Balochistan drone base
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The Balochistan drone base is a Central Intelligence Agency drone surveillance facility in southwestern Pakistan (#)'s Balochistan region. Its existence, initially top-secret, was inadvertently disclosed when investigative journalist Jason Leopold identified an unusual concentration of aviation-fuel deliveries to the base in Pentagon records he obtained via Freedom of Information Act request.

Disclosure mechanism

> [Leopold] read somewhere that drones use a certain kind of aviation fuel. And so he just did a Freedom of Information Act request to the Pentagon for the locations of all of the deliveries of this aviation fuel. And millions of dollars of fuel were going into this desert base in southwestern Pakistan, this top-secret base that's not top-secret anymore because the Freedom of Information Act has told us so.

The episode is invoked by John Kiriakou as a representative illustration of contemporary government information-management failure: "For all the smart guys in government who are supposed to keep a secret and claim to be able to keep the secret and whatever, they literally write stuff in the modern metadata that someone at home can get."

See also

- Jason Leopold
- Tuesday morning kill list
- Central Intelligence Agency
