From today's NY Times, it seems folks have caught on to the fact that huge swathes of previously declassified materials are being re-classified by the intelligence agencies:
U.S. Reclassifies Many Documents in Secret Review
... it continued virtually without outside notice until December. That was when an intelligence historian, Matthew M. Aid, noticed that dozens of documents he had copied years ago had been withdrawn from the archives' open shelves.
Mr. Aid was struck by what seemed to him the innocuous contents of the documents — mostly decades-old State Department reports from the Korean War and the early cold war. He found that eight reclassified documents had been previously published in the State Department's history series, "Foreign Relations of the United States."
"The stuff they pulled should never have been removed," he said. "Some of it is mundane, and some of it is outright ridiculous."
After Mr. Aid and other historians complained, the archives' Information Security Oversight Office, which oversees government classification, began an audit of the reclassification program, said J. William Leonard, director of the office.
Mr. Leonard said he ordered the audit after reviewing 16 withdrawn documents and concluding that none should be secret.
"If those sample records were removed because somebody thought they were classified, I'm shocked and disappointed," Mr. Leonard said in an interview. "It just boggles the mind."
Why is everyone so surprised? Are they surprised that this administration and this current intelligence community would do this? Or are they surprised that they themselves only just noticed after several years of this nonsense? A point made later in the article struck me:
While some of the choices made by the security reviewers at the archives are baffling, others seem guided by an old bureaucratic reflex: to cover up embarrassments, even if they occurred a half-century ago.
When in doubt, whitewash? Very disturbing. The
referenced article from
The National Security Archive by Aid and others is interesting.
