perfidy

As the clock tolls the end of the year, after five years of delays, millions of pages of secret, top secret and otherwise classified documents will become unclassified, unsecret and un-top secret.

But in theory if not in immediate practice, what was set in motion by the Clinton administration in 1995 is coming to fruition. Executive Order 12958 declared that in 2000, every classified document 25 years of age or older would be automatically declassified unless the classifying agency had already sought and received that document's exemption (anything that could cause an "identifiable" risk to national security, would violate a person's privacy or involves more than one agency is exempt). After two three-year extensions granted by the Bush administration in response to cries from the CIA, FBI, NSA and other agencies that they didn't have the manpower to review all of their papers in time, the final deadline has arrived. And President Bush is enforcing it.

The FBI alone will be declassifying 270 million pages of heretofore secret material. This is a good thing. While I recognize that keeping secrets is necessary, the government has had a nasty habit of classifying basically anything, regardless of whether it truly needed to be secret. I look forward to seeing what people dig out of this staggeringly large treasure trove.