The Daily Background
| Hundreds of millions of classified documents to become public on Jan 1
by Arlen Parsa
The Times has a fascinating article today about a massive declassification process which will occur at midnight on December 31st. Apparently back in 1995, President Clinton ordered that all classified documents 25 years old or older be declassified en mass by 2000. This deadline later got extended to January 1, 2007. So, just after midnight, every single classified document from the CIA, FBI, and other agencies will be declassified. Well, almost.
The agencies are still allowed to request exemptions from the declassification order, and apparently they’re taking advantage of this ability- liberally. Still, hundreds of millions of documents will be released to the public, at the National Archives in Washington DC at the very end of this year. The NYT reports:
And every year from now on, millions of additional documents will be automatically declassified as they reach the 25-year limit, reversing the traditional practice of releasing just what scholars request.
[…]
Gearing up to review aging records to meet the deadline, agencies have declassified more than one billion pages, shedding light on the Cuban missile crisis, the Vietnam War and the network of Soviet agents in the American government.Several hundred million pages will be declassified at midnight on Dec. 31, including 270 million pages at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which has lagged most agencies in reviews.
The sheer volume of documents and materials that had been kept secret for a quarter of a century are overwhelming the staff, but the CIA has already created an electronic database of sorts to account for fraction of its declassified documents. Unfortunately, the database is only accessible from within the National Archives building, and probably wouldn’t have actual document scans anyways- just a database that you could search through. Still, it sounds pretty cool, and I’d love to visit, if only to find some stuff to add to our fledgling document archive, though that’s more recent stuff naturally.
