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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."
This is from: "THE NATIONAL DECLASSIFICATION CENTER Releasing All We Can, Protecting What We Must National Declassification Center Prioritization Plan" mmmk
Careful What You Wish For....
400m pages!!! = big win for PR.
So everything about JFK & Marylin Monroe deaths ?
If so, looks like Gary McKinnon has really, really bad timing.
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.
"...eliminating the backlog of more than 400 million pages of classified records..."
Sounds like a job for FIRE!
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
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.
All the 'really juicy' things that would jeopardize anyone are either:
A) Not going to be released anyway. Not ever.
or
B) Long since irrelevant.
Looking deeper into B, this would include anything that the enemy's own intelligence efforts would have obtained long, long ago. Troop movements are secure information, for example, up until the enemy can see them himself on the battlefield. Then, not so much. The 'collateral murder' videos? Not classifiable after the kids got out of the hospital. Etc, etc, etc.
Conspiracy theorists, start your engines! There's gonna be enough red herrings and other tidbits of fodder to keep them going until the next "great document declassification dump" comes along. Enjoy!
We'll finally learn what was going on at Area 51 and the true origins of Marvin The Martian.
But how much is this going to cost?
...removing all the juicy tidbits before releasing 400 million pages of meaningless filler.
Could be something as nice as when we set up the Soviets natural gas pipeline to blow by providing them sabotaged parts. Something that we couldn't really fess up to at the time, but now we parade it as one of the covert successes of the cold war.
Could be something as wrong as Iran-contra.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
Finally, you'll all see that there *were* aliens at Roswell. "Those Air Force bases were just testing secret aircraft and spy-gear," you said. "The military cover-ups were to keep the Soviets from finding out about our secret spying programs," you said. "It's no coincidence that all those UFO sightings just happened to be around secretive military bases at the height of the Cold War," you said. "Move out of my basement," my Mom said.
Now you'll all see, and you'll finally respect me for realizing that the most obvious explanation for strange lights around Air Forces bases and secretive military coverups during the Cold War-era was that we were being visited by aliens who had traveled across the vast distances of interstellar space to shove probes up our asses.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Agent A recruits Agent B recruits Agent C... Agent A retires and it is disclosed that he is an agent. Agent B had contact with Agent A and is therefore suspect and Agent C may be exposed by this. Similarly breaking Nazi encryption was kept secret because the mistakes allowing to be broken could be made with other ciphers and used to break them. 25 years is about the time after which we can assume the "bad guys" know anyway.
I wonder how many black magic markers that takes.
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.
------
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.
What's a hipocrate? A big box of short hippos?
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
See the caveat labeled 'A'.
The amount of documentation that the NDC considers of high public interest but difficult to declassify is 151,793 cubic feet of paper.
That is a cube 1/10 of a mile on each side. Accoring to a random estimate on the internet, a cubic foot of paper is approximately 9.24 reams of paper (500 sheets). So, 151,793 cubic feet of paper is about 700 million sheets.
That's a big twinkie.
I wouldn't mind being a doctor, although I'm sure I'd need to refresh myself on the latest technologies...
Don't feel bad about the long time between when the events occurred and when they become declassified. In Canada, things like invoices and reciepts from world war two are kept classified for 35 years. Operational histories of events are published after 45 years (troop movements, etc). Senior staff orders at the secret level are kept classified up to 65 years, and top secret stuff is kept for 85 years (if its kept at all). Secret length is directly proportional to how juicy the bits of tid are.
One only hopes these make it quickly and unedited into public archives, preferably where they can be searched.
(OK, notice how I avoided mentioning Google or Bing, but realistically those are probably the only venues that could carry the load).
Historical research would probably account for the major continuing use of these documents after the Conspiracy and Cover-up crowd get done digging dirt on their pet theories.
But yes, I agree, this will engender as many questions than it answers, as casual wording from 25 year old documents will inspire entire new conspiracy claims.
UFOs, and Spies and Graft, oh My!
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
I give fox news about a day, to come up with story that implies that this means that Obama is wreckless, hates America, etc...
surely with a headline as stupid as what I came up with
not until 2017:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_F._Kennedy_assassination#Sealing_of_assassination_records
and certain parts of the autopsy report X-rays and photos are in the National Archives under restricted access.
According to Conspiracy buffs the Bush and the Hunt family had something to do with the assassination:
http://www.tomflocco.com/fs/FbiMemoPhotoLinkBushJfk.htm
I'm just sayin'
Thanks to there being no term limits on Congress, there may be things in those documents about people who are still in office.
"Classify everything, let NDC sort it out"
Isn't it wrong when copyrighted material is protected longer than classified government secrets...
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Conspiracy theorists, start your engines!
Quite the contrary. Conspiracy theorists, run for the hills!
You're all going to look interminably foolish when it comes out you were borked by transparently simplistic CIA misinformation campaigns.
No, it's a single doctor, and therefore very rare in urban settings.
Can we get the ACTA declassified?
Blog posts, even the newspaper. Is anyone else bothered by the fragment, "records are reviewed in a timely and efficiently", from a government document that took ~six months to prepare?
"It's a doughnut stuffed with M&M's. That way when you finish the doughnut, you don't have to eat any M&M's."
Haven't we seen this all before? Didn't the same happen with Clinton? 2013, so if Obama doesn't get reelected then we get what happened the last time, the next administration blocks it from ever happening. If he does get reelected then the documents will be so blacked out that the only visible words we be less then informative or even relate-able to any context. In other words it's a red herring of red herrings.
Sorry, all the KGB blackmail porn was on Betamax tapes. The transcribed copies might still be in there somewhere.
http://english.pravda.ru/fun/2002/07/08/32009.html
In GOD we trust, all others we monitor.
These are old documents. Assuming they are black and white scans or original sources in simple text based formats, you're probably looking at less than 100TB of data. Any medium sized business could build out the infrastructure to search that.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
When you can tell me definitively who shot JFK.
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
That deserves a huge funny mod. I love the idea of the CIA being involved in a huge conspiracy theory to make conspiracy theorists look bad. And that the revelation of such a program is bad for the conspiracy theorists. Hilarious!
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
At least throw up a link or two (live).
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
I know everyone seems to be popping wood over the treasure trove of 'secrets' expected, but honestly: the point of Obama's efforts is that far, far too much material was going into 'classified' status that just wasn't justified. As I recall it had also been a stated goal of Bush II and Clinton, to reduce the amount of overclassification going on. Futher, this isn't some sort of swath of automatically-declassified docs, I think we can all be sure that this pile has been thoroughly sorted through and culled for anything that should, in fact, be justified in remaining classified.
This would suggest to me that the tremendous bulk of material being declassified isn't worth being classified, and thus no more interesting generally than someone's grocery list.
-Styopa
North Korea doesn't have the industrial capacity to manufacture your old rockets, even if they obtained full blueprints. Neither do you, for that matter.
Nuclear physics aren't secret. The hard part in building nuclear weapons is obtaining sufficiently pure uranium/plutonium, not assembling it into a bomb. And even if it was, do you really think that everyone who's worked on atomic weapons through the years on both sides of Atlantic/Pacific is incorruptible?
Also, since most conflict in Middle-East seems to be initiated and driven by Israel nowadays, it could well be that Iran having the bomb would pacify the region.
This one might actually be a legitimate concern, if simply because any local collaborators might not be hailed as heroes as their countries, and it would be poor thanks to risk exposing them.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
What I would like declassified is the Nov 1941 intercepts of the Japanese fleet. The United States had cracked the Japanese code early in 1941, and you can read transcripts of their radio messages up to July-August of 1941, then nothing. What could still be vital to national security that over 70 years later it is still classified?
Anyone remember the old SNL skit?
JFK and MM checked into their hotel room. She put on her glasses and began giving him political advice, both domestic and international - helping him run the country. He gave her career advice. Later they discussed how the "affair cover" wasn't going to last forever, and they'd have to think of a new way to exchange advice and information.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
These are old documents. Assuming they are black and white scans or original sources in simple text based formats, you're probably looking at less than 100TB of data. Any medium sized business could build out the infrastructure to search that.
Any medium sized business has better uses for its resources.
You have an interesting interpretation of my post.
Did I really have to explicitly state how it was accomplished?
Should I also have given a detailed explanation of Iran-contra while I was at?
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
Maybe not if they are any of the 2nd tier search companies trying to distinguish themselves. Or alternatively, why wouldn't google/bing have better uses for their resources as well? It's not like this fairly substantial investment is going to bring in a lot of ad revenue.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Speaking of declassified documents, I'm so surprised that the movie 'The Men who Stare at Goats' was actually based off something real. I'm curious as to what else the DoD does with its time.
They don't do it to make the conspiracy theorists look bad.
They use the conspiracy theorists to propagate the misinformation virally, because just posting "The CIA says Roswell was Flying Saucers" gives it no credibility at all, and in fact draws attention to the CIA's involvement, which gets non-conspiracy theorists thinking.
But the CIA also doesn't care about the conspiracy theorists, because they can always get more, so whether the conspiracy theorists end up looking bad or not doesn't enter into the design of the misinformation.