CIA releases huge number of declassified documents online
The CIA has today released an archive of almost 800,000 files online, made up of previously classified information. The total content of the files is said to be between 12 and 13 million pages worth of material that was previously incredibly hard to get your hands on.
Since the mid 1990s much of the information has been technically available to the public however in practice it was difficult to get to.
Until now the only way to access this information in it's entirety was to travel to Maryland, USA, where 4 computers located in the back of the library of the National Archives were available for use between the hours of 09:00 and 16:00.
About 2 years ago, a non-profit freedom of information group called MuckRock began a law-suit against the CIA over access to the CREST database, which serves as the CIA's repository of declassified information. MuckRock said the CIA were effectively only paying lip-service to transparency without actually providing meaningful public access to the records, and suggested that making people travel all the way to the Archives in Maryland during work-hours to print out page after page of data just to do historical research was obnoxious and antiquated.
MuckRock were succesful in their court case, however after a filing last year by the CIA in which they said it would take 6 years to release everything, Michael Best of MuckRock began a Kickstarter to raise funds to go to the Archives and manually scan all the documents himself in order to publish them online. He stopped in October 2016 when the CIA indicated they were going to be releasing everything sooner than anticipated, in early 2017.
See my post on the Knowledge page for a more detailed look into what the documents contain.
