The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency has allowed permission over documents of “historical value” to be viewed by the public. The agency recently made over 12 million pages from 930,000 formerly classified documents available on the Internet. For the first time, such pages can now be searched online.
Joseph Lambert, CIA director for information management, released an official statement about the recent release of declassified documents online. “Access to this historically significant collection is no longer limited by geography,” Lambert stated. “The American public can access these documents from the comfort of their homes.”
In 1995, then-president Bill Clinton planned to declassify documents that were over 25 years old and had “historical value; the archives were only made searchable over the Internet in 2000 and readers can only have access from four computer units at the U.S. National Archives in College Park in Maryland. Due to such restrictions, interested parties such as journalists and researchers put forward their objections over the lack of access to the CIA Records Search Tool (CREST).
“Declassifying all the documents in the world doesn’t accomplish anything if people can’t get access to them,” director Steve Aftergood of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists said.
CIA previously faced a lawsuit from MuckRock, a non-profit group advocating freedom of information, over the agency’s failure to upload the declassified documents despite already being technically available in the 1990s. Through crowdfunding of over $15,000, journalist Mike Best sought to print and upload the archives’ content online to pressure the government agency.
In November, the CIA made an announcement that it will publish the promised material from the CREST archive on the CIA Library website. Some of the files that readers can gain access to include those relating to the mind control experiment deemed as Project MKUltra, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Stargate Project for psychic powers, among others.
