Declassification in Reverse

The National Security Archive issued a report today on a secret document reclassification program the US intelligence community has been carrying out over the last seven years. According to the report, "some 9,500 formerly declassified and publicly-available documents totaling more than 55,500 pages have been withdrawn from the open shelves at College Park and reclassified because, according to the U.S. government agencies, they had been improperly and/or inadvertently released."

No one wants government documents which contain up-to-date technical information about weapons programs to fall into the wrong hands, but it is hard to imagine how some of these historical documents - many of which are from the 1940's and 1950's - could possibly aid terrorists, or otherwise endanger national security. Pictured below is an excerpt of one of the examples given by the National Security Archive, "Memorandum, Hillenkoetter to Executive Secretary, NSC, Atomic Energy Program of the USSR, April 20, 1949." In the memo, a CIA officer recommends procedures for carrying out intelligence-gathering operations on the Soviet Union's atomic weapons programs.



Report: "Declassification in Reverse: The Pentagon and the U.S. Intelligence Community's Secret Historical Document Reclassification Program" [National Security Archive]