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U.S. Mass Declassified Documents At Midnight
Alchemist253 writes "Advocates of open government have another reason to celebrate New Year 2007: at midnight hundreds of millions of U.S. government documents that were classified more than 25 years ago got automatically declassified. Various agencies have applied for exemptions for specific documents, but nonetheless there should be a release of a number of interesting papers." From the article: "'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."
Do we finally find out who killed JFK?
move along. Oh the irony. Anyhow, while this may be good news correct me if I'm wrong but US government has made headway reclassifying previously unclassified documents, as reported for instance here. I don't really know the ins and outs, but isn't it kind of one hand giving while the other takes away?
Promote Charity on Myspace, Show Your Colours!
This policy is one of the few things, in my libertarian-leaning mind, that Bill Clinton got very right. There needs to be give and take on both sides. The public needs to respect the need for state secrecy on certain issues, and the state needs to bring everything it can to the public when the problem has been fixed. The only exception that to me is valid would be one that could really cause a war or that would get a foreign contact of the US Government or their friends and family killed.
Perhaps we need a seti type project to go though it all. We could dub it SAIG, Search for Any Intelligent Governance. I figure it would get the same number of false positives seti does.
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.
Well, if the government really wanted to keep people busy, I'm sure they could just use an algorithm to randomly generate a few million pages of government-speak, formatted to look important, but containing no information whatsoever. That way, they could mask the few nuggets of truly important information in a mound of nonsense and red herrings.
Wait, that's congress' job. Nevermind.
Push Button, Receive Bacon
Maybe in 25 years or so, we'll find out that we never found out anything truly helpful by a policy of torture and disregarding America's founding principle that all humans are endowed with unalienable rights.
.. torture is morally repugnant ..better have the faith that acting morally is always in the best interest of the nations and also the act in which one won't incur the wrath of the creator.
Anyway, "effective" or not
"Secret documents 25 years old or older will lose their classified status without so much as the stroke of a pen"
I'm curious as to how they switch the documents over. 25 years ago it's not like everything was computerized. Are they having people manually sort through classified docs in an "old documents" area, looking and the date, and moving them? I doubt they'd just let historians in to do the sorting.It seems that Slashdot's offices and many of its editors are infected with top secret radioactive element duplonium, resulting in dupes like this.
Does this happen every year?
If FOI in the UK is any indication, the top topic of requests will be
regarding UFOs. We should expect a lot of revelations on this in the New Year
(Kecksburg to name one...)
Attn: Clearance Level AquaMarine Only
It has come to our attention that several morning papers yesterday depicted several incorrect details. These are FALSE. Report Follows:
1. "Saddam was Executed". Saddam Hussein was previously in a position of executive powers in Iraq. Therefore, when the US instituted the Bush Doctrine, he was removed from those executive powers. Therefore, he was De-Executed.
2. "Saddam's Life was taken". Things which are taken are assumed to be in a condition to either return, or sometimes transfer. Confiscated items are also subject to additional regulations. Saddam's life was in no condition to be returned to him after the procedure performed. Saddam's life was extinguished, not taken or confiscated. It was destroyed at the source, and this result falls under the normal rules of war conduct.
Auxilliary memo, Clearance Level Indigo and above:
While Saddam was alive and merely being tried in court, both the American and Iraq populations could have maintained a state of suspension of disbelief. This symbolic moment officially marks the conclusion of Stage One Bush Doctrine. What the president's senior administration believes it has accomplished, only they know, and many of them have since resigned.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
It turns out, I wasn't born in Creston Iowa to Matt and Barbara at all. I was created as part of a series of a domestic experiments with in-vitro fertilization, and ... and my father ...
/me sits on ground and cries.
My father is Margaret Thatcher.
There is not a government on the planet that is ever going to tell it's people all their dirty little secrets.
And they don't keep stuff buried for national security, or to protect the innocent, or what ever other reason you may think. The one and only reason any government keeps secrets from it's people is because if they were to get out, they would be lynched.
They are only ever going to release the shit that doesn't matter.
Besides, the most foul things perpetrated by governments usually start with "Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest?", or words to that effect.
I wish I could think of a witty Sig. Sigh!
So, where the hell can we find these documents?
It seems likely they won't want to.
I imagine google will do a nice index and we'll know why Kennedy had the CIA assassinate the guy who invented the 100MPG on tapwater carbeurator shortly.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Lee Harvey Oswald did it ;)
See, Jimmy Carter was a great president.
Let's go over this declassifying thing. See, there are laws about hte handling of classified information. In fact, the law specifically states what may be classified, and by who. In fact, ever classified document must be marked to say why it's classified, who's the authority for classifying it, and when it will be declassified. Further, if it's not marked with a declassify on date, there's has to be a justification trail saying why it can't be automatically declassified. The law limits those to a very few categories -- nuclear weapon design, intelligence sources, etc. There's a reason congress wrote the law that way. However, shitheads like you just accuse everyone of working with classified material as conspirators. So go fuck yourself.
I find this very unlikely. Not to dismiss the sheer number of documents to sort through, correlate, and summarize, but search isn't exactly a dead field. A significant portion of the smartest people in the world are working on problems which parallel this one.
It'll be years, not tens of years, before these documents are fully understood.
So we shouldn't even try? A couple of tid bits from the last load of declassified docs: Johnson started the bombing of cambodia, not nixon. More explosive force was droped on that country (we have the day by day logs now) than was dropped by all sides in WWII (including nukes). Which has lent credence to the theory that the psychologicaly and physical devestation of the country was the reason a nutter like the k.Rouge went from a fringe force with less then a hundred followers to the genocidal ruler he became. Like it or not, some openess is better than none. And there is no way that law would get passed now by either party.
Well, I can't speak for everybody, but in the industrial part of US classified world, the NISPOM spells it out pretty clearly. One has to mark every classified document with the date of declassification. The "Declassify On" date comes from the Classification Guide delivered with the contract.
The NISPOM (National Industrial Security Program - Operating Manual) is publicly available; Google for it. Contrary to popular belief, classified information is mainly about accountability and trust, not dark rooms and guys in trench coats. Classified information is about letting information *be distributed*, in an accountable fashion. If somebody in a government position is doing something illegal, they probably just won't tell anybody about it. Calling it "classified" would just draw attention to it.
Which is not to say declassifying old, benign information isn't a good thing; it is. It increases public knowledge of our government while decreasing operating overhead. Indeed, it's generally preferred to have the smallest amount of classified information one can. It's a lot cheaper to work with unclassified material. Better to spend the money on men and equipment.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
http://politics.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/ 28/0328251
Here is some evidence from the New York Times that assassins are created.
at last we can find out where Elvis went!!!
It seems something like this would fit in well with their "Google Books" virtual library.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
Give it to Google, let them index it, and then we can all work on it. They everyone will Myspace and blog it, and the world will know everything.
Kernel Krunch - Part of a Complete OS
...unfortunately jokes like yours serve to undermine the effort of people who are attempting to get wrongly classified documents out in the open.
In the world view of far too many, to question anything the government says, or to demand answers of them, is sure proof of being a "conspiracy theory nutjob", unpatriotic, unAmerican, and probably a treasonous Commie.
A huge chunk of the population tell themselves - and others - that the government never lies, it covers nothing up, and has never misbehaved. They hope that everything is public except the things which shouldn't be for our own good. And to them, "hope" is the same as "believe", which itself is the same as "know".
There really are secret government conspiracies, and always have been, as anybody who has ever paid even the tiniest amount of interest in history will have discovered. The conspiracies may not all be of the world-shattering variety, and they aren't related to UFO coverups, and faces on Mars, but conspiracies by governments against their own citizens is a fact of life.
Making fun of those attempting to uncover the conspiracies just trivialises the issue and makes their job far more difficult than it already is.
Anybody thinking about making copies?
+1 funny?
It won't show what documents Sandy Berger walked out of there with, in his underwear. He was so sloppy. I can't TELL you how many times I've walked out of my secured workplaces, with confidential documents in my shoes, socks, and in my sandwich. But NEVER my underwear! :)
:)
He got community service and a $50,000 fine. Isn't that sweet. Think any of us would be *ALIVE* if we did that.
Maybe what's allowed out will explain some things we didn't know before. And not just paperwork: remember that guy who files a FOI and got the software that runs the VA hospital system? Now that was cool. (Unlike Sandy Berger.)
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
DragonHawk: "If somebody in a government position is doing something illegal, they probably just won't tell anybody about it. "
theLOUDroom: "That statement is based on the ridiculously flawed assumption that these actions involve only a single person."
Um, no. You'll notice it reads just as well if you assume a group instead of a single person.
The intent of my statement, which you and others seem oblivious to, is that classifying information creates accountability. There's all sorts of rules and regulations regarding classified information. There's classification guides, original agency tracking, regular inventories, all sorts of crap. (Go read the NISPOM if you don't believe me.) The point of calling something classified is not to keep something hidden, but to let the information be distributed. That distribution is done in an accountable manner, to trusted parties only, but the whole point is to provide a framework where that distribution can happen.
If an entity (be it an individual or a group) wishes to just keep the public from knowing something, it's much better to just not tell anyone else. And that's the other side of the coin which you seem to be missing: A conspiracy can exist easier if it operates outside of the rules. You don't need to call something "classified" to keep it a secret (lower case "S"). Any threats we face from within are going to be far more dangerous in that type of manifestation then under any official banner.
theLOUDroom: "Watergate would be a great example of how totally full of shit this statement is."
Exactly what classified material did the Watergate scandal involve? I'm no expert, but my understanding is that Nixon and his cronies broke into a DNC office in order to steal campaign info. Indeed, I had thought it was explicitly an "off-the-record" sort of program, in order to keep it from being widely known. Which was my point (I guess I need to point that out).
theLOUDroom: "The NSA wiretapping program would be another."
Which NSA wiretapping program? More than one has come to light over the years, ECHELON and TSP just being the most well-known. Speaking of just TSP, you'll remember that there's a not insignificant amount of support from people in all three branches of the government for the "legality" of at least some of it. You and I may not agree, of course, and the debate and controversy over them continues as we speak. Personally, I suspect it goes too far. But that's getting off the real point; read on.
I think the "illegal" part is mostly semantics. So I think you do raise a valid point, but I think the semantic argument obscures the real problem. I think it would be better to address the real problem head on: Even working "within the system", programs can exist, and activities can occur, which a large majority of the US citizenry would object to.
theLOUDroom: "The whole point of doing illegal things in government is that you have the resources of the gov't at your disposal."
I rather suspect that illegal -- and/or (to follow on the above) immoral and objectionable -- things happen in government the same way they happen outside of government: Someone thinks they know better than the rest of us, and/or that "the rules" do not apply to them. The end justifying the means, and all that. I have certainly seen enough of that in private enterprise -- as well as in the ordinary, day-to-day activities of ordinary people -- to believe that there's nothing different there. I do wonder if we perhaps have a better chance of doing something about the corruption in public government, though.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
What is this "government credibility" of which you speak?
Note to all conspiracy lovers: the government is not a single person. If there was such a thing as aliens and stuff, someone would have come forward by now; keeping a military base that can keep an alien locked hidden from the public is extremely difficult, given that there are perhaps thousands of people that work there.
Agreed. The only way to do this in a just but libertarian manner is to have a public referendum on a document-by-document basis to decide which files should be disclosed to the public.
The parent is made of fail and not funny. (This post courtesy of *chan.org)