[Infowarrior] - U.S. to Declassify Secrets at Age 25

[Richard Forno]

December 21, 2006
U.S. to Declassify Secrets at Age 25
By SCOTT SHANE
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/21/washington/21declassify.html?ei=5094&en=28
0ee006d9c2e17d&hp=&ex=1166763600&partner=homepage&pagewanted=print

WASHINGTON, Dec. 20 ‹ It will be a Cinderella moment for the band of
researchers who study the hidden history of American government.

At midnight on Dec. 31, hundreds of millions of pages of secret documents
will be instantly declassified, including many F.B.I. cold war files on
investigations of people suspected of being Communist sympathizers. After
years of extensions sought by federal agencies behaving like college
students facing a term paper, the end of 2006 means the government¹s first
automatic declassification of records.

Secret documents 25 years old or older will lose their classified status
without so much as the stroke of a pen, unless agencies have sought
exemptions on the ground that the material remains secret.

Historians say the deadline, created in the Clinton administration but
enforced, to the surprise of some scholars, by the secrecy-prone Bush
administration, has had huge effects on public access, despite the large
numbers of intelligence documents that have been exempted.

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.

Many historians had expected President Bush to scrap the deadline. His
administration has overseen the reclassification of many historical files
and restricted access to presidential papers of past administrations, as
well as contemporary records.

Practical considerations, including a growing backlog of records at the
National Archives, mean that it could take months before the declassified
papers are ready for researchers.

³Deadlines clarify the mind,² said Thomas S. Blanton, director of the
private National Security Archive at George Washington University, which
obtains and publishes historical government documents.

Despite what he called a disappointing volume of exemptions, Mr. Blanton
said automatic declassification had ³given advocates of freedom of
information a real lever.²

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.

J. William Leonard, who oversees declassification as head of the Information
Security Oversight Office at the National Archives, said the threat that
secret files might be made public without a security review had sent a
useful chill through the bureaucracy.

³Unfortunately, you sometimes need a two-by-four to get agencies to pay
attention,² Mr. Leonard said. ³Automatic declassification was essentially
that two-by-four.²

What surprises await in the documents is impossible to predict.

³It is going to take a generation for scholars to go through the material
declassified under this process,² said Steven Aftergood, who runs a project
on government secrecy for the Federation of American Scientists.

³It represents the classified history of a momentous period, the cold war,²
Mr. Aftergood said. ³Almost every current headline has an echo in the
declassified past, whether it¹s coping with nuclear weapons, understanding
the Middle East or dictatorship and democracy in Latin America.²

Anna K. Nelson, a historian at American University, said she hoped that the
files would shed light on the Central Intelligence Agency role in Iran and
deepen the documentation of the Jimmy Carter years, in particular the Camp
David accords.

³Americans need to know this history, and the history is in those
documents,² Ms. Nelson said.

She said the National Archives staff was buried in a 400-million-page
backlog that awaits processing and is not publicly available.

Also, a budget shortfall has cut back on evening and weekend access to the
major research center of the archives, in College Park, Md.

³They can declassify the records, but the archives don¹t have the staff to
handle them,² Ms. Nelson said.

The first deadline was imposed in an executive order that President Bill
Clinton signed in 1995, when officials realized that taxpayers were paying
billions of dollars to protect a mountain of cold war documents.

The order gave agencies five years to declassify documents or show the need
for continued secrecy.

When agencies protested that they could not meet the 2000 deadline, it was
extended to 2003. Mr. Bush then granted another three-year extension, but
put out the word that it was the last one, despite the new emphasis on
security after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and a new war in Iraq.

³The Bush administration could have said, ŒThis is a Clinton thing,¹ and
abandoned it,² Mr. Aftergood, said. ³To their credit, they did not.²

As an enforceable deadline loomed, the intelligence agencies that produce
most secret material add workers to plow through files from World War II.

The C.I.A. has reviewed more than 100 million pages, released 30 million
pages and created a database of documents, Crest, that is accessible from
terminals at the National Archives. Although most of the documents are
exempt, they can be requested under the Freedom of Information Act.

The National Security Agency, the eavesdropping and code-breaking agency,
has released 35 million pages, including an extensive collection on the Gulf
of Tonkin incident that led to the escalation of the Vietnam War. The agency
plans a major release early next year on the Israeli attack on the Liberty,
an American eavesdropping ship, in 1967.

The F.B.I., by contrast, negotiated an exemption from the 1995 executive
order and concluded last year that the 2003 executive order ended its
special status. It has rushed to review material, seeking exemption for 50
million pages on intelligence, counterintelligence and terrorism, but
leaving 270 million pages to be automatically declassified now.

Among those files, said David M. Hardy, the bureau declassification chief,
are those on investigations of Americans with suspected ties to the
Communist Party. Reviewers will keep working on the exempt material to see
what can be released, but it is a slow process, Mr. Hardy said.

³The numbers of documents are staggering,² Mr. Hardy said.

The bureau is studying digitizing documents and using computers to search
for classified material. Some experts say mass declassification is not the
smartest approach. L. Britt Snider, a former intelligence official who heads
the Public Interest Declassification Board, which advises the White House,
said most government records, even top-secret ones, were pretty boring.

³Rather than take this blunderbuss approach,² Mr. Snider said, ³I¹d like to
see the agencies concentrate first on what¹s interesting and what¹s
important.²