U.S. Mass Declassified Documents At Midnight

Posted by kdawson on Monday January 1, 2007 @05:08AM 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."

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How do they change over? by PurifyYourMind · 2007-01-01 05:26 · 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.