While the FBI file for Timothy Leary has several interesting pieces of information, what really stands out are some conspicuous - and revealing - absences.

In 1976 and again in 1977, the Justice Department decided not to prosecute anyone for the CIA’s illegal surveillance and mail openings. The report issued in 1977 reveals the Justice Department’s highly flawed reasons, including claims that prosecution would not serve to prevent such questionable or outright illegal surveillance from happening again - ironically setting the stage for modern surveillance programs.

Leaks from the government and even Congress itself are nothing new. As shown by a declassified memo describing a meeting between Henry Kissinger and CIA Director William Colby, these concerns were among the very ones facing the White House, the Rockefeller Commission and the Church Committee in the mid-1970s. Topics included NSA spying on Americans, selectively leaking less damaging info, and how much blame could be shifted to the FBI.

Between 1975 and 1976, Senator Frank Church carried out a televised campaign to reign in the U.S. intelligence community. The “Church Committee,“ as it was later known, held hundreds of hearings, published hundreds of pages of reports, and revealed some of the CIA, NSA, and FBI’s most sinister and illegal plots. Now, internal documents released in the recent CREST deluge reveal that even after his 1984 death, Frank Church was still trolling the CIA.

Last year, MuckRock user Jens Porup filed a FOIA with the CIA for a list of all poisons used in covert assassinations. Although Porup could have reasonably expected this request to be rejected under about a half-dozen exemptions, the Agency still managed to throw him a curveball: they simply responded that assassinations were illegal.

It took some coaxing, but Kim Davis has released nearly 500 emails exchanged with other government officials since August. In a reversal of her previous stance, the county clerk agreed to provide the emails in digital format at minimal fee, in keeping with Kentucky’s public records statute.