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."

How do they change over?

[PurifyYourMind]

"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.

Re:So ...

[yabos]

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 ...

[tomhudson]

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:So ...

[khallow]

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:UFOs

[Lord Kano]

I'm from Pittsburgh. I have heard secondhand stories about Kecksburg from my grandfather. He was a steelworker and some of his coworkers lived in Kecksburg.

SOMETHING definately crashlanded there, but I suspect that it may have been Soviet.

Either way, I'd like to find out for sure.

LK

How long until Google gets a copy?

[abb3w]

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

Funny, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

...unfortunately jokes like yours serve to undermine the effort of people who are attempting to get wrongly classified documents out in the open.

In the world view of far too many, to question anything the government says, or to demand answers of them, is sure proof of being a "conspiracy theory nutjob", unpatriotic, unAmerican, and probably a treasonous Commie.

A huge chunk of the population tell themselves - and others - that the government never lies, it covers nothing up, and has never misbehaved. They hope that everything is public except the things which shouldn't be for our own good. And to them, "hope" is the same as "believe", which itself is the same as "know".

There really are secret government conspiracies, and always have been, as anybody who has ever paid even the tiniest amount of interest in history will have discovered. The conspiracies may not all be of the world-shattering variety, and they aren't related to UFO coverups, and faces on Mars, but conspiracies by governments against their own citizens is a fact of life.

Making fun of those attempting to uncover the conspiracies just trivialises the issue and makes their job far more difficult than it already is.