Privacy Policy & Other Disclaimers
Privacy Act Notice
For site management, information is collected for statistical purposes. The Department of State uses software programs to create summary statistics for such purposes as assessing what information is of most and least interest or identifying system performance or problem areas. The following is the type of information collected about your visit to the website: the name of the Internet domain from which you access State Department websites (for example, "aol.com" if you are connecting from America Online) and the date and time you access our site.
For site security purposes and to ensure that this service remains available to all users, the State Department uses software programs to monitor network traffic to identify unauthorized attempts to upload or change information or otherwise cause damage. Unauthorized attempts to upload information or change information on this service are strictly prohibited and may be punishable under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986. Information also may be used for authorized law enforcement investigations. Except for the above purposes, no other attempts are made to identify individual users or their usage habits.
Links to External Websites
Links to websites outside the U.S. Federal Government or the use of trade, firm, or corporation names within the State Department websites are for the convenience of the user. Such use does not constitute an official endorsement or approval by the U.S. State Department of any private sector website, product, or service.
Disclaimer of Liability
Every effort is made to provide accurate and complete information. However, with the thousands of documents available, often uploaded within short deadlines, we cannot guarantee that there will be no errors. With respect to documents and information on the current and archive State Department websites, neither the U.S. Government, the U.S. Department of State, nor their employees and contractors make any warranty, expressed or implied, including the warranties of merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose with respect to documents available from State Department websites. Additionally, the U.S. Government, U.S. State Department, assume no legal liability for the accuracy, completeness, or usefulness of any information, product, or process disclosed herein and do not represent that use of such information, product, or process would not infringe on privately owned rights.
Cookie Disclaimer
This site does not use cookies.
Search Disclaimer
This search is based upon locating specified words in the electronic text of documents. However, in many cases, this is dependent upon the conversion of the text in paper documents to electronic text through optical character recognition (OCR). Because of age and condition of some paper documents, the OCR may not recognize certain characters and words correctly. Please keep this in mind when using full text search, as these anomalies may affect the results of your search for relevant documents using your search criteria.
Please note:
- Some of the documents in the Virtual Reading Room are those of other federal agencies. Any questions regarding other federal agencies’ documents should be directed to the originating agency.
- The search results list sometimes displays “n/a” in the data fields, which stands for “not available”. The data is sometimes not available depending on the document itself or how the document was processed.
Private Use of Government Information
The private sector may download government information that is in the public domain and provide enhancements or "added value." We encourage private sector initiatives to further disseminate government information. However, we caution users that the "official" version is the version which appears on government websites. Please be aware that government information on private sector websites may not necessarily be as up to date and that the "value added" information is not provided by the government.
Computer Fraud and Abuse Act
Unauthorized attempts to upload information and/or change information on these websites are strictly prohibited and are subject to prosecution under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986 and Title 18 U.S.C. Sec.1001 and 1030.