It's cool that things that make the government look bad are eventually legally declassified and discussed openly.
I would rank that coolness as way cooler than Kazakhstan but equally as cool as the Brazilian dictatorship? Still haven't got a chance to check out the CIA torture footage, but seeing as one of the people who ordered the torture and authorized the destruction of the tapes was put in charge and just left office a year ago, it turns out that discussion doesn't mean much.
edit: I guess it teaches us that we shouldn't expect more consideration from the current regime than the past one, seeing as they've not only gone entirely unpunished, but were rewarded. If we had never heard about the transgressions of the past, we wouldn't be fooled into expecting better out of the current crop.
edit: Am I the only one who read Brasil: Nunca Maís? Did the Church Committee change anything? It's actually reprehensible that we can talk about this stuff openly while parading the people who did it as experts on what we should do next.
edit:
"The CIA inspector general’s office has said it “mistakenly” destroyed its only copy of a comprehensive Senate torture report, despite lawyers for the Justice Department assuring a federal judge that copies of the documents were being preserved."
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/cia-mistak...
That's the idea, and by and large the system functions as intended. Critically, it's a "must take increasingly burdensome measures to maintain classification" configuration. So default / inaction is declassification.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classified_information_in_th...
Prove me wrong.
How about no.
Some idiot in a big country can do the same.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alar...
- Iran
- Lebanon (ubstable)
- North Korea (they already have the tech even if they don't have proper ICBMs yet)
q.e.d?
I always wonder what would have happened if it had taken the Soviets longer to develop atomic weapons (or never did). Would a hawkish US president be more likely to use nuclear weapons to assert foreign policy than they are now?
And if they'd been normalized in a second war, even at tactical scale, it makes you wonder how the rest of nuclear history would have unfolded.
"The Atomic Energy Commission is in a unique position in that it is perhaps the only permanent agency of the Government which has operational intelligence responsibilities comparable to that of the State, War, or Navy Departments. It is difficult at times to distinguish operational intelligence from actual operations and it is found that the Commission, without recognizing it as such, -----------------------------------------------------------------------"
This program operated under an executive order forty years ago, before many HNers were born, likely. The guy who signed that order died many years ago. How is this coming to light now serving any public good? Guarantee the Patriot Act, for example, does not get repealed.
We also have no idea what hasn't been released, so it's impossible to say things are 'working', by design or otherwise.
The Patriot Act expired in 2020
He spoke out against it publicly and even threatened to veto should it make it through Congress.
It was him speaking out against it (and the abuses of it by intelligence agencies) that discouraged both Democrats and Republicans from pushing it through.
Trump didn't like the IAs and they didn't like him.
> The Copyright Act of 1790 was the first federal copyright act to be instituted in the United States, though most of the states had passed various legislation securing copyrights in the years immediately following the Revolutionary War. The stated object of the act was the "encouragement of learning," and it achieved this by securing authors the "sole right and liberty of printing, reprinting, publishing and vending" the copies of their "maps, charts, and books" for a term of 14 years, with the right to renew for one additional 14-year term should the copyright holder still be alive.
> That's the idea, and by and large the system functions as intended.
What makes you say it largely functions as intended? It sometimes functions, but that is different. Also, we don't know what we're missing.
In the US the people elect a government, the government passes laws creating rules (or passes laws delegating rule-making authority which is functionally the same thing) for, among other things, how information gets declassified. That information then gets declassified or not in accordance with those rules.
> we don't know what we're missing.
That is literally always true, it's impossible to prove that the government isn't hiding something.
Considering that voting rates are around 60%, eligibility rules are often a joke, and most of those votes are typically wiped out by FPP anyway, it's more like some people elect a government...
This said, the US declassification system is as good as it gets. Most countries on the planet don't have anything comparable, and anything deemed a state secret will forever remain as such in those countries (at least officially, bar revolutions). Not even Western Europe is particularly good in that regard. Somewhat ironically, and particularly on Cold War matters, us Europeans are often keeping secrets that would otherwise embarrass the US government, which wouldn't be possible if US agencies kept them on their books.
So you not only need to know the existence of some secret document you are interested in (how could you?), they basically have the option to simply deny it’s existence?
Is it really how it supposed to work?
Otherwise, current classified programs could simply be confirmed by a brute force request of every possible program.
Letters like this don’t signify anything cool unless they lead to meaningful action, and they usually do not. I wouldn’t be so quick to congratulate the system for such things. This is like having a fancy PnL dashboard that’s updated too late and nobody with power looks at it anyway.
They're supposed to enforce the laws equally against everyone, though, so the fact that certain powerful organizations in government are exempt and open about it is a little bit more terrifying than if they were exempt but quiet about it.
It's a bit of a flex.
There's literally a part of the US government that can torture people, get caught, get investigated by US Congress, hack into official congressional computers to delete evidence, get caught doing that, and then... face no consequences whatsoever.
If that isn't the most powerful organization in the world, I sincerely don't know who else might qualify for that title.
Not to quote a certain poet,[0] but you mug someone on the street and you could face life in prison, but if you mug a whole community, the worst that might happen is you lose your job
Obviously it's tricky. By delaying things people can mentally bias towards "that was then". It wasn't that long ago that the US government was kidnapping and forcibly drugging US citizens, but "that was then".
But it's also really important that at some point that information does make it out.
Just to be explicit, there is no reason to suspect that isn't still taking place right at this moment.
This will barely make the evening news and the Patriot Act will stand. Nothing will come of this.
The Patriot Act expired in 2020
That's part of the plan. Those WaPo articles carry a different tone if it's breaking news vs following up on a already broken story.
https://www.archives.gov/research/jfk/warren-commission-repo...
From CNN (for what it’s worth) regarding Kennedy data:
“The vast majority of the almost 1,500 documents released by the National Archives as new appear to be duplicates of previously released documents with only a few redacted words now revealed…Some have no changes whatsoever.
The release still leaves more than 10,000 documents either partially redacted or withheld entirely”
The 9/11 data is in a similar situation. Much unreleased/classified data.
I never jest. And stop calling me Shirley.