Friday, February 24, 2006

Give it back!

According to a recent article "Secret program reclassifies documents" :



"Researcher Matthew Aid has discovered a secret reclassification program that has moved thousands of declassified pages out of the National Archives and Records Administration's facility in Maryland. Some groups, such as George Washington University's Nation Security Archive, are fighting to end the program, arguing that the government has no right take back information it has published. The reclassification has been ongoing since 1999 as the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the Defense and Justice departments take back information they say had been inadvertently published. The National Security Archive describes some of the documents that have been reclassified as uninteresting and mundane."



And from The National Security Archive :



"Washington, D.C., February 21, 2006 - The CIA and other federal agencies have secretly reclassified over 55,000 pages of records taken from the open shelves at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), according to a report published today on the World Wide Web by the National Security Archive at George Washington University."



OSINT has greatly evolved from President Nixon's remark in respect to the CIA “What use are they? They’ve got over 40,000 people over there reading newspapers.”, whereas Secrecy is a major weakness to the national security of a country in a very complex way. I feel that sometimes, you need the average citizen's unbiased opinion on a major issue, but I guess I'm not into politics, just figuring out what is going on at the bottom line!



More on Secrecy, Intelligence, Misc :

Making Intelligence Accountable
Why Spy? The Uses and Misuses of Intelligence (1996)
Intelligence Analysis for Internet Security : Ideas, Barriers and Possibilities
U.S. Electronic Espionage : A Memoir
Terrorism prevention in Russia : one year after Beslan
Crypto Law Survey
Cryptome
Project on Government Secrecy
Shhh!!: Keeping Current on Government Secrecy



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