Freedom from Information Act
Historical Records at the National Archives.
Worried that sensitive information may have been improperly declassified in the late 1990s, government agencies took to scrubbing public records at the National Archives and elsewhere, pulling untold thousands of public records for "review" and possible reclassification.
Many 30- or 50-year-old archival collections are a shadow of what they were just a few years ago.
On a recent visit to the National Archives, American University historian Anna Nelson recalled, "I found four boxes of Nixon documents full of nothing but withdrawal cards," signifying records that had been removed. In another collection of Johnson records concerning the 1965 intervention in the Dominican Republic, "I found a box of 55 withdrawal cards."
Not all archive withdrawals are unwarranted. For instance, documents containing classified nuclear-weapons design information were discovered in otherwise declassified records collections, as this recent DOE report on inadvertent disclosures indicates. But the scope of current withdrawals goes beyond what's necessary and poses arbitrary obstacles to historical research.
from Slate.com
Worried that sensitive information may have been improperly declassified in the late 1990s, government agencies took to scrubbing public records at the National Archives and elsewhere, pulling untold thousands of public records for "review" and possible reclassification.
Many 30- or 50-year-old archival collections are a shadow of what they were just a few years ago.
On a recent visit to the National Archives, American University historian Anna Nelson recalled, "I found four boxes of Nixon documents full of nothing but withdrawal cards," signifying records that had been removed. In another collection of Johnson records concerning the 1965 intervention in the Dominican Republic, "I found a box of 55 withdrawal cards."
Not all archive withdrawals are unwarranted. For instance, documents containing classified nuclear-weapons design information were discovered in otherwise declassified records collections, as this recent DOE report on inadvertent disclosures indicates. But the scope of current withdrawals goes beyond what's necessary and poses arbitrary obstacles to historical research.
from Slate.com
posted by Matthew at 12:26 PM
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