U.S. To Declassify Hundreds Of Millions Of Documents

[Iggore]

For some very strange reason that I can't explain, what I'd really like to come out of this are offical reports of giant sea monsters attacking nuclear submarines. To hell with aliens, mind-control and all the horrible twisted things that J. Edgar Hoover did during his reign. I'm craving giant sea monsters at the moment.

U.S. to declassify hundreds of millions of documents on December 31

By SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON, Dec. 20 — It will be a Cinderella moment for the band of researchers who study the hidden history of American government.

At midnight on Dec. 31, hundreds of millions of pages of secret documents will be instantly declassified, including many F.B.I. cold war files on investigations of people suspected of being Communist sympathizers. After years of extensions sought by federal agencies behaving like college students facing a term paper, the end of 2006 means the government’s first automatic declassification of records.

Secret documents 25 years old or older will lose their classified status without so much as the stroke of a pen, unless agencies have sought exemptions on the ground that the material remains secret.

Historians say the deadline, created in the Clinton administration but enforced, to the surprise of some scholars, by the secrecy-prone Bush administration, has had huge effects on public access, despite the large numbers of intelligence documents that have been exempted.

And every year from now on, millions of additional documents will be automatically declassified as they reach the 25-year limit, reversing the traditional practice of releasing just what scholars request.

Many historians had expected President Bush to scrap the deadline. His administration has overseen the reclassification of many historical files and restricted access to presidential papers of past administrations, as well as contemporary records.

Practical considerations, including a growing backlog of records at the National Archives, mean that it could take months before the declassified papers are ready for researchers.

“Deadlines clarify the mind,” said Thomas S. Blanton, director of the private National Security Archive at George Washington University, which obtains and publishes historical government documents.

Despite what he called a disappointing volume of exemptions, Mr. Blanton said automatic declassification had “given advocates of freedom of information a real lever.”

Gearing up to review aging records to meet the deadline, agencies have declassified more than one billion pages, shedding light on the Cuban missile crisis, the Vietnam War and the network of Soviet agents in the American government.

Several hundred million pages will be declassified at midnight on Dec. 31, including 270 million pages at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which has lagged most agencies in reviews.

J. William Leonard, who oversees declassification as head of the Information Security Oversight Office at the National Archives, said the threat that secret files might be made public without a security review had sent a useful chill through the bureaucracy.

“Unfortunately, you sometimes need a two-by-four to get agencies to pay attention,” Mr. Leonard said. “Automatic declassification was essentially that two-by-four.”

What surprises await in the documents is impossible to predict.

“It is going to take a generation for scholars to go through the material declassified under this process,” said Steven Aftergood, who runs a project on government secrecy for the Federation of American Scientists.

“It represents the classified history of a momentous period, the cold war,” Mr. Aftergood said. “Almost every current headline has an echo in the declassified past, whether it’s coping with nuclear weapons, understanding the Middle East or dictatorship and democracy in Latin America.”

Anna K. Nelson, a historian at American University, said she hoped that the files would shed light on the Central Intelligence Agency role in Iran and deepen the documentation of the Jimmy Carter years, in particular the Camp David accords.

“Americans need to know this history, and the history is in those documents,” Ms. Nelson said.

She said the National Archives staff was buried in a 400-million-page backlog that awaits processing and is not publicly available.

Also, a budget shortfall has cut back on evening and weekend access to the major research center of the archives, in College Park, Md.

“They can declassify the records, but the archives don’t have the staff to handle them,” Ms. Nelson said.

The first deadline was imposed in an executive order that President Bill Clinton signed in 1995, when officials realized that taxpayers were paying billions of dollars to protect a mountain of cold war documents.

The order gave agencies five years to declassify documents or show the need for continued secrecy.

When agencies protested that they could not meet the 2000 deadline, it was extended to 2003. Mr. Bush then granted another three-year extension, but put out the word that it was the last one, despite the new emphasis on security after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and a new war in Iraq.

“The Bush administration could have said, ‘This is a Clinton thing,’ and abandoned it,” Mr. Aftergood, said. “To their credit, they did not.”

As an enforceable deadline loomed, the intelligence agencies that produce most secret material add workers to plow through files from World War II.

The C.I.A. has reviewed more than 100 million pages, released 30 million pages and created a database of documents, Crest, that is accessible from terminals at the National Archives. Although most of the documents are exempt, they can be requested under the Freedom of Information Act.

The National Security Agency, the eavesdropping and code-breaking agency, has released 35 million pages, including an extensive collection on the Gulf of Tonkin incident that led to the escalation of the Vietnam War. The agency plans a major release early next year on the Israeli attack on the Liberty, an American eavesdropping ship, in 1967.

The F.B.I., by contrast, negotiated an exemption from the 1995 executive order and concluded last year that the 2003 executive order ended its special status. It has rushed to review material, seeking exemption for 50 million pages on intelligence, counterintelligence and terrorism, but leaving 270 million pages to be automatically declassified now.

Among those files, said David M. Hardy, the bureau declassification chief, are those on investigations of Americans with suspected ties to the Communist Party. Reviewers will keep working on the exempt material to see what can be released, but it is a slow process, Mr. Hardy said.

“The numbers of documents are staggering,” Mr. Hardy said.

The bureau is studying digitizing documents and using computers to search for classified material. Some experts say mass declassification is not the smartest approach. L. Britt Snider, a former intelligence official who heads the Public Interest Declassification Board, which advises the White House, said most government records, even top-secret ones, were pretty boring.

“Rather than take this blunderbuss approach,” Mr. Snider said, “I’d like to see the agencies concentrate first on what’s interesting and what’s important.

 

[OldTimeRadio]

It sometimes occurs to me that if a government had a document which they really wanted to keep secret they'd declassify it and then release it along with "hundreds of millions" of other documents.

 

[TinFinger]

bury bad news iirc

 

[OldTimeRadio]

The idea comes from the "hiding in plain sight" technique occasionally used by jewel merchants in transporting an exceptionally valuable diamond from one country to another. You don't employ an international courier if you have reason to believe that there will be teams of diamond thieves laying for the courier at every step of the journey. Instead you spend three or four dollars to mail the stone parcel post.

 

[rynner2]

The idea comes from the "hiding in plain sight" technique

copyright J.E.Poe...?

(Unless anyone knows better...?)

 

[OldTimeRadio]

copyright J.E.Poe...?

Do you mean E. A. Poe? Otherwise I don't understand the reference.

But the classic fictionaal use of "hiding in plain sight" is probably G. K. Chesterton's "The Invisible Man."

 

[Pietro_Mercurios]

copyright J.E.Poe...?

Do you mean E. A. Poe? Otherwise I don't understand the reference.

But the classic fictionaal use of "hiding in plain sight" is probably G. K. Chesterton's "The Invisible Man."

It's a reference to Edgar Allan Poe's The Purloined Letter.

Note similarity of Poe's tale of Detective C. August Dupin to tales of a famous consulting detective of half a century later...

And, The Invisible Man was actually by H.G. Wells, father of Orson.

But, of course, Chesterton's 'Invisible Man' was probably in a Father Brown story I've forgotten the title of.

Ah! It was a Father Brown story, called The Invisible Man. :lol:

 

[OldTimeRadio]

....H.G. Wells, father of Orson.

There's extant a radio interview of Wells and Welles, together, recorded in Texas in 1940. Welles says that he's helping H. G. search for that second "e" missing from his last name.

It was a local broadcast and the young announcer/interviewer is clearly intimidated by his two famous guests.

 

[Hanslune]

Of course the far smarter move would be to just DESTROY the document or release an edited version, or just lose it and never release.

The most interesting of these will be who the agencies investigated as being Communist spies or sympathizers.

 

[Nemo]

Nah...Most of the documents will have been blacked out just leaving the occasional "at, and"

 

[Hanslune]

Probably not these are being declassified under a different law not a release under FOIA. If the agency didn't move to reclassify the entire document the whole things comes out, AFAIU.

We'll see

 

[OldTimeRadio]

Nah...Most of the documents will have been blacked out just leaving the occasional "at, and"

But those make for such fascinating reading: "On XXXXX XX, 19XX, Agent XXXXX observed an XXXXX actually XXXXXing at XXXXX, XXXXX and promptly reported it to XXXXX. The President was made aware of this the same day, at location XXXXX."

 

[Kondoru]

This is going to keep the conspiracy theorists going for a few decades, if not a little longer

 

[OldTimeRadio]

Of course the far smarter move would be to just DESTROY the document....or just lose it....

That's long struck me as one of the strongest evidences that something at least interesting transpired at Roswell Army Air Force Base in 1947 - the fact that the base daybooks and logs from the operative period went "missing" from National; Archives years ago and have never since been located.

 

[Hanslune]

It would have been far more interesting if everything related to Roswell had been destroyed.

Archives are at best incomplete at the best of times. It would be interesting to see how many day books are missing from that time period for every unit. Then you'd have a parameter of data on the chance of a daybook being missing. Of course if the daybook wasn't missing and it didn't contain anything interesting it would be ignored or considered a forgery.

 

[OldTimeRadio]

Roswell AAFB was our main atomic base in 1947, so the records from that period should have been carefully guarded and preserved.

 

[crunchy5]

Roswell AAFB was our main atomic base in 1947, so the records from that period should have been carefully guarded and preserved.

In case of attack by time travellers. :lol:

 

[Hanslune]

Such a record would have been rather mundane. Nothing classified would have been in it. Actually it might be interesting (if anyone has the information) as to what went into an airforce base daylog. Anyone know?

If it was like a log kept at an army base you would record, arrival of VIPs, security issues, violations, relief of quards, who was on duty, and perhaps logging of messages from certain HQs.

 

[OldTimeRadio]

Roswell AAFB was our main atomic base in 1947, so the records from that period should have been carefully guarded and preserved.

In case of attack by time travellers. :lol:

Rather, a fear of attack by official vandals with no reqard for history.

 

[OldTimeRadio]

If it was like a log kept at an army base you would record, arrival of VIPs....

UFOlogists would be extremely interested in possessing an official transcript of which VIPs showed up at Roswell AAFB during July, 1947.

Alas, those are the very records which have vanished.

 

[Hanslune]

That information, if it existed, would probably not have been recorded. In the logs we kept in Germany any mention of nuclear weapons, exercise dates, CEOI issues, anything remotely dealing with operational and certainly anything classified wouldn't be noted. The logs were of an administrative nature. With the Red Brigade active at that time even keeping track of the COs location was discontinued.

We would need to see a manual or policy from that period as to what would/was suppose to be recorded. Or take a look at an another airbases log.

 

[crunchy5]

We would need to see a manual or policy from that period as to what would/was suppose to be recorded. Or take a look at an another airbases log.

I don't really know what the conditions are on this release of info law but these will hopefully be covered at least giving investigators a heads up as to what to look for. Think yourselves lucky the UK govt would never allow this level of info to get out, too many families who might be embarrassed by what great great grandad did in the Boer war when he made a bit of money on substandard boots for the troops.

 

[jefflovestone]

Roswell AAFB was our main atomic base in 1947, so the records from that period should have been carefully guarded and preserved.

In case of attack by time travellers. :lol:

Actually, I bet there's an action/sci-fi film in there somewhere. Modern day Islamic Extremists make targets of American* atomic bases and icons like Statue of Liberty but not now, in the past - when they're not going to be defended in the same way. The suicide extremists plan is to blow up an atomic base and thus stopping

American 'time agents' go back in time themselves and foil the caper.


*it has to happen in America, like everything else.

 

[crunchy5]

*it has to happen in America, like everything else.

No doubt the bad guy Muslim extremists would be played by English actors, is our accent so sinister ?

 

[Hanslune]

UK security

Yep I noted recently that the report/information on the sinking of the HMT Lancastria in 1940 is locked until 2040.

Scifi? I think that's been done. How about instead you have time travelers (lunatics) who go around in time moving stuff around and taking things - just to cause trouble, for jollies.

Time pirates meets jackass...or some such

 

[Kondoru]

it sounds dumb

 

[jefflovestone]

*it has to happen in America, like everything else.

No doubt the bad guy Muslim extremists would be played by English actors, is our accent so sinister ?

Yeah, the speaking parts, certainly. The rest? Just get a load of Mexicans or something. I'm more bothered about product placement and advertising at the moment than casting. I'm thinking of having the American time agents using a sexy new laptop to run their time travel software and have them talk on a cell phone instead of radios, it's just a question of who's gonna pay the most.

 

[OldTimeRadio]

I'd still like to be able to look at those Roswell AAFB records and suspect that they went missing for a purpose. You don't simply stroll into National Archives, grab the records of atomic bases, and walk out whistling.

 

[crunchy5]

I'd still like to be able to look at those Roswell AAFB records and suspect that they went missing for a purpose. You don't simply stroll into National Archives, grab the records of atomic bases, and walk out whistling.

I bet you do if you went to the right school and joined the right club :devil: :vampire:

 

[OldTimeRadio]

I bet you do if you went to the right school and joined the right club :devil: :vampire:

But if it took all that clout to do it, I'm even more curious about what those July, 1947, Roswell AAFB daybooks contained.

Somebody obviously wanted to vanish 'em.