This is a rehash of a thread I posted in 2001. (See it here.) Since so much time has passed, I figured it might be fun to try it again.
There was once a **60 Minutes ** piece that featured New York State US Senator Patrick Moynahan who was a great proponent of transparency in government. He was disgusted by the government’s habit of classifying information at the drop of a hat in the name of “national security.” The reporter asked him the date of the oldest piece of secret information in the government’s files. He said it went back to the WWI era!
I was wondering what that piece of information was and if it has since been declassified (many theories were suggested in the replies to my original thread). If it has, what is the current record-holder. Anyone know?
Loose lips help the terrorists! If we talk about our top secret zepplin force, we are only giving aid and comfort to the enemy. But the Liberal media only cares about making bush look bad, and doesn’t care how many of our brave zepplin crews die!
If it goes back to WWI, it probably has somethiing to do with that. The only reason it’s still top secret most likely is that it involved some unseemly thing the U.S. did.
Legally, most of our information should now be ten years old or less. We converted, starting in 1995, to a system called “derivative classification markings” to comply with Executive Order 12958.
There are exceptions X1-X8 (see link) which mean you can keep something classified for longer, but those documents have to also be reviewed for declassification pretty frequently. X1 is “sources and methods” for example - if there’s a source who’s been spying for 10 years and his first reports would give away his location or how we got him into place then assuming we still use that source or method it would remain classified until the method was obsolete. For human intelligence that might be indefinite.
I bet there are some things relating to the treaties signed at the end of WWI that we don’t talk about. With so many foreign dignitaries in our country for the UN, I can’t imagine we don’t conduct some sort of collection activity, and to admit that perhaps some of the janitors there aren’t really janitors would be a faux pas. So we probably hold those documents pretty close.
My guess is, if you went to the archivists maintaining some of this ancient classified information and asked, “Why can’t we see these files from World War 1,” they’d tell you, “Look, there’s probably nothing earth-shattering in them. It would probably be perfectly safe and harmless to release everything. But that’s not standard procedure. Standard procedure is, a librarian/historian/archivist has to go through each file individually and de-classify each file one at a time. And frankly, we don’t have a fraction of the money or manpower it would take to do that!”
The problem is the sheer VOLUME of classified information. There are so MANY documents that it would take an army of archivists a decade to declassify everything that’s been marked as classified.
It was probably something like the identity of an agent or informant. Intelligence agencies like to keep the identities of their people secret, even long after they’re no longer active, because they worry that rival agencies will be able to use this information to identify current people. Informants are often recruited in a chain; you get information from the first person about the second person, use this information to recruit the second person, get information about a third person and add another link, etc. So by knowing the first person in the chain, you can often guess who the later people are.
From mental dead storage, no other cite: I recall a news story from the Carter Administration about a massive review of classified documents. The oldest one the DoD kept secret dated from the 1930’s and dealt with defense plans for the Panama Canal.
At some point, doesn’t the cost of maintaining boxes of not-really-but-marked-classified documents outweight the cost of declassification? I assume that most old “secrets” are kept non-electronically, which means they take up a lot of physical space.
I mean, whole libraries are being indexed electronically and books being scanned to PDF’s … surely the government can find a few billion dollars in its heart to clean up the Archives of Secrecy.
