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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....
So everything about JFK & Marylin Monroe deaths ?
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."
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!
No worries, that's what they have Adobe for.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
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.
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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.
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...
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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?