Snopes hilary gives nuclear time12/20/2023 ![]() Our secrets are getting lost, and lost forever.Ĭonsider the example of the State Department’s core Central Foreign Policy Files, the National Archives’ first large collection of electronic records. Mayer, executive for research services at the National Archives, said at a recent conference that the current volume of classified information “boggles the mind.” He described the last scene from the Steven Spielberg film “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” where a crate stamped “top secret” was lost among thousands of other crates in a cavernous warehouse. Today, that figure has stagnated at around 30 million, despite a huge increase in classified data. In the late 1990s more than 200 million pages of documents were being declassified each year. The Information Security Oversight Office, the government’s tiny watchdog agency, notes that of the estimated $11.6 billion spent in 2013 to keep information secure, only $99 million was spent on declassification, less than a third as much as 15 years ago. Both Democratic and Republican administrations have chosen to devote more resources to protecting state secrets than to preserving the historical record. “Big Data” is a big management challenge. Instead, there are just 41 archivists working in College Park, Md., to review records from across the entire federal government - one page at a time. The National Archives estimates that, without new technology to accelerate the process, that information would take two million employees a year to review for declassification. The bigger problem is that the government produces an astounding volume of email, much of it classified, and the public doesn’t get to see it unless archivists can preserve and process it.Īccording to the nonpartisan Public Interest Declassification Board, a single intelligence agency is producing a petabyte of classified data every 18 months, or the equivalent of 20 million four-drawer file cabinets. But the State Department’s Office of the Historian estimates that the department produces two billion emails a year.Įven if she had dutifully archived all her correspondence, future Americans still might not have learned much about the Arab Spring or Iran’s nuclear program. Clinton’s aides eventually turned over 55,000 pages of correspondence. The revelation on Monday that Hillary Rodham Clinton used only a personal email account when she was secretary of state and did not preserve her emails on departmental servers seems to reflect a troubling indifference to saving the history she was living. But how will history judge a generation of leaders who don’t preserve the historical record? Historians, after all, have the benefit of hindsight and archives full of once-secret files. HISTORY will be the judge: That’s the line leaders often use when making difficult decisions.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |