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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?
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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.
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"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.
If you read the article, you'd find that this is the first time. Clinton enacted a law, and Bush (!) has enforced it. From here on in, it will happen every year, but this is the first.
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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...)
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.
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A similar process happens here in the UK every year. (That article's from 2001, but it's still current info.) There are various documents that are classified for 30, 50 or 100 years. Eventually everything gets turned over to historians, in theory at least. It'll be interesting to see how the digital age will affect this process in 25 years' time...
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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.
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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.
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