The Family That Mined the Pentagon's Data for Profit

Most drivers who head up to Alta Ski Area from Salt Lake City pay no mind to the nondescript turnoff from Utah State Route 210 that veers out to the left about five miles before the slopes. Some motorists may catch a glimpse of the black gate and the “No Trespassing” signs or see a plain white cargo van peeling off the main road and feel a twinge of curiosity. What passing motorists wouldn’t see, at the end of a winding lane, is a bunker-like concrete structure about the size of a two-story house, surrounded by a system of motion sensors and hidden cameras. Behind the structure’s loading door, a tunnel stretches some 200 feet into the solid granite mountain, leading to a series of vaults that constitute one of the most secure private storage facilities in the world.

Designed to protect against floods, earthquakes, fires, and even a nearby nuclear blast, Perpetual Storage opened in 1968 to house some of the most precious objects in America. But by the late 1970s, physical assets were already slightly passé. While Perpetual was happy to secure rare artifacts, what kept paying the salaries of its armed guards was the business of storing corporate microfilm and computer records. Patrick Lynch, Perpetual’s co-owner, told The Washington Post in 1979 that the master file for one customer was worth $15 million (equivalent to $60 million today).

So when George MacArthur Posey III approached Perpetual in 1978, he wasn’t interested in the vault’s fine art or bullion. He was after information. Posey was looking for certain records belonging to General Electric, and he wasn’t furtive about his intentions. At the time, GE was developing an advanced turbofan engine that would power the US Air Force’s brand-new F-16 fighter plane. As if he were talking to a librarian, Posey asked Lynch for access to the Perpetual vault in order to photograph GE’s records. As Lynch recalled the interaction, Posey explained that he had photographed records concerning the F-16 in the past and had “sold those records to other countries.”

Perpetual’s clients spell out very clearly “who can do what with their records,” Lynch told WIRED in a recent phone interview. And GE’s authorization forms made no mention of Posey. After turning Posey down flatly, Lynch reported the interloper to the FBI—something Perpetual hasn’t done since. The FBI’s Los Angeles office noted that Posey tried something similar the next summer, attempting (unsuccessfully) to obtain information about the US Navy’s supersonic F-5 fighter from an engineer at its manufacturer, Northrop.

Posey, however, considered himself not only an entrepreneur but a patriot. His small family business, Newport Aeronautical Sales, based in Southern California and previously owned and operated by Posey’s stepfather, sold unclassified technical information to companies that wanted to bid on Pentagon contracts to repair military aircraft or manufacture spare parts. Those would-be contractors were all too happy to outsource the tedious work of obtaining technical manuals, parts lists, and specs. By helping them, as Posey saw it, he was also helping the US military find the lowest bidder for its contracts.

As it turned out, there was an easier way to obtain valuable technical data than going through the executives of storage vaults, and Posey would make a hugely profitable business of it for the next several decades. It involved a high-minded, fast-evolving, and relatively new law called the Freedom of Information Act, and it would bring the Posey family business millions of dollars in easy money. But it would also turn them into key combatants in the US government’s long, concerted battle to keep information from the public. Along the way, Posey would become embroiled in global politics, earn a spell in prison, and watch his own son appear in federal court on charges of conspiracy and theft of government property for actions related to the operations of Newport Aeronautical.

Illustration: Shay Azzari

What turned into a business opportunity for the Poseys began as a Cold War-era fight for government transparency. In 1947, President Harry Truman signed an executive order that gave the executive branch power to investigate and fire any federal employee who was deemed to be disloyal to the country, without having to supply evidence. The results of those investigations were held in secret FBI files. In the mid-1950s, the US government, and the Pentagon, in particular, hoarded information as compulsively as atom bombs. In the midst of the Red Scare, the design of a bow and arrow was deemed too sensitive for public release. The amount of peanut butter American soldiers consumed annually was a military secret. Shark attacks on sailors could neither be confirmed nor denied.

In 1953, John Moss, a newly elected US congressman from Sacramento, California, was appointed to the House Post Office and Civil Service Committee—normally an obscure position without much political power. During Moss’ first term, he was appalled to discover that not even he, a member of the committee with statutory jurisdiction over the Post Office, could get information about 2,800 postal workers who had been fired for alleged security reasons.

After Truman left office, the Pentagon became even more secretive; in 1955, President Dwight Eisenhower’s defense secretary, Charles Wilson, ordered that for any information to be released to the public, it had to make a “constructive contribution” to national security. Journalists and newspaper editors, who had raised mounting alarms against government secrecy for years, went into an uproar. They found common cause with Moss, a Democrat, who would soon be appointed to the more powerful Government Operations Committee, on which he spearheaded the creation of a Special Subcommittee on Government Information. From his platform as chair of that new subcommittee, Moss began pressing for the bill that would ultimately become the Freedom of Information Act.

“Our system of government is based on the participation of the governed, and as our population grows in numbers it is essential that it also grow in knowledge and understanding,” Moss told the House. “We must remove every barrier to information about—and understanding of—government activities consistent with our security if the American public is to be adequately equipped to fulfill the ever more demanding role of responsible citizenship.” Moss’ Republican cosponsor was a young congressman from Illinois named Donald Rumsfeld.

For a decade, the federal government had fought them every inch of the way. It was only in 1966 that press and public pressure sent the Freedom of Information bill to the desk of President Lyndon Johnson (with unlikely support from the commie-hunting senator Joseph McCarthy). The law went into effect on July 4, 1967. For the first time, members of the American public had the right to inspect information held by their government, with relatively few exceptions, and to sue if their requests for information were unduly denied.

In 1974, in the wake of the Watergate scandal, Congress passed amendments to the Freedom of Information Act that gave the law even more teeth. Congressional hearings had revealed that many bureaucrats were going to great lengths to resist complying with FOIA, much as the White House had tried to stymie Watergate investigators. Now, Congress decreed, any agency that declined to fulfill a FOIA request would be on the hook to pay all legal costs if the requester sued and prevailed, any agency employee who wrongfully withheld information could be personally sanctioned, and courts would be able to review whether information had been frivolously classified as secret.

Those amendments ushered in a golden age for use of the Freedom of Information Act. For years, backlogs were light; requesters could ask for pretty much anything that wasn’t classified and agencies had to hand it over for just the cost of duplication, no more than a few dollars, in a timely manner.

Under those conditions, many of the democratic effects that Moss envisioned began to flourish. Over the years, FOIA has allowed generations of journalists to break tens of thousands of stories and has empowered activists and communities to track everything from government-sanctioned pollution to disaster mismanagement. But the law also opened pathways for the expression of another core American aspiration: free-market economics.

In the late 1970s, George Posey must have realized that filing paperwork with bureaucrats was a lot easier, and less costly, than trying to talk his way into underground bunkers. Newport Aeronautical Sales epitomizes what Ohio State University law professor Margaret Kwoka calls “information resellers”—companies that submit a stream of Freedom of Information Act requests to US government agencies, then treat the responses as merchandise to unload. Cheap FOIA requests in, valuable data out. Some resellers focus on the Security and Exchange Commission’s financial filings, others on facility inspection reports from the Food and Drug Administration. The Poseys specialized in engineering drawings, technical orders, and manuals for aircraft, most of them from the military.

Today, these information resellers have become some of the prime beneficiaries of FOIA. In a 2017 analysis of 229,000 FOIA requests, those from journalists accounted for just 8 percent. In 2020, there were nearly 800,000 requests made. At some federal agencies, the vast majority of requests are now from commercial operators who resell or use data for profit. Their turf is where a lot of the battle over the erosion of the freedom of information in America has been fought.

Illustration: Shay Azzari

After several requests for comment, George Posey responded to a detailed list of questions, saying in an email that the “majority” of the claims inherent in the questions “are false and misleading.” Given the opportunity to specify which claims he was refuting, Posey did not respond before press time. No other employees of Newport Aeronautical or members of the Posey family would speak with WIRED. But court records, investigative reports, and interviews with associates of the Posey family and former employees paint a relatively thorough picture of their family business.

Over time, Newport Aeronautical accumulated stacks of manuals and drawings for most of the US military’s active aircraft, from attack helicopters and lumbering transport planes to advanced-strike jets. As the documents piled up, Posey installed floor-to-ceiling shelves in a warehouse attached to Newport Aeronautical’s office, paying people to help file and index the growing collection. The folks at Newport Aeronautical had gained a reputation as masters of obtaining aircraft data—“gurus in the industry for any needed manuals,” one customer is reported to have said.

To understand why there’s a market for military technical documents, it helps to know that the Pentagon operates many of its aircraft for much longer than any commercial airline would, often by decades. When components on those aircraft eventually start to fail, the options for fixing them can be few, far-between, and pricey. “It’s called vendor lock, where we have to go back to the original equipment manufacturer,” says retired Air Force general Hawk Carlisle, the former president and CEO of the National Defense Industrial Association, a trade organization of companies that support the US military.

In an effort to eliminate vendor lock and reduce costs, the Pentagon prefers to own the technical data for its equipment, then shop around for the cheapest supplier, says Carlisle. But that is not always possible, especially for the many aircraft that have civilian counterparts. Either way, there is now a multibillion-dollar cottage industry of companies that want to bid for government maintenance, repair, and overhaul contracts—but that need the latest blueprints and manuals to do so. Filling that need was Newport Aeronautical’s niche.

An aviation and nautical buff, Posey would often turn up at Newport Aeronautical’s small office straight from his yacht club in shorts, flip-flops, and Vuarnet sunglasses, recalls a former employee named Al Barazin, who started work there in the early 1990s. Another former employee told WIRED that the CEO still worked hard. Every day, Barazin would arrive at the office to find dozens of requests for technical data spitting out of the fax machine. Each order—say, for the manuals associated with a helicopter’s fuel pump—would have a part number. If Newport Aeronautical had the documents, Barazin would photocopy and overnight them to the customers. If not, someone would fill out a preprinted FOIA request form with the part number and contact details and fax or mail it to the relevant military base.

When the request was granted, Newport Aeronautical would mail the government a check for the cost of duplicating the requested documents, maybe $5 or $10. Posey would then charge his customers many times that—often $200 or more. Customers were happy to pay the markup, says Barazin, because “we had this stuff at our fingertips, whereas it would take a repair facility a month or two months to get the data, and they wouldn’t be able to quote for the work. That’s the model, and it’s a brilliant model.”

Some of those customers weren’t simply mom-and-pop repair facilities trying to earn US government contracts. About half of Newport’s business involved legally selling data abroad, Posey claimed in the 1980s. Merex, a US company owned by Pakistani arms dealer Arif Durrani, did business with foreign countries that needed to maintain their US-made aircraft. Reached by WhatsApp in Pakistan, Durrani remembers visiting Newport Aeronautical’s old office in Costa Mesa, crammed with paperwork and photocopiers. “He sold stuff to us whenever we needed it in a hurry,” says Durrani. “For example, the Israeli government would buy components from me directly. When they would order them, I knew that these parts were being transferred to Iran, because Iran was flying Phantom jets in the ’80s. Israel was sending its technicians and basically repairing their aircraft.” Durrani says that while Posey did not necessarily know the identity of his customers’ end users, he suspected that Posey knew “enough the motive behind what he gets.”

In the early 1980s, Posey whisked his new bride, Roberta, off to Kenya for their honeymoon. It was there, his mother Nadja later told the Los Angeles Times, that Posey was approached by representatives of South Africa’s government looking to buy some manuals. On his return from Kenya, Posey began popping up on electronic intercepts set up by the FBI in its hunt for spies.

The Pentagon had come to suspect that America’s enemies, and the Soviets, in particular, were using FOIA to get their hands on technical data that, although unclassified, still posed a risk to national security. A 1985 Department of Justice memo stated that “Soviet acquisition of US technology significantly shortens their research and development cycle, and reduces the risks associated with the design of new weapons and defensive systems.” But when military bases began withholding such data from their responses, Posey didn’t simply fold: He sued the Navy for violating the Freedom of Information Act. In 1984, the case was settled. The Pentagon would now release critical information to data brokers like Newport Aeronautical, provided they limited resale to other qualified contractors. Posey claimed the settlement as a victory, but Newport Aeronautical was now firmly in the government’s crosshairs.

By 1986, international horror at South Africa’s system of institutionalized racial oppression led the US Congress to pass the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act, laying out broad sanctions against the regime. Posey was labeled a South African agent, and the government placed taps on his phones and put a voice-activated bug in the Newport Aeronautical office.

Almost immediately, the veteran FBI agent in charge of that investigation, Robert Ibbotson, tuned in to cloak-and-dagger phone calls that could not be more different from Posey’s direct approach at Perpetual Storage.

On April 28, 1986, Posey dialed a number in Pretoria, South Africa, identified himself as “Mr. Brown,” and said he had a package for Johann Van Vuuring, who he identified on a subsequent call as a buyer for the South African Air Force. A few days later, Posey received a call from the office of Nicolaas Vorster, a naval attaché at the South African embassy in Washington, DC, alerting him to a letter on its way.

Van Vuuring called back in August and read Posey a series of 17 groups of letters and numbers: 58L4, 38R11, 275R12, 81L6, 325L1, 348L11, and so on. The FBI identified Van Vuuring’s cipher as a dictionary code. The sender encodes their message by finding the word they want in a dictionary, noting the page number, whether it is in the left or right column, and which entry it is from the top. In this case, 58L4 signifies the forth word down on the left-hand side of page 58: “big.”

What makes dictionary codes effective, and difficult to crack, is that they require the sender and recipient to have the same dictionary. “The security lies in the fact that there are so many dictionaries that are published that you have to virtually search through hundreds of them, coming up with the right one, the right volume, and the right copyright date,” FBI cryptanalyst Jacquelyn Taschner said.

But a cipher is only as strong as its weakest link. After taking down the code from Van Vuuring, Posey needed help deciphering it. He called his wife—she was being treated at a local hospital at the time—and asked her if she knew the location of “the number books” that they “used to play with.” Ibbotson was still listening in. Roberta told Posey that the books were in the bottom-right side of the gray wall unit in the house. Ibbotson had learned the key to understanding Posey’s conversations with Van Vuuring—but it would take some time before he would get his hands on that dictionary.

Deciphered later, Van Vuuring’s message read: “Big guy visit LA, August, mid month, want meeting for business, and K list farm no good.” A subsequent phone call from Van Vuuring allowed the FBI to identify the “big guy” as Joe Botha, an executive with a sales firm about which details are scant. Reports by the FBI suggest that the “K List” was the list of documents Botha was seeking.

That September, Posey arranged to meet Botha for lunch at the historic La Valencia hotel in La Jolla, California. Ibbotson and a contingent of FBI agents staked out the hotel in advance of the meeting and were in place with video and tape recorders. They watched as Posey pulled up, left his car at the valet, and walked straight over to one of the FBI agents. Posey asked the agent if he was Botha, and the agent replied that he wasn’t. Posey eventually located Botha without the FBI’s assistance.

While the two sat for lunch, Botha delivered Posey a shopping list of technical data and manuals for Newport Aeronautical to procure. The South African would ultimately order documents related to a range of components, including power units for the C-130 transport aircraft and, an old favorite, General Electric jet engines. Some of the items were on the US Munitions List—technology, weapons, and information whose export is strictly controlled, especially to a pariah nation like South Africa.

Posey later insisted on dealing with the South African military through intermediate companies. “I can’t deal with anybody on a surface level. I have to stay subsurface so I am protected from scrutiny,” he told Botha. When Botha asked what he meant by “protected from scrutiny,” Posey replied, “You know, protected from scrutiny of the FBI.”

It was far too late for that. The FBI had heard and watched it all.

Ibbotson was listening when Posey told Roberta that the deal stood to make Newport Aeronautical $98,000 (equivalent to about $260,000 today), and he was listening when Posey roped in Edward James Bush, an English-born aerospace consultant, to act as a courier for the manuals and then launder the proceeds through his Canadian bank account. The two had already worked together, Bush said later. The year before, Posey had supplied him with technical manuals for F-4 and F-5 fighters, destined for Iran’s air force.

In early February 1987, a team of FBI agents followed Posey and Bush as they scrambled to print and pack the South African documents. Bush planned to travel to South Africa through Argentina, where Posey wanted him to drop off some other technical manuals on space and missile systems for the Argentine Air Force.

As the men organized and packed the documents in Newport Aeronautical’s office, the FBI listened in on the office bug. “This is not just some routine job. You are violating the export laws,” Bush said, according to Ibbotson. “Fucking A,” Posey replied, and he and Bush carried on with their plan.

On the afternoon of February 7, Bush checked three white boxes and a blue suitcase for his journey and entered the boarding area at Los Angeles International Airport. There he was arrested by the FBI and US Customs Service agents. Around the same time, in Costa Mesa, the FBI raided the Newport Aeronautical office and Posey’s house. As Posey, Roberta, and their 2-year-old son returned home, they found unmarked FBI vehicles and more than a dozen agents crawling through their belongings—including the dictionary codebook that Posey used to communicate with Van Vuuring.

Posey’s brother Robert, who was also a Newport Aeronautical employee, gamely fielded questions from reporters. “It’s not like we’re really trying to hide anything,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “If we were shipping guns or missiles, that would be one thing, but these are books!”

In March, according to the Los Angeles Times, Posey became the first person to be indicted under the Anti-Apartheid Act. He was also charged, as was Bush, with conspiring to violate the Arms Export Control Act. Vorster, the South African naval attaché, was mentioned (but not charged) in the indictment and reportedly left the country in a hurry. Reached in retirement in South Africa via email, Vorster told WIRED: “I had no personal contact with these gentlemen, and I certainly never met them.” Bush quickly pleaded guilty to violating the Arms Export Control Act and cooperated with the FBI. Posey, however, wanted his day in court.

At the opening of Posey’s trial, in July 1987, his lawyer claimed that the military “has had a vendetta with my client going back to the ’70s.” The prosecutor, assistant US attorney Brian Hennigan, said Posey’s own conversations showed that he knew he needed government permission to export the manuals. Hennigan, now a defense attorney in private practice, told WIRED that Posey’s trial has stuck with him over the years. Hennigan remembered feeling “a sense of moral fervor” during the prosecution. Posey “wasn’t simply trading information, this was trading in information with no thought or no value being placed on what was going to be done with it,” he said.

During the trial, Posey said that he and Van Vuuring used codes only because Posey was planning to give him a (possibly illegal) kickback, and he argued that the documents he sold were unclassified and in the public domain. Posey was swiftly convicted of violating the Arms Export Control Act and the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act. When he was sentenced, Posey said: “I did not mean in any way, shape, or form to jeopardize national security, nor did I have the means to do so. A lot of things were said about me which made me out to be some sort of subversive against our country, which is contrary to my character or my true beliefs. I’m a patriot. I’ve served my country.” Patriot or not, Posey was fined $15,000 and sentenced to 10 years in prison, with all but four months suspended. He was forbidden from selling information to foreign buyers for five years.

Illustration: Shay Azzari

After serving his four months at a medium-security prison in Michigan, Posey regained the helm at Newport Aeronautical. But he was about to make a whole new group of enemies. Starting in 1998, the company began fielding lawsuits from some of the world’s biggest defense contractors. A lawyer at Lockheed Martin remembers sending letters to Newport Aeronautical telling it to stop selling the company’s data. But asking nicely was never going to work with Posey. In 2000, Airbus asked a federal court to prohibit Newport Aeronautical from advertising, reproducing, selling, or publishing any of its copyright materials. The court issued such an injunction, under pain of $50,000 in damages. Posey agreed to Airbus’ terms to settle the case, and Newport Aeronautical seems to have entered into similar consent judgments with Bell, Kiddie, Boeing, and Moog.

The 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001 made business even harder for Newport Aeronautical. FOIA’s old cosponsor, Donald Rumsfeld, was now in charge of the most secretive Department of Defense in a generation, as public sentiment granted the George W. Bush administration a wide berth to wage its war on terror. Against this backdrop, the Pentagon decided to tighten its rules on handing out critical data to companies like Newport Aeronautical: It would now provide technical orders to commercial customers only if they could link requests to a specific government contract.

Posey either didn’t hear of the new rule or decided to test its limits. In August 2002, workers at Robins Air Force Base in Georgia got in touch with the US Air Force Office of Special Investigations. Posey, they alleged, had just requested the entire technical manual library for the C-130 aircraft on compact discs. When a database administrator at Robins told Posey about the Pentagon’s new policy, they said, Posey became upset. “Mr. Posey continued to try and persuade me that he had a legitimate reason for getting this technical data,” wrote the administrator in a sworn statement to the Office of Special Investigations. “He also used what I considered intimidation, threatening to involve the DOD and take legal measures because [the base] refused his request.”

The employees also claimed that Newport Aeronautical had requested technical data in “mass quantities” from the base in the past and that it was in possession of documents that were classified Secret.

The Air Force opened an investigation, the results of which were later made public in a lawsuit. It noted Posey’s history of work with Arif Durrani, the Pakistani arms dealer, who had been convicted of shipping Hawk missile parts to Iran as part of the infamous Iran-Contra affair. It also claimed that Posey helped provide technical data to another arms dealer, Amanullah Khan, who was later convicted of attempting to sell fighter aircraft parts to undercover federal agents he thought were Chinese arms dealers. The investigators reported that Newport Aeronautical and Posey had also been investigated by US Customs agents in Boston; New York; Washington; and Oxnard, California. None seem to have resulted in any charges.

Although Posey had threatened to sue the DOD, the Pentagon struck first. In early 2003, undercover Special Investigations agents attempted a sting operation against Newport Aeronautical, asking Posey to supply a technical manual for the C-130 that was classified as Secret. According to the investigation report, Posey quoted a price of $650 for the manual but noted that the data was “restricted.” Posey is reported as saying that “he may have one of his workers sweet-talk someone” in order to secure the documents. The sale was never consummated and, as with the earlier investigations, the inquiries stalled.

But the post-9/11 restrictions on what information the DOD would share were more than Posey could bear. In 2004, Newport Aeronautical finally did sue the Air Force for not fulfilling a number of FOIA requests. The complaint claimed that vendor lock had cost the DOD and America’s allies billions of dollars and that Newport Aeronautical, by providing data quickly to contractors, had increased small business participation.

“Potential competitors who relied on NAS for data could not bid on solicitations issued by the Air Force, other DOD buying agencies and our allies,” Posey wrote. “As a result, original equipment manufacturers were often the only manufacturer with data. This further resulted in awards of overpriced noncompetitive contracts.”

His lawsuit dragged on for more than five years before the court granted the Air Force’s motion to dismiss. The government would be allowed to withhold unclassified technical manuals with military or space applications. The universe of documents available through FOIA had shrunk once more, and Newport Aeronautical would have to look elsewhere for the information its customers wanted.

In early 2008, even before the suit against the Air Force was settled, Newport Aeronautical had begun developing another strategy for obtaining the information its customers wanted—one that would move the company past FOIA resales and into shadier territory. According to his LinkedIn account, Posey’s son, George MacArthur Posey IV—known to the family as “Mac”—joined the company in 2009.

For more than a decade, Mac and a fellow Newport Aeronautical employee made document requests directly to a Florida woman named Melony Erice, who worked in sales for a number of private aerospace companies. She was never a Pentagon employee. Nevertheless, she managed to fulfill Newport’s requests. In all, the company paid Erice more than $589,000 for over 5,000 technical manuals and drawings. According to court documents, those manuals and drawings in turn earned the company over $2.1 million. On Facebook, Posey boasted to his friends about Mac: “He makes sure we always get paid. He’s our Ray Donovan, if you know what I mean. Doesn’t miss a dime.”

“Now my son wants to take over and expand what I have started,” Posey posted on Facebook in 2013. “He already has, and has impressed me with his expertise of business management. But he still doesn’t know the difference between Cessna 150 and a B-52, but he does know money coming in and money going out. Proud dad.”

Where was Erice getting the information? Not through her own FOIA requests, as it turned out. In 2019, military investigators stumbled on email correspondence between Erice and a civilian employee of the US Navy in Philadelphia, who was using his access to military databases to illegally download files that Newport Aeronautical wanted. He then split the proceeds with Erice, with whom he had previously lived.

Investigators followed the trail of thousands of emails from Erice to accounts associated with Newport Aeronautical, gaining a search warrant for them in late 2019. There, they found evidence that she had not been Newport Aeronautical’s only backchannel for technical manuals and drawings. Filings allege that starting in February 2015, Mac had also bought over 870 documents for nearly $83,000 from a quality-control manager at a Florida aerospace contractor who had access to military data as part of his job. On September 2, 2020, 33 years after Posey’s house was raided by federal agents while his wife and toddler son watched, federal agents came to arrest Mac.

Mac was charged with one count of conspiracy to steal government property and to commit bribery of a federal public official, as well as three counts of receiving stolen government property. He has since been appearing, often remotely due to the Covid-19 pandemic, before the same US District Court as Posey did. Like his father before him, Mac is also facing the possibility of 10 years in prison. While the government’s criminal complaint notes George Posey’s position as CEO of Newport Aeronautical and shows him receiving an emailed invoice from Erice for stolen documents, he has not been charged.

law professor Margaret Kwoka has spent the past decade studying the evolution of FOIA. She thinks Representative Moss would be both delighted and horrified to see the results of his efforts to force the government into transparency. “Delighted that so many people have found so many uses for this law that probably he couldn’t have imagined,” she says. “Horrified by just the sheer bureaucracy that it has created.”

At least 125 countries around the world now have freedom-of-information laws, many modeled on FOIA. But while the US legislation has been amended about every decade since the success of Moss’ crusade, Kwoka notes that the changes have failed to prevent ever-lengthening delays and restrictions. These include ever-broader interpretations of exemptions that allow agencies to withhold behind-the-scenes deliberations and many corporate secrets. “Most redactions or denials based on claimed exemptions from agencies go unchallenged because most people don’t have the time or money to appeal,” says Kwoka.

For all the Posey family’s law-breaking, Newport Aeronautical has been one of the very few commercial requesters attempting to hold the military to Moss’ principles of radical transparency. “They may be more exceptional than regular,” says Kwoka. “Most data resellers for sure don’t go to court, either ever or hardly ever. They get what they can get, and then they sell it.”

Though most of Newport Aeronautical’s cases ultimately failed, they set precedents that have since been cited in dozens of subsequent FOIA cases, including those brought by environmental, digital-privacy, and government-spending activists, some of which have reached the United States Supreme Court.

The Poseys’ lawsuits may have helped rein in the government’s tendency to hoard information, but the family hardly makes for a set of uncomplicated FOIA heroes. George Posey was the first person—and one of only a handful ever—to be convicted of violating the US Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act, and Mac has pleaded guilty to conspiracy and receiving stolen government property.

Nevertheless, the Poseys might yet be gearing up to start a new family business. At the start of this year, Mac incorporated Back Bay Packaging, based at the same address as Newport Aeronautical’s office. The nature of that business, like so much of what went on at Newport Aeronautical Sales over the past five decades, remains a mystery.

The agencies investigating the Poseys almost certainly have more details in their files that have not been made public, and last winter I asked all of them for interviews. Most refused outright, although the US Air Force Office of Special Investigations suggested that I file a FOIA request to learn more. I’m still awaiting a response.

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All image sources: Getty Images