The Central Intelligence Agency has published nearly 13 million pages
of declassified files online, documents which previously were
physically accessible only from four computer terminals at the National
Archives in College Park, Maryland.
The record include info on Nazi war crimes, the Cuban Missile Crisis, UFO sightings,
human telepathy ("Project Stargate") and much more. The release has
been a long time coming: Bill Clinton first ordered all documents at
least 25 years old with "historical value" to be declassified in 1995.
The agency complied, however anyone who wanted access had to trek all
the way to the US National Archives in Washington DC to get a peak.
In 2014, a nonprofit journalism organization called MuckRock filed a
Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit pressing the CIA to post all
of its documents online, but the agency said it would take up to six
years to scan everything according to engadget. At the same time, journalist Mike Best crowd-funded more than $15,000 to
visit the archives to print out and then publicly upload the records,
one by one, to apply pressure to the CIA. "By printing out and scanning
the documents at CIA expense, I was able to begin making them freely
available to the public and to give the agency a financial incentive to
simply put the database online," Best wrote in a blog post.
"Access to this historically significant collection is no longer
limited by geography," said Joseph Lambert, the CIA's information
management director in a press release. The agency was aiming to publish
the documents by the end of 2017, but finished the work ahead of
schedule.
“We’ve been working on this for a very long time and this is one of
the things I wanted to make sure got done before I left. Now you can
access it from the comfort of your own home,” said outgoing CIA director
of information Lambert. The agency continues to review documents for
declassification, so the treasure trove has not been unearthed in full,
and there’s definitely more to follow.
* * *
The online records, shed light on the agency's activities throughout
the Vietnam, Korean and Cold War conflicts; they also includes documents
relating to UFO sightings and psychic experiments from the Stargate
program, which has long been of interest to conspiracy theorists. The
archives also cover events from the 1940s the 1990s (each year, a new
batch are declassified) and include details about the flight of war criminals from Nazi Germany, the quarter-mile Berlin tunnel built to tap Soviet telephone lines, internal intelligence bulletins and memos from former CIA directors, UFO reports and more.
The released trove also includes the papers of Henry Kissinger, who
served as secretary of state under presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald
Ford, as well as several hundred thousand pages of intelligence analysis
and science research and development.
Among the more unusual records are documents from the Stargate
Project, which dealt with psychic powers and extrasensory perception.
Those include records of testing on celebrity psychic Uri Geller in
1973, when he was already a well-established performer.-Read More
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