The reference shelf
The Stacks
A curated shelf of openly-licensed documents and PDFs — declassified files, field manuals, crypto standards, privacy frameworks, landmark papers, and public-domain books. Everything here is linked at its rights-cleared source: nothing rehosted, nothing dubious.
How to read the shelf
License tiers
Every item carries a license badge so you know what you're allowed to do with it — including training models on it:
- PD Public domain. U.S. federal works and expired copyrights. Train on it, quote it, sell what you build with it — no strings.
- OPEN Open access. Free to read and cite; authors retain copyright. Fine for research corpora.
- FREE Free download. The publisher offers the full text gratis. Check their terms for redistribution.
- MIXED Check per item. Big archives with varying licenses — verify before you ingest.
Building a corpus? A machine-readable manifest of this shelf lives at stacks.json — titles, URLs, genres, and license tiers, ready for an ingestion pipeline. Point your crawler at the sources, not at us: we link, we don't host. Pointing an agent at the site instead? Hand it llms.txt, the agent-readable map of every page plus how to use the shelf.
Stack 01
Declassified & FOIA
U.S. federal works can't be copyrighted (17 U.S.C. § 105) — so declassified government documents are public domain by law. Primary sources, no paywall, no permission slip.
- CIA FOIA Reading RoomPD — millions of declassified pages: intelligence reports, memos, briefing books. The Agency's own attic, open to the public.
- NSA Cryptologic HeritagePD — declassified histories of codebreaking: the people and machines behind a century of signals intelligence.
- FBI VaultPD — the Bureau's declassified case files: gangsters, spies, and strange history, scanned and searchable.
- National Security ArchiveMIXED — George Washington University's declassification shop: curated document sets on the events that shaped the modern world. Mostly federal docs; verify per set.
- CIA World FactbookPD — the Agency's public almanac: every country's terrain, people, and economy in one place. Reference gold.
Stack 02
Field Manuals
U.S. Army field manuals are federal works — public domain. Doctrine, straight from the source.
- FM 2-22.3: Human Intelligence Collector OperationsPD — the Army's HUMINT manual: how collectors plan, run, and report human-source operations. The tradecraft textbook.
- FM 34-52: Intelligence InterrogationPD — the 1992 interrogation manual: questioning technique, approach strategy, and the legal lines around it.
- FM 21-76: SurvivalPD — the classic survival manual: shelter, water, food, evasion. The one everyone photocopied.
- ATP 2-22.9: Open-Source IntelligencePD — the Army's OSINT doctrine: planning, collection, and analysis of publicly available information. This site's day job, in uniform.
Stack 03
Crypto & Protocols
The standards and textbooks the internet's security is built on.
- RFC EditorFREE — every Request for Comments ever published: the design documents of the internet, freely reproducible.
- RFC 8446: TLS 1.3FREE — the spec for the encryption wrapping most of the web. Read the standard, not someone's summary of it.
- Handbook of Applied CryptographyFREE — Menezes, van Oorschot & Vanstone's full textbook, free from the authors. The crypto canon.
- NIST SP 800-53PD — the federal security-controls catalog: hundreds of controls for protecting systems. The compliance world's bible.
Stack 04
Privacy & Identity
The federal frameworks for privacy engineering and digital identity — public domain.
- NIST Privacy FrameworkPD — privacy risk management, structured like the Cybersecurity Framework. For building systems that don't leak.
- NIST Cybersecurity FrameworkPD — the CSF: outcomes-based guidance for managing cyber risk. Boardrooms and SOCs speak this dialect.
- NIST SP 800-63: Digital IdentityPD — the standard for identity proofing and authentication: passwords, MFA, federation, done right.
Stack 05
Machine Learning Papers
Open-access papers — the authors' versions, free to read and cite.
- arXiv cs.AI — recentOPEN — the firehose: the newest AI preprints as they land. Drink carefully.
- Attention Is All You NeedOPEN — Vaswani et al., 2017: the Transformer paper. The architecture eating the world, in fifteen pages.
- BERTOPEN — Devlin et al., 2018: pre-training deep bidirectional transformers. The paper that launched a thousand fine-tunes.
Stack 06
Public-Domain Bookshelf
Copyright expired, wisdom didn't. Project Gutenberg's editions are verified public domain.
- The Art of War — Sun TzuPD — strategy, deception, and knowing your adversary. Twenty-five centuries old, still assigned.
- The Prince — MachiavelliPD — power as it is actually exercised. Short, sharp, permanently relevant.
- Internet Archive: TextsMIXED — millions of digitized texts. Licenses vary by item — check before you train, but the public-domain shelves run deep.