Intel bonanza? If only!

At the stroke of midnight on December 31, 2006, hundreds of millions of secret U.S. government documents will be instantly declassified. Secret documents 25 years old or older will lose their classified status without so much as the stroke of a pen, unless agencies have sought exemptions on the ground that the material remains secret. ...

At the stroke of midnight on December 31, 2006, hundreds of millions of secret U.S. government documents will be instantly declassified.

Secret documents 25 years old or older will lose their classified status without so much as the stroke of a pen, unless agencies have sought exemptions on the ground that the material remains secret.

Historians say the deadline, created in the Clinton administration but enforced, to the surprise of some scholars, by the secrecy-prone Bush administration, has had huge effects on public access, despite the large numbers of intelligence documents that have been exempted.

And every year from now on, millions of additional documents will be automatically declassified as they reach the 25-year limit, reversing the traditional practice of releasing just what scholars request.

Theoretically, this is is great news. Imagine all the fascinating things we'll learn about the U.S. government!

But Dr. Bill Burr, Senior Analyst at George Washington University's National Security Archive project, told FP not to get our hopes up in the near term. Burr's organization does a great job of digging through declassified material and coming out with gems. They're also the ones who helped break the secret reclassification program at the National Archives earlier this year. Burr said it will probably take the resource-strapped National Archives years to sift through all the new material—we're talking millions and millions of pages of dry government prose here. So, although the declassification is a good thing, don't expect to learn the truth behind Area 51 just yet.

Carolyn O'Hara is a senior editor at Foreign Policy.

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