Secrets to Be Declassified Under New Rule at Age 25

[spindrifter]

By SCOTT SHANE
Published: December 21, 2006

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 government’s 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.

<more>

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/21/washington/21declassify.html?hp&ex=1166677200&en=01b3bc0cee9767ae&ei=5094&partner=homepage

[babylonsister]

1. There must be scholars and historians salivating at the possibilities.

This makes me wonder what this admin has been accused of moving or shredding so prolifically the past few years.

[MADem]

2. Jeez, when will we get to see all the good Kennedy stuff?

And I'm wondering about the stuff above secret, the TS/NOFORN goodies??? We'll probably get a few astounding nuggets of news at this go-round, and then, they'll get better at exempting all the good stuff in future:

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

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

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

What surprises await in the documents is impossible to predict.

“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.

[northofdenali]

3. Some of the "classified" material is really, really odd........

"The FBI agreed Tuesday to make public the final 10 documents about the surveillance of John Lennon that it had withheld for 25 years from a UC Irvine historian on the grounds that releasing them could cause "military retaliation against the United States."

Despite the fierce battle the government waged to keep the documents secret, the files contain information that is hardly shocking, just new details about Lennon's ties to New Left leaders and antiwar groups in London in the early 1970s, said the historian, Jon Wiener.

For example, in one memo, then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover wrote to H.R. Haldeman, President Nixon's chief of staff, that "Lennon had taken an interest in 'extreme left-wing activities in Britain' and is known to be a sympathizer of Trotskyist communists in England."

Another document had been blacked out on the grounds of national security when Wiener obtained it more than 20 years ago through litigation brought under the Freedom of Information Act. It is now known that it said two prominent British leftists, Tariq Ali and Robin Blackburn, had courted Lennon in hopes that he would "finance a left-wing bookshop and reading room in London."


http://www.latimes.com/search/dispatcher.front?Query=John+Lennon&target=blendedsearch&first-page-size=5

Wow. John, we never knew!!

[eppur_se_muova]

4. "left-wing bookshop and reading room" ... oh the horror !

What are these paranoid lunatics so afraid of ? People sitting and reading ... and THINKING for themselves ?!?

[Orsino]

5. The * crime family will never give up its secrets.

Never.

[rman]

6. Including certain papers related to the JFK assassination,

for which at the time even 30 or 40 years of secrecy was deemed to short?