National Security Archive's complete index of NSA internal Cryptolog periodical | Hacker News Reader

National Security Archive's complete index of NSA internal Cryptolog periodical

nsarchive.gwu.edu

80 pointspentestercrab12 comments

With major redaction in the content that's nearly 50 years old!

I can't believe there is much government secret stuff from 50 years ago that it's still in the public interest to keep secret today.

The Cold War never ended. Nor has much else. Further, the importance of cryptology has only intensified - greatly.

I feel like a lot of the redacted content is not technical, but could be political too.

Anything unprofessional would offend someone.

I don't think there is an attitude of revealing as much as possible, if anything there is a bias to reveal as little as possible. I bet they only left un-redacted the parts that they were specifically forced to reveal.

Note, however, that FOIA legally requires the opposite approach: everything is presumed public unless there is a specific reason to withhold.

Yes, but if it is as all possible to say that there is a specific reason, I'm suggesting that one will probably be found. The NSA wants to be as liberal as possible with the sharpie, because even if something is of marginal importantance and will almost certainly never matter, why not redact it anyway on the off chance the analysis wasn't being paranoid enough?

Given the frequency of FOIA and other requests, I'd strongly suspect the people with the most knowledge of X aren't the ones making all the redaction calls.

They've got something more important to do... their job.

So if you can't have enough time / attention from the person who actually knows, I'm more comfortable with a policy of over- rather than under-redaction.

Indeed, it is very important to err on the side where the enemy knows as little as possible, especially when your enemy is the American public.

Unfortunately, you pretty much have to sue the US government every time you're looking for real transparency from the government and to make FOIA work as intended these days.

Would love to have these in downloadable form. Anyone have a torrent or zip file of this? I realize i can go document by document and download the PDF but just wondering if anyone had yet...

Right side bar has an "Original Document (PDF)" link that initiates the download of the file you're looking for.

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