Teh One Who Knocks
01-19-2017, 12:40 PM
By Liat Clark - Wired
http://i.imgur.com/BsijaRb.jpg
The CIA has dumped 13 million pages of declassified documents online to make them easier to find - and you can peruse them all here (https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/collection/crest-25-year-program-archive).
The mass file dump is the result of a long-running push by freedom of information activists demanding the release of documentation that is no longer classified. The collection should make for fascinating reading, with scientific research, policy files, senior correspondence and yes, UFO sightings and psychic experiments conducted under the ‘Stargate’ programme, ranging from the 1940s up to the 1990s. The BBC has pulled out reports made in the 1970s into Uri Geller's apparent psychic abilities.
Since 2000, the CIA has been operating a searchable database, known as Crest, from the National Archives in Maryland. It was populated with records that were each manually reviewed by staff, who checked to see if they fell under the terms of the “25-year program”, a policy implemented by former President Bill Clinton who said documents should be made public if they were of “historical value”. Following that bulk drop, and since, the CIA says researchers have printed 1.1 million pages. However, it was necessary to physically go to the National Archives in the US to access files.
Now, the agency has asserted on its site: “The CIA recognised that such visits were inconvenient and presented an obstacle to many researchers. Therefore, in January 2017, the CIA published the records of the Crest collection online.”
What the CIA fails to mention on its website is the battle nonprofit MuckRock has been waging to force the agency to make the whole database publicly available, and soon. As a result of that freedom of information lawsuit, every file has finally been made accessible.
Crest has organised the millions of pages into “collections”, with names like “General CIA Records” and “Berlin Tunnel” - the short-lived tunnel the CIA and British Intelligence services dug to carry intelligence between East and West Berlin during the Cold War. The “Secret Writing” and “STARGATE” collections will likely get more hits.
The files are not all that easy to read, though, being scanned copies of the originals. There are also clumsy tools in the advanced search that don’t help - rather than being able to select the dates you would like to search between, there is an option to manually type in a date and then select one of seven options in a drop down menu including “is it greater than or equal to”, and other such irritating questions.
“We’ve been working on this for a very long time and this is one of the things I wanted to make sure got done before I left,” departing director of information management at the CIA, Joseph Lambert, told Buzzfeed. “Now you can access it from the comfort of your own home.”
Happy reading.
http://i.imgur.com/BsijaRb.jpg
The CIA has dumped 13 million pages of declassified documents online to make them easier to find - and you can peruse them all here (https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/collection/crest-25-year-program-archive).
The mass file dump is the result of a long-running push by freedom of information activists demanding the release of documentation that is no longer classified. The collection should make for fascinating reading, with scientific research, policy files, senior correspondence and yes, UFO sightings and psychic experiments conducted under the ‘Stargate’ programme, ranging from the 1940s up to the 1990s. The BBC has pulled out reports made in the 1970s into Uri Geller's apparent psychic abilities.
Since 2000, the CIA has been operating a searchable database, known as Crest, from the National Archives in Maryland. It was populated with records that were each manually reviewed by staff, who checked to see if they fell under the terms of the “25-year program”, a policy implemented by former President Bill Clinton who said documents should be made public if they were of “historical value”. Following that bulk drop, and since, the CIA says researchers have printed 1.1 million pages. However, it was necessary to physically go to the National Archives in the US to access files.
Now, the agency has asserted on its site: “The CIA recognised that such visits were inconvenient and presented an obstacle to many researchers. Therefore, in January 2017, the CIA published the records of the Crest collection online.”
What the CIA fails to mention on its website is the battle nonprofit MuckRock has been waging to force the agency to make the whole database publicly available, and soon. As a result of that freedom of information lawsuit, every file has finally been made accessible.
Crest has organised the millions of pages into “collections”, with names like “General CIA Records” and “Berlin Tunnel” - the short-lived tunnel the CIA and British Intelligence services dug to carry intelligence between East and West Berlin during the Cold War. The “Secret Writing” and “STARGATE” collections will likely get more hits.
The files are not all that easy to read, though, being scanned copies of the originals. There are also clumsy tools in the advanced search that don’t help - rather than being able to select the dates you would like to search between, there is an option to manually type in a date and then select one of seven options in a drop down menu including “is it greater than or equal to”, and other such irritating questions.
“We’ve been working on this for a very long time and this is one of the things I wanted to make sure got done before I left,” departing director of information management at the CIA, Joseph Lambert, told Buzzfeed. “Now you can access it from the comfort of your own home.”
Happy reading.