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CIA Releases 13M Pages of Declassified Documents Online (bbc.com)
About 13 million pages of declassified documents from the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have been released online. The records include UFO sightings and psychic experiments from the Stargate programme, which has long been of interest to conspiracy theorists. From a report on BBC: The move came after lengthy efforts from freedom of information advocates and a lawsuit against the CIA. The full archive is made up of almost 800,000 files. They had previously only been accessible at the National Archives in Maryland. The trove includes the papers of Henry Kissinger, who served as secretary of state under presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, as well as several hundred thousand pages of intelligence analysis and science research and development.
...Your Tax Dollars At Work!
This oughta be FUN!!!
I knew it!
That's what this is. $58 billion a year we spend on intelligence. The vast majority of it a complete and total waste of money.
These released documents were indeed wasted time and money... which is obviously why they were releasable in the first place. We can only speculate on the value of documents which are still deemed to be classified.
'Programme' is not the correct spelling of the word. Learn to write.
It is in every English speaking country except America and Canada.
http://grammarist.com/spelling/program-programme/
That's where everybody else releases classified US docs, isn't it?
That's what this is. $58 billion a year we spend on intelligence. The vast majority of it a complete and total waste of money.
These released documents were indeed wasted time and money... which is obviously why they were releasable in the first place. We can only speculate on the value of documents which are still deemed to be classified.
An addendum: What might be more maddening to the conspiracy theorists, though, is that there are really no guarantees that the released documents are in full agreement with all of those classified and still unreleased intelligence documents... (evil grin)
The truth is out there...
Just a quick browse of the CREST archive shows a number of items that are historically intriguing, be it the Berlin tunnel, formulae for invisible ink, OPSEC tutorials for the old OSS, and other items.
The documentation about GITMO is also worth a look-see.
Definitely stuff worth looking at, and some of it might be something worth having in an American History class.
What is the Canadian spelling, then? I thought that Canada is just Britain in North America, except that their currency is a Canadian dollar rather than a Canadian pound
The CIA must be one of the most evil organisation you Americans have.
They are the private 'government overthrow agency' of big business.
Watch you back Trump, if you try to dismantle them.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/a...
46137
Their currency is the maple-shilling, and they are a constitutional moosearchy.
And it's fair because it's a BBC article being referenced. If it had been Stargate Program (proper noun), there would actually be some issue with a spelling change.
Release cryptographic signatures upon document creation ane keep classified documents secret. When declassified, check signature for tampering. Seems like this should be built into freedom of information act. At the very least we should know when a fraudulent document was created or modified.
Canadian pound
I think you mean Canadian Kilogram
This shower of new docs from the CIA is pure gold. A true golden shower of docs from the intelligence community, one might say. ;-)
I wonder if we'll find any docs as good as the ones that have shown up in the FBI vault recently?
A lot of companies have a couple people that do something of value, and 1000 boondoggle projects and worthless executives to go with them.
They, at least, sometimes go out of business, and have therefore some incentive to improve toward marginal efficiency and rational resource allocation.
"Intelligence agencies" have neither. And the results of this are becoming manifestly obvious. Not sure what your point is, but let's draw a real-world example. For the cost of the Iraq war, we could have provided every man, worman, and child in that country with a college education, labeled "goodwill of the United States". Which choice of financial expenditure do you think would have left us with better relations with the Islamic world? And the fact we didn't make that choice, lies squarely with the "OMGWMD" agencies. There were no enhanced salaries and ever-growing bureaucracies on offer for Option #1, so, of course, that didn't happen.
If you think there aren't better, vastly more straightforward ways to influence countries and work toward peace with 70 billion dollars that don't involve massive payoffs to the military-industrial complex and killing people nearly at random, you seem just about unimaginative enough to apply to a three-letter-agency yourself.
This is nice, except for docs that have parts redacted. They could sign chunks of the doc, but what chunk size? And if too small, it could be possible to determine the contents of the chunk based on other sigs (maybe).
Regardless, that's not a bad idea, even if it's just used for pulling out the originals and verifying before redacting, and it'd still be good for docs that don't have anything redacted.
It's always like that: '13 million pages released' . To place this in context you need some percentages, numbers to compare with, statistics. What's the yearly release rate, what's the yearly classifying rate. And with respects to levels of secrecy, because if it's always low level secrecy that's being released then you're not doing much either.
"Programme" is the old English spelling, while "Program" is the modern English spelling. This proves that the CIA has been experimenting with time travel and space travel at Area Bacardi 151, and employs agents from Old England. The space travel gadget is so powerful that the Old English CIA agents recently voted and were able to move the entire island of England out of Europe! Rumors have it, that in two years time, the technology (unencumbered by those meddling Boys in Brussels) will be so advanced that they will vote to leave the planet Earth entirely!
This was recently announced by Old England's Prime Minister May (who nobody voted for an was selected by Russian Hackers), who said that Old England was going to "go away globally." This announcement caused some consternation in Indian workers, who when they misheard, "Old England has long global traditions", to mean that Old England was going to conquer third world countries and turn them into colonies to rebuild the Empire . . .
. . . and Strike Back!
Americans need not be worried, however. Old England policemen, called "Bobbies", although very few of them are actually named Bob, don't carry weapons. And neither do their soldiers. Except the SAS men, whole ALWAYS carry their knives with them, all the time. When they shower, they hold it between their butt-cheeks. Americans are armed to their teeth, and their major pastime is shooting holes in each other.
On the other hand, if you ask a Bobby for directions, he or she will smile and point you in the right direction. American police folks will cut you to pieces with a fully automatic Heckler & Koch MP5, and then run you over with a BearCat.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
This wouldn't work, as by nature of declassifying a document the document itself is changed. That "Declassified" marker wasn't on the original document, after all.
Also, what is the point of this? It doesn't solve a problem. If the agency wanted to create fake documents or tamper with them, they could just as easily create fake cryptographic signatures to match. As these signatures would necessarily come from the same organization creating the documents, this has as much use as asking the used car salesman to, "double-pinky-swear that this is the lowest price he'll go, promise!"
The proper Canadian spelling is "Program-ay".
/ducks
Re "We can only speculate on the value of documents which are still deemed to be classified."
The deep thinking around the Bay of Pigs?
The full extent of Operation Paperclip? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
I'm glad they released all this material, because *this* is chock-full of useful info....
https://www.cia.gov/library/re...
This sig contains repetition and redundancy.
You missed the timing - release the signatures *immediately*, while the documents are still classified. Then, when declassifying the documents, the veracity of the document can be confirmed. Assuming of course that the signature algorithm was sufficiently secure that the agency couldn't create false matches. Though even if they could, there would probably be some suspicious anomalies in the resulting document as it was tweaked to match the original signature.
Of course, if they created the frauds immediately you would be absolutely correct, but in that case there's little point in them keeping the records at all.
But assuming they created the original signatures in good faith, they would prevent undetected tampering between that moment and the eventual declassification. Even if there were redacted portions, at least individuals with clearance to view the originals would be able to verify they weren't tampered with.
As for the "Declassified" stamp, I'm sure some method could be found to include that in a "wrapper" around the original file, or as an easily reversed insertion.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
It's likely the entire StarGate/Remote Viewing program was a cover for NRO real Remote Viewing from space and other projects. Tell them we use ESP instead of solid science, engineering and technology.
In GOD we trust, all others we monitor.
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What does "immediately" mean? When the FOIA request is received? When the document is created? In either case, the only people who know when the document becomes available are also able to create a fake or modified version and create a signature for it.
American police folks will cut you to pieces with a fully automatic Heckler & Koch MP5
A practice referred to as 'heckling'.
The time and money wasted preparing all of this and putting it out on the web is still less than the time and money wasted responding to thousands of FOIA requests and lawsuits from those same conspiracy theorists.
In the end, they probably save a lot of money doing this just to get rid of the FIOA hassle.
That assumes that the conspiracy theorists are actually going to back off. If instead we anticipate that the conspiracy theorists might not be persuaded by this mass document release, and instead they choose to view the entire release as part of the conspiracy, (as I alluded in my addendum) then we should expect the FOIA requests and lawsuits to continue unabated.
In other words... your conclusion relies upon people to actually be reasonable. My (admittedly snarky) conclusion assumes the opposite. The reality is probably somewhere in the middle.
Wrong. You don't mix Roman and Arabic numerals like that. 13M, when written in an English text, is 13 million.
They would politely conquer you and destroy your worlds all while apologizing profusely?
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
suite of Armour.
Is that the suite where you store the suits of armor?
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
http://www.accountingcoach.com...
I always wondered why accountants were weird, now we know.
However, everywhere else I have seen m, it means millions (or meters...).
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
When the document is created / filed. Yes, you could create a fake document at that time, but if you're in a position to do that, then you're probably in a position to simply make the file disappear instead. Which you would actually have to do anyway to hide your fakery, or there would be both a real and fake version sitting in the files. (I am of course assuming any such tampering would be done by corrupt individuals or subsets of the agency, rather than being accepted policy agency-wide)
The signature would then protect against anyone silently tampering with the document between the time it was filed and its eventual release.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.