How are doing everybody? Welcome back to the Sean Atwood channel. I'm Ron Swanson. I'm here with John Greenwald, the founder of the Black Vault, the largest private collection of freedom of information action documents in the world, over three and a half million of them. We're going to delve through some of the topics and just what our government likes to refuse

us access to. But John, thank you so much for being here. If you can just let us know who you are

and we'll get jumping into it all, mate. Thank you so much. No, it's my pleasure and I appreciate

your invitation to join you today. Yeah, like you said, I run a pretty big archive on the internet

called the Black Vault. And as far as I know, it's the private, the largest private online collection

of Freedom of Information Act documents and to put it in a nutshell, you name a government secret.

I've probably gone after records on it and so i started this uh this

will be my 30th year doing this and i if you would ask me 30 years ago if i would still be doing it

i would have laughed but uh here i am um i started when i was 15 years old, not to age myself, and I was driven

strictly by curiosity. I wanted to know what the government had. I was tired even back then

in the mid to late 90s. You know, the internet was ripe with he said, she said stories. And that

was back then.'s you know a

million times worse now and i was tired of that and i wanted to go after government records i

was naive at the time i thought well if anybody's going to tell me the truth it's the u.s government

and that was like the stupidest thing i could have ever thought but i'll give myself a pass on that

you were young and naive.

You know what I'm saying? Exactly. You haven't started paying taxes yet. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. It was a young period of your life. It's okay. Yeah. So I, I, you know, stupidly thought that, but it was the best decision I ever made in my life. I mean, I started learning about government

secrets through this thing called the Freedom of Information Act, had no idea really what it was

at the time other than I could write a letter, request information, and voila, it would appear in my

mailbox. Because back then, they didn't really use email as much as they do now. I really do feel old telling this story.

But regardless, that's how it all started.

And at first, I wasn't sure if I was going to do a website.

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