Friday, April 03, 2009

The CIA's Open Secrets

Mother Jones reports:
In a quiet, fluorescently lit room in the National Archives' auxiliary campus in suburban College Park, Maryland, 10 miles outside of Washington, are four computer terminals, each providing instant access to the more than 10 million pages of documents the CIA has declassified since 1995. There's only one problem: these are the only publicly available computers in the world that do so. At a time when Google is scanning and posting the contents of entire libraries to the Web, the agency refuses to link this large collection of documents—accessible through the CIA Records Search Tool, or CREST—to the Internet. This has effectively placed the CIA's declassified library beyond the reach of most Americans. So is the agency covering up what it has already uncovered?