"We're doing the Lord's work, as my daddy would say," Blanton says with a laugh. "Information doesn't belong to the government, it belongs to all of us."

Blanton is 53, but he looks much younger, a good advertisement for the dubious proposition that spending your entire adult life poring through government documents has a fountain-of-youth effect. He's sitting in his office at the archive, which is headquartered in George Washington University's Gelman Library. His room, like all the others, is piled high with cardboard boxes, each of them piled high with documents. And more documents arrive nearly every day, delivered by a uniformed agent of the federal government -- a mail carrier.

"Every day is Christmas -- you're opening a present from the government," Blanton says. "Look at this. It came in last week. I haven't even gone through it yet."

He picks a document off his desk, which is littered with documents. The heading reads, "Defeating An Insurgency: Seminar War Game."

"It's a war game that was conducted just a year ago in McLean, Virginia, with the Air Force, Army, Navy and Special Operations Command."

He flips through the pages until something catches his eye. "Okay, there were three war games," he says. "One was Egypt, one was Colombia, one was Kurd versus Arab."

He flips a few more pages, then softly mutters a word that is frequently muttered by the archive's staff of document buffs when they peruse the latest fruits of FOIA:

"Interesting."

Rogue Research

The National Security Archive is the house that FOIA built and a mecca for document buffs.

Despite its official-sounding name, the archive is not a government agency. It's an independent, nonprofit institute created in 1985 by a handful of reporters, historians and activists who'd been filing FOIA requests for documents related to American activities in the guerrilla wars then raging in Central America. Its first director was Scott Armstrong, a former Senate Watergate Committee staffer and Washington Post reporter. Armstrong finagled a grant from the Ford Foundation and borrowed office space at the Brookings Institution and soon he was filing hundreds of FOIA requests, many related to the big scandal of the '80s, the Iran-contra affair.

Naturally, these activities made him extremely unpopular with the Reagan administration.

"Scott was regarded as quite a dangerous scoundrel, to put it mildly," recalls former Justice Department attorney Daniel J. Metcalfe, who served for 25 years as the federal government's FOIA coordinator. In 1986, Metcalfe issued a directive warning federal FOIA officials to be wary of Armstrong, but that didn't stop the archive from obtaining and releasing countless Iran-contra documents.