The Declassification Engine: What History Reveals about America’s Top Secrets

The American national security state—and its accumulated millions of pages of classified records—has become a fixture of our political, social, and cultural life. Yet prior to World War I, the United States had no systematized government classification system, and its actual defense and foreign policy–related secrets were few. That changed with the United States’ entry into World War I, when through legislation and regulatory policy, the Wilson administration created the forerunners of the modern U.S. intelligence community. The secret electronic and human surveillance techniques and processes that started under President Woodrow Wilson mushroomed in scale during and after World War II.

Defenders of the current secrecy system claim it is vital to the safety of Americans at home and abroad. But what does the actual history of the past 100 years show? Have the FBI, CIA, NSA, and other federal agencies and departments truly used secrecy to protect us or instead to keep knowledge of their own misdeeds from us, or both? How many classified documents are there, and does anybody really know? How much of our own history is being kept from us, and how much of it is likely to ever see the light of day? Join us as our expert panel delves into these and related issues.

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