Watching the Curtain Drop on Secret Docs

If you plan on watching New Year's Eve celebration in Times Square on TV, you will be watching an immensely cool Rube Goldberg machine -- since once the apple falls to the ground a curtain of secrecy will be lifted in Washington D.C., according to the New York Times's Scott Shane. With some major exceptions, all documents over the age of 25 -- think Hoover-era files on domestic dissidents or Carter-era papers on the Iran hostage situation -- lose their secret status and become public record.

Secret documents at least 25 years old will lose their classified status, without so much as the stroke of a pen, unless agencies have sought exemptions on the grounds that the material remains sensitive.

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 only what scholars request.

Full story.

As Noah points out, kudos are due to the Bush Administration for enforcing the deadline first set by the Clinton Administration. It's a surprising move for an administration which prizes secrecy and which could have easily punted the deadline until after the 2008 presidential elections. UPDATE: See this list at Talking Points Memo's Muckraker for a growing tally of Bush Administration secrecy moves.

But Stephen Aftergood, who heads the Federation of American Scientist's Secrecy Project and knows more about government classification policies than probably anyone else outside of government, digs into the details and finds that "the impact of the policy may not be as dramatic as one might imagine."

Photo: The Lost Wanderer