|
2 items FYI US Reclassifies many documents
in secret review The White House moves not to edit but erase
archives already available to the public in a secret program By Scott Shane, NYT, Feb. 21, 2006 In a seven-year-old
secret program at the National Archives, intelligence agencies have been
removing from public access thousands of historical documents that were
available for years, including some already published by the State Department
and others photocopied years ago by private historians. The restoration of
classified status to more than 55,000 previously declassified pages began in
1999, when the Central Intelligence Agency and five other agencies objected to
what they saw as a hasty release of sensitive information after a 1995
declassification order signed by President Bill Clinton. It accelerated after
the Bush administration took office and especially after the 2001 terrorist
attacks, according to archives records. But because the
reclassification program is itself shrouded in secrecy - governed by a
still-classified memorandum that prohibits the National Archives even from
saying which agencies are involved - 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noticed that dozens of documents he had copied years ago had been withdrawn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. Under
existing guidelines, government documents are supposed to be declassified after
25 years unless there is particular reason to keep them secret. 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. One reclassified document in Mr. Aid's files, for instance, gives the
C.I.A.'s assessment on Oct. 12, 1950, that Chinese intervention in the Korean
War was "not probable in 1950." Just two weeks later, on Oct. 27,
some 300,000 Chinese troops crossed into Korea. Mr. Aid said he believed that because of the reclassification program,
some of the contents of his 22 file cabinets might technically place him in
violation of the Espionage Act, a circumstance that could be shared by scores
of other historians. But no effort has been made to retrieve copies of
reclassified documents, and it is not clear how they all could even be located. "It doesn't make sense to create a category of documents that are
classified but that everyone already has," said Meredith Fuchs, general
counsel of the National Security Archive, a research group at George Washington
University. "These documents were on open shelves for years." The
group plans to post Mr. Aid's reclassified documents and his account of the
secret program on its Web site, www.nsarchive.org, on Tuesday. The program's critics do not question the notion that wrongly
declassified material should be withdrawn. Mr. Aid said he had been dismayed to
see "scary" documents in open files at the National Archives,
including detailed instructions on the use of high explosives. But the historians say the program is
removing material that can do no conceivable harm to national security. They
say it is part
of a marked trend toward greater secrecy under the Bush administration, which
has increased the pace of classifying documents, slowed declassification and
discouraged the release of some material under the Freedom of Information Act. Experts on government secrecy believe the C.I.A. and other spy agencies,
not the White House, are the driving force behind the reclassification
program. "I think it's driven by the individual agencies, which
have bureaucratic sensitivities to protect," said Steven
Aftergood of the Federation
of American Scientists, editor
of the online weekly Secrecy News. "But
it was clearly encouraged by the administration's overall embrace of
secrecy." http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/21/politics/21reclassify.html The Life
and Death of Public Records
Buried in a 2004
law on terrorism is text that could bar public access to birth and death
certificates for up to 100 years. By Terry Allen,
In These Times, February 14, 2006
Sometimes it's the small abuses
scurrying below radar that reveal how profoundly the Bush administration has
changed In These Times has obtained a draft of the proposed regulations now
causing widespread concern among state officials. It reveals plans to create a
vast database of vital records to be centralized in The draft lays out how some 60,000
already strapped town and county offices must keep the birth and death records
under lock and key and report all document requests to Consider the public health
implications. A few years back, a doctor in a tiny Activists in Some of state officials around the country
are questioning whether the new regulations themselves illegally tread on
states' rights. But the feds have been coy. Richard McCoy, public health statistic chief in But while the public loses access
to records, the federal government gains a gargantuan national database easily
cross-referenced in the name of national security. The feds' claim that
increased security will deter identity theft and terrorism is facile. Wholesale
corporate data gathering is the major nexis of identity theft. As for
terrorism, all the 9/11 perpetrators had valid identification. Meanwhile, the quiet clampdown on
vital records is part of a growing consolidation of information at the federal
level. "That information will dovetail with the Real ID Act of 2005," says Marc Rotenberg of the Aside from public health and privacy
concerns, closing vital records incurs a steep intangible cost: It undermines
community in places where that healthy ethos still survives. In small town This may not be the most dramatic
danger to democracy, but it is one of the Bush administration's many quiet, incremental assaults on
the health of http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/2488/ |
_______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] http://fes.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
