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."

So ...

[tomhudson (43916)]

Do we finally find out who killed JFK?

Re:So ...

[prelelat (201821)]

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:

[tomhudson (43916)]

I wonder if someone could run for president on a single promise - release ALL the info on the JFK killing ... or how long they'd survive before an "accident", or a "deranged gunman" took them out ...

Re:

[khallow (566160)]

Answer, no way. That's a really lame single issue. Besides Clinton pretty much did this as part of his policy of more openness in government. And he didn't have an accident or get assassinated.

Re:So ...

[rifter (147452)]

Answer, no way. That's a really lame single issue. Besides Clinton pretty much did this as part of his policy of more openness in government. And he didn't have an accident or get assassinated.

Why assassinate the man when you can assassinate his character?

Re:

[ScrewMaster (602015)]

Yes. It was Microsoft Bob.

Hey! That's just as reasonable as most of the other "theories" that have been propounded in the decades since.

Re:

[tomhudson (43916)]

No, Microsoft Bob was like herpes.

1. Nobody would admit to having it
2. It seriously damaged your reputation
3. People shunned you
4. There is no "cure", only treatment.

Re:

[yabos (719499)]

Most of the possibly interesting documents are always censored when they're declassified. Various UFO documents are mostly blacked out and so are useless.

Re:So ...

[by 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.

nothing to see here...

[thelost (808451)]

move along. Oh the irony. Anyhow, while this may be good news correct me if I'm wrong but US government has made headway reclassifying previously unclassified documents, as reported for instance here [nytimes.com]. I don't really know the ins and outs, but isn't it kind of one hand giving while the other takes away?

Give and take

[MikeRT (947531)]

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 (468275)]

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 (208100)]

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 (947445)]

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.

How do they change over?

[PurifyYourMind (776223)]

"Secret documents 25 years old or older will lose their classified status without so much as the stroke of a pen"

I'm curious as to how they switch the documents over. 25 years ago it's not like everything was computerized. Are they having people manually sort through classified docs in an "old documents" area, looking and the date, and moving them? I doubt they'd just let historians in to do the sorting.

Don't be silly

[symbolset (646467)]

When a document is classified, that doesn't mean it's pressed on thick orange cardboard with brown ink to prevent photocopying. The government has millions of classified documents and some of the most wonderful document scanners you've ever seen. The original documents were all probably scanned and archived long ago. If they want to, they can release the documents on DVD.

It seems likely they won't want to.

I imagine google will do a nice index and we'll know why Kennedy had the CIA assassinate the guy who invented the 100MPG on tapwater carbeurator shortly.

NISPOM tells us

[DragonHawk (21256)]

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.

Re:NISPOM tells us

[theLOUDroom (556455)]

If somebody in a government position is doing something illegal, they probably just won't tell anybody about it.

That statement is based on the ridiculously flawed assumption that these actions involve only a single person.

If you want to do something like assasinate a foreign head of state are you going to hop a plane and try to do it yourself, or are you going to collect the right people and develop a plan?

Watergate would be a great example of how totally full of shit this statement is.
The NSA wiretapping program would be another.

The whole point of doing illegal things in government is that you have the resources of the gov't at your disposal. To take advantage of this you need to communicate with your underlings and co-conspirators.
How is the NSA going to set up an illegal wiretapping program if you don't tell them to? How are they going to keep it secret without piles of secret money?

Biggest Personal Bombshell:

[mr_luc (413048)]

It turns out, I wasn't born in Creston Iowa to Matt and Barbara at all. I was created as part of a series of a domestic experiments with in-vitro fertilization, and ... and my father ...

My father is Margaret Thatcher. /me sits on ground and cries.

Yeah right!

[ratzmilk (137380)]

There is not a government on the planet that is ever going to tell it's people all their dirty little secrets.

And they don't keep stuff buried for national security, or to protect the innocent, or what ever other reason you may think. The one and only reason any government keeps secrets from it's people is because if they were to get out, they would be lynched.

They are only ever going to release the shit that doesn't matter.

Besides, the most foul things perpetrated by governments usually start with "Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest?", or words to that effect.

Where?

[by Anonymous Coward]

So, where the hell can we find these documents?

Re:Where?

[AlXtreme (223728)]

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

How long until Google gets a copy?

[abb3w (696381)]

It seems something like this would fit in well with their "Google Books" virtual library.

Re:Is this new?

[swordgeek (112599)]

If you read the article, you'd find that this is the first time. Clinton enacted a law, and Bush (!) has enforced it. From here on in, it will happen every year, but this is the first.

Re:

[OriginalArlen (726444)]

A similar process happens here in the UK every year [bbc.co.uk]. (That article's from 2001, but it's still current info.) There are various documents that are classified for 30, 50 or 100 years. Eventually everything gets turned over to historians, in theory at least. It'll be interesting to see how the digital age will affect this process in 25 years' time...