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U.S. Mass Declassified Documents At Midnight

Posted by kdawson on from the seekrits dept.

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."

6 of 131 comments (clear)

  1. How do they change over? by PurifyYourMind · · Score: 3, Interesting

    "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.
  2. Re:So ... by yabos · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Most of the possibly interesting documents are always censored when they're declassified. Various UFO documents are mostly blacked out and so are useless.

  3. Re:So ... by tomhudson · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I wonder if someone could run for president on a single promise - release ALL the info on the JFK killing ... or how long they'd survive before an "accident", or a "deranged gunman" took them out ...

  4. Re:So ... by khallow · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Answer, no way. That's a really lame single issue. Besides Clinton pretty much did this as part of his policy of more openness in government. And he didn't have an accident or get assassinated.

  5. Re:UFOs by Lord+Kano · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I'm from Pittsburgh. I have heard secondhand stories about Kecksburg from my grandfather. He was a steelworker and some of his coworkers lived in Kecksburg.

    SOMETHING definately crashlanded there, but I suspect that it may have been Soviet.

    Either way, I'd like to find out for sure.

    LK

    --
    "Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
  6. How long until Google gets a copy? by abb3w · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.