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New Declassification Process To Open 400 Million Pages of Records
linzeal writes "The newly minted National Declassification Center has been tasked by President Obama with eliminating the backlog of more than 400 million pages of classified records that are more than 25 years old by the end of 2013. The National Archives has prepared a draft prioritization plan to guide its declassification activities, and has invited public input on the plan. A public forum on the subject will be held on June 23. This may be a bonanza for the community of historians and intelligence buffs who have been left without significant source material to work with, in some cases since WWII, especially in terms of any information on cryptography, image analysis, and espionage."
Not that previous posters don't have a point, but transparency in governments has to start somewhere. Far from perfect, late, and everything else, but at least it's a start.
Does anyone on /. honest believe anything seriously juicy or even particularly interesting would *ever* be released to the public.
Depends on your definition of 'juicy' - this kind of information is a treasure-trove for historians. Not Nicholas Cage "National Treasure" 'historians' but the real guys who record the fundamentals of who/what/where/when/how and sometimes the why of our government operations. The motivation to over-classify is particularly strong - no one ever got sent to prison for not releasing a document. But keeping this stuff hidden has all kinds of long-term bad effects, such as an inability to learn from previous mistakes, duplication of effort and a bunch more stuff that isn't about malfeasance but is extremely important to healthy governance.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Twenty-five years is a ridiculous amount of time to keep things from the people that you were elected to represent. Please someone, anyone, name me an item from 1984 that would have ended the world as we know it were it discovered prior to this year.
Rockets
We certainly don't want N. Korea to have our 1984-level rocketry capability, now do we?
Atomic Weapons
1984 atomic bombs are just as deadly ... why should we give Iran a leg-up?
Spies
Do we still have spies in place from the cold war? If it a long time to get them into place, you might as well leave them there for as long as possible.
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That said, 25 years is a long time for most things, and I believe the above have exceptions so that they wouldn't be released anyway. But maybe it's better to set a definite time period that's sufficient for most things than to make it too short.
That depends on your definition of interesting. There's lots of material that is still classified that would never make the evening news when it's released, but which would be of considerable interest to historians, economists, engineers, geeks, etc... etc...
Just because it doesn't cause a scandal doesn't mean it's not important or interesting.
Isn't it wrong when copyrighted material is protected longer than classified government secrets...
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