A story doing the rounds claims that the Trump administration is taking advantage of the government shut-down to change the rules by which the Department of the Interior processes and responds to FOIA requests. This story could not be less accurate if they were actively trying to mislead people. As ...
Read more

I recently filed a FOIA request for documents on Top Gun 2. Going through the entertainment liaison office reports it is clear that - just as on the original film - the Navy are taking the lead on military support. The Navy responded saying they found over 20,000 pages of ...
Read more

Pitch Perfect 3 appears on the surface to be a family-friendly piece of lighthearted, forgettable entertainment. But beneath that surface lies a carefully-crafted piece of military PR, aimed at recruiting people the DOD usually finds it hard to attract. Documents recently released by the US Air Force and the Pentagon ...
Read more

Two and a half  years ago I asked the US Navy for various documents relating to their work with the entertainment industry, including the Production Assistance Agreements they sign with Hollywood producers.  After over a year's delay they responded saying that they don't keep any copies of these contracts.  Following ...
Read more

As part of their outreach efforts the Air Force's entertainment liaison office has started running annual tours for dozens of Hollywood bigshots. Recently released documents detail last year's tour to US Space Command. In this focus episode I go through the documents page-by-page as an open source case study in ...
Read more

Reel Power broke the mould for books covering the role of Hollywood in promoting militarism, war and the political status quo.  It took the Chomsky/Herman propaganda model and adapted it to film and TV, showing how Hollywood's output varies, but tends to repeat and reinforce the same ideological priorities regardless ...
Read more

Dennis Rodman's visit to North Korea in early 2013 sent shock waves through the international media and inspired a CIA-supported Hollywood film about assassinating Kim Jong-Un. It also drew the attention of the US State Department, who recently released cables about Rodman's trip, though they are highly classified and heavily ...
Read more

Professor CJ invited me onto his Dangerous History Podcast recently to discuss the research behind National Security Cinema, what we found, and what it means. We talk about conspiracy theories, how I got into this line of research, what methods I employed, the nature of the entertainment liaison offices and ...
Read more

Newly released documents shed light on the FBI's entertainment liaison office - officially titled the Investigative Publicity and Public Affairs Unit (IPPAU), including how they work on dozens of popular films and TV shows, and reject requests for support for PR reasons, just like the Pentagon ...
Read more

I was recently interviewed by Michael Morisy the co-founder of MuckRock, the world's premier FOIA site. It was an interesting conversation about how to use FOIA, what works and what doesn't, how my use of the FOIA developed over time and why I've had so much success with FOIA requests ...
Read more

In June 2016 the Pentagon repealed a ban on openly transgender people serving in the US military. A year later and Tzar Trump I has reinstated the ban, causing a panic among the liberal Left for whom the right of transgender people to kill innocent civilians in foreign countries is ...
Read more

Robbie Martin invited Matt and I onto Media Roots to talk about our new book National Security Cinema. We discussed a lot of the core material - the scripts changes and political censorship enforced by the Pentagon and CIA - we spent much of this discussion looking at the industry ...
Read more