Friday is a research console over declassified Cold War intelligence archives, offered at fridayarchive.org by Maxime Usdin (“Friday”, “we”, “us”). By creating an account or using the service you agree to these terms. If you do not agree, do not use Friday. Effective 7 October 2026.
Friday lets you search scanned, OCR-processed historical records and ask questions that are answered with citations to the underlying pages. It is a research aid for historians, students, journalists and the public. It is not a substitute for reading the documents, and it is not a source of legal, professional or factual certainty.
The archival records in Friday (FBI files, Venona decrypts, congressional testimony, the Vassiliev notebooks and related collections) are public records of the United States government or materials released to the public by their holders. We claim no ownership of those records. You may read, download, quote, cite and reproduce them freely, subject to any rights their original holders may assert. A citation to Friday is welcome but not required when you cite a document.
Everything that is not the documents themselves belongs to Friday and is protected by copyright, database and trade-secret law. That includes the software, the search and question-answering methods, the prompts and models configuration, the corrected text and page segmentation produced from the scans, the entity, alias and cover-name tables, the concordance index, the embeddings, the collection descriptions, and the design and text of the site. We grant you a limited, revocable, non-exclusive, non-transferable right to use these through the service for research. No other right is granted. Nothing in these terms transfers any ownership to you.
Chat answers are produced by language models reading the pages Friday retrieves. They can be incomplete or wrong, and they can misread a scan. Every answer links to the cited page so you can check it. You are responsible for verifying anything you rely on or publish against the scanned original. You may quote Friday's answers in your own work with attribution. You may not republish Friday's answers, search results or database contents in bulk, or present them as your own compilation.
You sign in with an email address through our sign-in provider. Keep your credentials to yourself and tell us if you believe your account has been used without your permission. You are responsible for what happens under your account. Accounts are for individuals; do not share one or create accounts for others.
You agree not to:
Friday can be connected to chat assistants that support the Model Context Protocol. That connection is offered for your own interactive research under these same terms. It is not a licence to automate bulk retrieval, mirror the archive or resell access. We may limit or withdraw the connector at any time.
What we keep about your account and sessions, why, and for how long is described in the Your data section of the help dialog, which forms part of these terms. In short: we keep your sign-in email, your sessions until you delete them, and usage records that contain none of your text. We do not sell your data or use your sessions to train any model. Write to coldwarspyhistory@gmail.com to ask what is held about you or to have it removed.
If you send us corrections, identifications, suggestions or other feedback, you grant us a perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free right to use it in Friday without obligation to you. We may credit contributors but are not required to.
Friday is a research project supported by grant funding. We may change, suspend or discontinue any part of the service, add or remove collections, or change these terms at any time. Material changes to the terms will be posted on this page with a new effective date, and continued use after that date means you accept them.
We may suspend or close an account that breaks these terms or that is being used in a way that harms the service or other users, with or without notice. You may stop using Friday at any time and ask us to delete your account. Sections 3, 4, 9, 12 and 13 survive termination.
Friday is provided “as is” and “as available”, without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including accuracy, completeness, fitness for a particular purpose, non-infringement and uninterrupted operation. Scans, transcriptions and generated answers may contain errors.
To the fullest extent the law allows, Friday and the people who build and fund it are not liable for any indirect, incidental, consequential, special or punitive damages, or for any loss of data, research, reputation or profit, arising from your use of or inability to use the service. Our total liability for any claim is limited to the amount you paid us to use Friday, which at present is nothing.
These terms are governed by the laws of the State of California and the United States, without regard to conflict-of-law rules. Any dispute will be brought in the state or federal courts located in California, and you consent to their jurisdiction.
Questions about these terms, requests about your data, and reports of misuse go to coldwarspyhistory@gmail.com.
Copyright © 2026 Maxime Usdin. All rights reserved.