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Article: Open secrets: classification overkill.(United States. National Archives and Records Administration)
- Article from:
- Reason
- Article date:
- August 1, 2006
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2006 Reason Foundation. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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LAST DECEMBER an intelligence historian named Matthew Aid was doing research at the National Archives when he noticed that documents he had copied years before, including State Department reports from the Korean War era, had mysteriously vanished. Other historians had observed the same phenomenon: Innocuous material they had in their own files had been reclassified and withdrawn from public access.
In response to complaints from Aid and others, the National Archives conducted an audit of more than 25,000 publicly available documents that had been reclassified since 1995 by agencies such as the CIA, the Air Force, and the Energy Department. According to the ...