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."

Comments

So ...

[tomhudson]

Do we finally find out who killed JFK?

Re:So ...

[prelelat]

What will this even prove, if there were conspiracies I'm sure they would have added them to the exemption pile. If not the conspiracy junkies will yell out that the documents were destroyed or put in the exempt pile. People will believe what they want, its all cloak and dager when it comes to the government.

Re:So ...

[Anonymous Coward]

No, but since it goes back to the early 80s, maybe we'll find out who shot Ronald Reagan.

Oh wait, we already know that.

Or do we? I submit that the KGB grew genetically-altered assassins equipped with light-bending camoflauge armor to do the job, while using mind control to set up John Hinckley, Jr. as the fall guy (with the help of communist fifth columnists within the film industry who re-edited Taxi Driver to contain subliminal messages, which also caused the rise of MTV, which is a whole other conspiracy which I do not have the space to cover here), and that they in fact succeeded in killing him, but quickly switched the real, dead Reagan with a insidiously clever android based on alien technology. Did you ever seen Ronald Reagan around any large magnets after the shooting? Didn't think so.

I suggest those of you who can see this memorize this information as quickly as you can, because the government DOES NOT WANT YOU TO KNOW THIS, and this post will surely not remain up for very long. (AND DON'T COPY AND PASTE IT. THEY HAVE CODE EMBEDDED IN YOUR BROWSER THAT SEND EVERYTHING EVERYBODY COPIES AND PASTES DIRECTLY TO THE NSA.) Don't worry about me, I'm posting from behind a proxy server (NOT Tor, which is in fact run by Dutch intelligence), and will be taking the next boat to another continent after I've sent out the signal. See through the lies. Good luck to you.

Give and take

[MikeRT]

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.

Re:Give and take

[Kadin2048]

Agreed. However, I don't think the people should ever passively accept classification of documents or withholding of information. Every decision in that direction should be actively questioned and debated. There should be a constant public push to declassify everything, because only when you have that impetus, will anything ever be declassified, particularly because you have a government with an obsession to act secretive and horde information.

The only legitimate reason for secrecy is when the disclosure of a document would result in direct and immediate harm to a U.S. national, ally, or key national interest. The classification of documents for "face saving" reasons is harmful and should be stopped. If we as a nation have made mistakes in the past we should be upfront with them to ourselves and move on.

Saig anyone?

[bunhed]

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.

not surprising

[macadamia_harold]

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.

Where?

[Anonymous Coward]

So, where the hell can we find these documents?

Re:Where?

[AlXtreme]

Not sure if declassified documents have already been placed online for the FBI or NSA, but the FBI, NSA and CIA FOIA sites might be good places to start. The CIA does have a few new documents online. Pick your favorite incident and happy hunting!

NISPOM tells us

[DragonHawk]

Are they having people manually sort through classified docs in an "old documents" area, looking and the date, and moving them?

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.