Each year, the U. And, if so, does that imply that similar redacted memos refer to the same key words? The Declassification Engine could be an instrument for historians and conspiracy theorists alike. One finds correlations between specific words and often-classified memos, for example. Another was designed to help train the system to pick up on differences between redacted documents, and what was revealed years later when the government declassified them for public eyes.
Last week, historians, journalists, legal scholars, statisticians, and computer scientists met at Columbia University to formally launch the Engine — and to ask for money.
What they hope are good guesses, but guesses nevertheless. Declassification straddles a long-standing fault line in American politics, as Marc Trachtenberg, a professor of political science at UCLA explains :. Declassified documents are often a tool to better understand our own history.
But getting at that understanding sometimes requires teasing out decades-old data. One of the first things the team did last year was to analyze which keywords were most closely associated with federal decisions to withhold documents among 1. Daniel Ellsberg, the former defense department analyst famous for leaking the Pentagon Papers, remembers the long process to make all of the documents public.
It took decades, long after the Vietnam War ended, for the full report to come out. When it did, Ellsberg noticed that one of the sections originally redacted referred to the so-called Haiphong Massacre of Sections U.
Science Technology Business U. Redaction nation: US history brims with partial deletions. Attorney General William Barr told Congress last week he expects to release his redacted version of special counsel Robert Mueller's Trump-Russia investigation report "within a week. We've gotten copies of high-level documents over the years through Freedom of Information cases where, when the first version comes out, half of it's withheld.
Try again a few years later with a different administration, you get another chunk of it released. Gradually, over time, I think the entire text will come out and when people are doing the anniversaries, decades down the road, they are more likely to have a complete copy the Mueller report than we're going to get.
A lot of them do, in the first place. The big argument is over how long they stay secret and how long they stay in the vault. That's the big argument, I think, even with the redactions in the Mueller report. How really secret are they, and how long are they going to have to stay secret?
Pretty much everybody, even in the security business, will say that most classified documents can be released within five, ten or 15 years. Only if it's something like a design of a weapons system that would empower some thug in some foreign country to create danger for American citizens, then I think they have a basis for classifying that.
Same thing with some brave Iranian who walks into our embassy and wants to give us the lowdown on the Ayatollah succession, but asks for anonymity. You probably want to protect that person's identity for as long as there's some danger to them. There are some real secrets, and that's where I differ from people like [Julien] Assange and even Chelsea Manning, who just kind of wanted to throw it all up against the wall: "Nothing should be secret.
Things that would really hurt people should be secrets. Things that are bottom lines in a diplomatic negotiation, probably until that negotiation is done, that can be a real secret. But most of the classified universe does not deserve to stay secret more than a couple of years. I think that's Attorney General Barr's worst nightmare.
A couple of years back, the Justice Department, under duress of a lawsuit, had to release this internal consultant's report. People that heard about it on the outside, it exposed racism problems and discrimination problems within the Justice Department. The office at Justice redacted it using a computer program putting black blotches on. It comes out in the public and somebody realizes, "Oh, that's just an Adobe Acrobat.
I can peel that off. What was under there was all this embarrassing stuff about Justice Department employees complaining to their supervisors and never getting any justice out of it.
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