I am a little disturbed that I had to hear about
this from an archives community I belong to rather than through any sort of major newsmedia:
The CIA's recent "document sweep" of papers in an archive at the University of Washington raises issues of access to old classified documents that have been open to historians for 20 years. The CIA says the documents were never properly declassified. But some academics say the agency is trying to regain control over documents that have been in the public domain for two decades.
More details after the fold.
Tantalized by this nugget, I searched Lexis-Nexis for more info. I was only able to find a few local stories, one of the more interesting was
this one:
A team that includes the CIA is expected at the University of Washington tomorrow to make certain any national-security information has been removed from the papers of the late Sen. Henry M. Jackson.
The search comes 20 years after the senator's family donated his papers to the UW. The collection ranges from reports to correspondence and is housed in hundreds of boxes at the Allen Library.
Jackson served in the U.S. Congress almost 43 years. He died at age 71 in 1983.
At the time of the donation, University staff members searched the collection for items marked with "national-security designators" and sent them to federal agencies for review, said Kelley Knickerbocker, UW facilities security officer.
The UW also requested declassification so the collection could be open to researchers. Over the years, some of the items sent out for review have been declassified.
The last papers were submitted for review about a decade ago and, in mid-2004, the UW heard back on a final item. It had been declassified by the CIA, but then an official review was ordered for the item, Knickerbocker said.
The review will be conducted likely over a few days of only parts of the collection by a team of about five people from the CIA, Department of Energy, National Archives & Records Administration and the Air Force.
Jackson was an expert on national security, energy and environmental concerns.
Even more interesting(chilling?) was this follow-up:
Five federal officials, including three from the CIA, have removed several documents from the archival papers of the late Sen. Henry M. "Scoop" Jackson at the University of Washington, according to The Associated Press. The federal document-security team spent three days in the special collections division of the UW's Suzzallo-Allen Library last week. The group, which included staff from the U.S. Energy and Defense departments, went through 1,200 boxes of material using a five-binder index to find the targeted papers. Carla Rickerson, head of special collections, said the team removed no more than 10 documents. She would not disclose the exact number of papers or their subject matter, citing UW privacy policies.
I'm not sure which is more disturbing-- that the CIA would see the need to secure documents that have been in the public domain for 20 years already, or that almost nobody reported on it (the NYT and WaPo, for example, had nothing on this). Am I overreacting? Is this a non-story, or does the intervention of the CIA in this case suggest that something more sinister is going on?