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CIA Secretly Reclassifying Documents
SetupWeasel writes "The New York Times is reporting that the CIA is secretly reclassfying documents. How did we catch on? Historians have some of the documents. From the article: "eight [of the] reclassified documents had been previously published in the State Department's history series, 'Foreign Relations of the United States.'" Are our intelligence agencies rewriting history, stupidly paranoid, or both? We do know that they are ignoring a 2003 law that requires formal reclassifications. It puts that whole Google censorship thing in a whole new light. (Americans aren't allowed to see that video.)"
.. are given cart-blanche to declare their own secrets, they will forever be out of control.
America: your country has been usurped by your CIA and its masters. The American Public no longer control that agency.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
My federal government is a billion tonne overweight fascist hog.
Well, Vote Libertarian!
Everyone is always worried about governments "rewriting history" i.e. from the post "Are our intelligence agencies rewriting history, stupidly paranoid, or both?" This here is not an example of that. The government is not rewriting history, just denying access to it. Whether that is as bad is debatable.
This poster in no way agrees with what the CIA is doing, just pointing out an oft made error. This here is not some Orwellian nightmare.
quis custodiet ipsos custodes
Doesn't sound very secret to me. Isn't secret when nobody knows about it? And why does slashdot assume the only possible explanations are A) the government is evil and rewriting history or B) the government is stupid or C) the government is evil? Watch out! Sounds as big as the wiretap scandal! Oh wait, nobody cares about that anymore either.
Should we worry that people are doing this (although I suspect others in the past have) or that they are being caught doing this? Maybe we're trying harder to catch these people, but if your average newspaper can catch these people, what does it say about the security we've got in place to cover tracks?
In some ways I'm glad that my civil rights can't be screwed because such lax idiots are in control, but at the same time I fear all my personal information is being held by people I wouldn't trust with my TV remote.
I like muppets.
Documents are always getting reclassified, both up and down. If you will all recall a number of previously accessible public works documents concerning dams and power plants were removed post 9/11.
The thing is that something that wasn't secret before may become sensitive in the future due to changing conditions. Also things that are secret now may become less critical in the future and thus be released. This is the whole reason for review procedures.
Only people who are constantly willing to believe the worst in the government are going to see a grand conspiracy here.
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.
Any sufficiently advanced man is indistinguishable from God
If that's true, it's possibly one of the funniest things I've ever heard.
/. gets so overexcited anytime someone mentions one of the magic keywords (censorship / google / apple / "kill bill gates" etc)
PHP
Yes, it is true, but without knowing the motives of the submitter in banning access to the U.S., it's as erroneous to dismiss the issue as it is to execute the standard Slashdot knee-jerk reaction to censorship.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
You do realize that you have just broken copyright law by posting a copy of their content here without their permission, right? Please don't tell me that you're also one of those people who complain about companies violating the GPL. That would just make you a hypocrite.
I am astonished that you make absolute statements such as this.
How can you possibly know that he hasn't developed this opinion by consuming information from a broad range of sources?
Disagreeing with someone is not reason enough to label them un-informed.
A very interesting perspective... one that I happen to lean towards since intelligence agencies are not usually a bunch of ignorant doofuses. They are smart, and there is a calculated reason for doing such actions. Let's hope it's benign, but if I had to bet money on their reason, my money's on that it's for covering tracks. We won't know unfortunately until 100 years from now, when the documents become declassified (if they ever do).
The reason that they want to re-classify stuff is simple. The US gov has a policy of 'plausible deniability' meaning that everything they say is considered true ("because we say so") until someone finds evidence to the contrary. Remove the evidence and you got a new 'truth'.
This is part of a larger trend that is developing at a rapid pace in the US which embraces secrecy in place of open government, and propaganda instead of news. To think we used to scold the old USSR for this very same bullshit. It's shameful that so many Americans are comfortable with this new form of 'freedom'. It really is true: You don't really appreciate what you have until it's gone.
When all else fails, run.
Errr? We actually had those at one time?
Not trying to knock your friend or anything, but if the "quality" of reporting I'm seeing in any one of the major metro papers in my area are any indication of the "skilled investigative reporters" of which you speak, I'd be better off with some tin cans, some string, and those X-Ray glasses I got in a box of Cracker Jack as a kid. That way I could investigate them myself with the same level of "thoroughness". The only way to get decent coverage of any story is to use five or six different sources and try to piece together a coherent image of what the actual story should be.
People are stupid, sensationalism sells, and the people who are looking for actual news are being disenfranchised by things such as the Jackson trial and the latest political "scandal". If the papers want money, maybe they should improve the quality of their stories, eh?
When French King Louis 14 (1638-1715) famously said "l'etat, c'est moi" (the state, that's me), he meant that the king incarnates the state. Anything the king does is legal, official policy. No "separation of powers". Anything the kind doesn't like is a threat to national security, because the king's security is the state's security.
Making documents already circulated in public makes it harder for the public to know about them. It doesn't really stop determined researchers, like foreign intelligence agencies, from knowing about them. But it sure does make it more likely that embarassing info, evidence of crimes, and plans for goverment actions unacceptable to the public will be ignored by our fat, lazy corporate media.
This action by Bush's government is independently a demonstration of a King's privilege. But of course it doesn't stand alone. Over the past 5 years, there is a long list of individual actions by Bush's government to do thinks like an absolute monarch, including ignoring Congress, lying us into war, leaving the Gulf Coast unprotected, leaking CIA/WMD agent identity to protect a lie to send us to war, with only the TV spokesmodel facing any repercussions when the government is caught. It's obvious that the Bush doctrine of the unitary executive is Bushspeak for "the state, that's me".
--
make install -not war
I think YOU missed your parent post's point. He was giving an analogy, and wasn't literally referring to rewriting individual documents. If you look at the body of documents as a whole, they present a story. You can create a different story by releasing some documents and holding others. He analogizes sentence fragments to entire documents.
LS
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
"I'm afraid that if newspapers get poorer and poorer, we citizens lose one of our country's main forces against political evils - skilled investigative reporters with the resources to pursue stories in depth."
But we lost that years ago when newspapers found that parrotting PR guff is a lot cheaper that employing real reporters. The dearth in solid investigative reporting is not just due to the Internet - the decline began long before the net was in everyone's home.
Virtually nobody in the general public understands how intelligence collecting works or how classification schemes are intended to thwart them. Hollywood and novels have conditioned us to think of vital information as being a small discrete units, say a single document, that must be protected. In truth, this is a mere plot device to create what Hitchcock called a "McGuffin", some single thing the characters can run around trying to obtain in order to drive the story. People believe that only a small amount of the "McGuffin" information honestly needs to be kept secret and that the rest is just dishonesty.
However, real-world intelligence does not come in discrete units but rather it arises from an analysis of broad patterns. It comes from data mining. Many separate and seemingly innocuous pieces of information are stitched together to create a picture of something hidden. The reason that the military (or even corporations) "over-classify" is to prevent the data mining of otherwise trivial items. The 1947 balloon program sounds historic and trivial but that program fit into a budget and organization somewhere and that effected the form of other, perhaps more interesting and relevant, programs.
Only someone from the inside, with a broad picture of how all the pieces fit together, could possibly judge whether the classification of any particular piece of information is justified or not. Anyone else is doing so based on ignorant hubris.
Look, you don't have to lose the indignation. What you felt is exactly what people in China feel everytime they use the internet, and what any kid in the US feels any time they try to access a website on homosexuality from a public school. These are real problems affecting billions. The fact that you had to momentarily share their subjugation should serve to remind you of what they're going through. Use the indignation to speak on their behalf. Yes, it's possible the video was blocked from US audiences just to make a point. So what? The point is made.
Glenn Loos-Austin
UI Designer at Epic
http://www.flickr.com/photos/junkchest/
If you can control what people know, you control what they beleive, and thus how they act. Right to the point where they're not even aware that they're being played.
The Iraq Invasion is a wonderful demonstration of the US Ministry of Truth. There are people in the US currently running around thinking the US invaded Iraq to "liberate" the people, not go after WMD which wasn't there.
You 1st worlders can't see it firsthand, it is so scary to watch.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
The government is not rewriting history, just denying access to it. Whether that is as bad is debatable... This here is not some Orwellian nightmare.
One of the examples from the story is a 1950 assessment by the intelligence folks to the effect that the People's Republic of China was unlikely to intervene directly in the Korean war that year. As anyone who watched an episode of two of "MASH" could tell you, the red Chinese did come across the border in 1950.
In that case, the history the CIA (and whatever other agencies -- we're not allowed to know who's even involved ) is erasing is the history of their own mistakes. If that's not "Orwellian" what is? Seriously.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Poster1: "skilled investigative reporters with the resources to pursue stories in depth"
Poster2: "Errr? We actually had those at one time?"
Yes, we did, but the 1990s were a hallmark in the die-off of investigative journalism. Several books have been written about the subject. The 1990s produced a corporatized media system that tipped over a hump in concerns of financial controls, corporate ownership, and the vast background hum of elite influence. The end product is that major media outlets are streamlined to produce consumerist news (HappyNews{tm}), not anything else. Investigating financial topics, for instance, not only takes a while, but tends to cross some corporate donor or owner somewhere.
The (in)famous meta-story of the Fox News / Monsanto story is an outstanding example of how highly-corporatized ownership of news (and in fact all industries, as well as corruption of government) kills investigative journalism.
An American is much more likely now to find investigative journalism from independents like Greg Palast, and foreigners (notably, the BBC). His domestic media otherwise has been completely subverted and simply cannot be trusted.
[You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change.]