. research a national security threat) is not only concerned with revealing historically significant and veiled facts about the history of U.S. national security operations. He explains that his efforts are, in a broader context, a fight against government secrecy. "Democracy cannot meaningfully exist without an informed citizenry, and such a citizenry is impossible without broad public access to information about the operations of government. Secrecy is a cancer on the body of democracy," Shapiro noted.

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On Tuesday, as Sparrow Media reported, Shapiro released a statement on his latest lawsuit over the Mandela files. He commented: