> eventually legally declassified and discussed openly
That's the idea, and by and large the system functions as intended. Critically, it's a "must take increasingly burdensome measures to maintain classification" configuration. So default / inaction is declassification.
It took multiple whistleblowing attempts in the span of over a decade to get it widely accepted that the government is conducting illegal mass surveillance on an internet scale. That for sure keeps people from having faith in the current classification system, and for good reasons.
It's important in this instance to distinguish how wolverine876 thinks the system should function and how the system is intended to function. It's possible for it to simultaneously be the case that you hate the system and that the system is working as intended.
In the US the people elect a government, the government passes laws creating rules (or passes laws delegating rule-making authority which is functionally the same thing) for, among other things, how information gets declassified. That information then gets declassified or not in accordance with those rules.
> we don't know what we're missing.
That is literally always true, it's impossible to prove that the government isn't hiding something.
Considering that voting rates are around 60%, eligibility rules are often a joke, and most of those votes are typically wiped out by FPP anyway, it's more like some people elect a government...
This said, the US declassification system is as good as it gets. Most countries on the planet don't have anything comparable, and anything deemed a state secret will forever remain as such in those countries (at least officially, bar revolutions). Not even Western Europe is particularly good in that regard. Somewhat ironically, and particularly on Cold War matters, us Europeans are often keeping secrets that would otherwise embarrass the US government, which wouldn't be possible if US agencies kept them on their books.
As intended by the people in power? By the time this stuff comes out, everyone involved is retired or dead or past statute of limitations.
This program operated under an executive order forty years ago, before many HNers were born, likely. The guy who signed that order died many years ago. How is this coming to light now serving any public good? Guarantee the Patriot Act, for example, does not get repealed.
We also have no idea what hasn't been released, so it's impossible to say things are 'working', by design or otherwise.
He spoke out against it publicly and even threatened to veto should it make it through Congress.
It was him speaking out against it (and the abuses of it by intelligence agencies) that discouraged both Democrats and Republicans from pushing it through.
Trump didn't like the IAs and they didn't like him.
The Trump administration delivered a letter to Congress in August 2019 urging them to make permanent three surveillance provisions of the Patriot Act. The provisions included section 215, which enables domestic call-record collection as well as the collection of other types of business records.
From Wiki - “On March 10, 2020, Jerry Nadler (D) proposed a bill to reauthorize the Patriot Act, and it was then approved by the majority of US House of Representatives after 152 Democrats joined the GOP in supporting the extension. The surveillance powers of the Patriot Act needed renewal by March 15, 2020, and after it expired, the U.S. Senate approved an amended version of the bill. After President Donald Trump threatened to veto the bill, the House of Representatives issued an indefinite postponement of the vote to pass the Senate version of the bill; as of December 2020, the Patriot Act remains expired.”
I still wonder if I should be happy or mad at Rep Nadler. On one hand he tried to reauthorize the Patriot Act, on the other because he tried to do it as a Democrat he guaranteed that Trump would never support it.
You just made me realize classified government secrets are more reasonable and accessible than copyrighted works. The insanity of copyright never ceases to impress.
I like the 14 + 14 a lot better even though I think it is still too long.
> The Copyright Act of 1790 was the first federal copyright act to be instituted in the United States, though most of the states had passed various legislation securing copyrights in the years immediately following the Revolutionary War. The stated object of the act was the "encouragement of learning," and it achieved this by securing authors the "sole right and liberty of printing, reprinting, publishing and vending" the copies of their "maps, charts, and books" for a term of 14 years, with the right to renew for one additional 14-year term should the copyright holder still be alive.
Yes, that is much better. I still think that's way too much time but under that system everything I grew up with would already be public domain which is a fair outcome. These corporations have already made their fortunes several times over, there's absolutely no need for them to have a virtually perpetual monopoly on anything.
I believe coliveira is saying the government is keeping things classified longer than they legally are allowed to, and no one gets in trouble for that, but they should.
> “Once an MDR request has been submitted to an agency for the review of a particular document, the agency must respond either with an approval, a denial, or the inability to confirm or deny the existence or nonexistence of the requested document.”
So you not only need to know the existence of some secret document you are interested in (how could you?), they basically have the option to simply deny it’s existence?
In principle I am against nuclear weapons. In practice I believe a deterrent state (at least two adversarial countries maintaining an active nuclear stockpile) is probably better than just one country maintaining an active stockpile.
I always wonder what would have happened if it had taken the Soviets longer to develop atomic weapons (or never did). Would a hawkish US president be more likely to use nuclear weapons to assert foreign policy than they are now?
If the Incheon landings [0] had been a failure during the Korean War in 1950, it's hard to see how nuclear weapons wouldn't have been employed, especially as China was neither involved nor had their own.
And if they'd been normalized in a second war, even at tactical scale, it makes you wonder how the rest of nuclear history would have unfolded.
Eventually some idiot in some small country with nukes gets pissed and fires, and we have this generations Franz Ferdinand - except none of us live long enough to pick up a rifle.
The US has had quite a few proxy wars with nuclear armed countries. I think it prevents an all our war like WWI and WWII, but not war in general. Less war? Perhaps. We seem to be doing our damndest to have at least one going on at all times though.
If Assad had had a nuclear weapon most probably it would have fallen in the hands os Islamists (ISIS, more likely) during the recent civil war in Syria, not a very bright perspective.
"The Atomic Energy Commission is in a unique position in that it is perhaps the only permanent agency of the Government which has operational intelligence responsibilities comparable to that of the State, War, or Navy Departments. It is difficult at times to distinguish operational intelligence from actual operations and it is found that the Commission, without recognizing it as such, -----------------------------------------------------------------------"
so everything that should not show up later will be put as "nuclear secret":
e.g. bulk collection of telephone data for nuclear safety, financial data bulk collection for nucear safety, etc. ;-)
That's the idea, and by and large the system functions as intended. Critically, it's a "must take increasingly burdensome measures to maintain classification" configuration. So default / inaction is declassification.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classified_information_in_th...