I thought the declassification of US government documents was 25 years. Or I guess there's an exemption when it comes to military intelligence? I wonder where and when the data was collected.
The source of the photos was the CORONA and HEXAGON satellites: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/wa...
The journal article cites its sources which you can use to understand more: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00934690.2020.1...
The data has been available for quite a while, but available is different from usable:
> While challenges involved in spatially correcting these unusual panoramic film images has long served as a stumbling block to researchers, an online tool called “Sunspot” now offers a straightforward process for efficient and accurate orthorectification of CORONA, helping to unlock the potential of this historical imagery for global-scale archaeological prospection. With these new opportunities come significant new challenges in how best to search through large imagery datasets like that offered by CORONA.
The nine exemptions can be found at the Justice Department's website[1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declassification [1] https://www.justice.gov/archives/open/declassification/decla...
Remember these movies where a small-firm lawyer is hammered with tons of document boxes in a discovery process against a big corporation? Well, historians are like that, but they have less money and they don't know how many boxes there are. Also they have to look for the boxes themselves rather than them being delivered at their office.
In older, well-studied fields there are few boxes, they are already referenced, and historians have a chance to see everything over their career. In more recent, less studied fields, there are countless unopened boxes.
Problem is, you need to cross-check with the reference material in case it's subject to hallucinations.
I don't know what to do about the context window, though.
Still, there is an effort made to make these collections more easily avaialble. For instance, in the case of soviet archives, [1] describes the work done and the conditions to access. That work is far from exhaustive though, and a large part of the stuff still needs to be done the slow way, or require special requests in order to be accessed.
[1]: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ceelbas/state-archive-russian-federati...
If that was true we'd have all the Kennedy assassination docs.
>25X7 – reveal information that would impair the current ability of U.S. government officials to protect the President, Vice President, and other protectees for whom protection services, in the interest of national security, are authorized;
Basically back to step one: they tell you what they want.
> (6) reveal information, including foreign government information, that would cause serious harm to relations between the United States and a foreign government, or to ongoing diplomatic activities of the United States;
Like, snipers on roof tops, planning the route so there's no slow downs, etc.
https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/nsa/DOCUMENT/940228.htm
" In August 1974, the Joint Chiefs of Staff destroyed all the minutes and transcripts of their meetings going back to 1947, and in 1978 essentially stopped keeping any such records. Only 30 pages of notes have survived, much to the dismay of military historians and scholars of the Cold War."
So, like, we will never get the discussions around, say, them using smallpox against North Korea.