Disclosure as Censorship
The CIA isn’t the only government agency proactively reviewing their records and declassifying some for public release, just one of the most prolific, with thousands and thousands of pages available on their website. You might be inclined to laud the Agency for their efforts, or chide other agencies for not being similarly proactive.
Please don’t.
Voluntary disclosure and release of records by government agencies doesn’t benefit anyone except the agencies themselves. Everyone else - scholars, researchers, journalists, and interested members of the public - gets screwed. To be perhaps a little bit less pessimistic, proactive disclosure and release creates, at the very least, the potential to shortchange the public, in two very important ways.
First, the government can withhold whatever they feel like when voluntarily declassifying and releasing records, without justification or accountability. Under the FOIA, they can only withhold information for a finite, limited number of reasons - and must specify where and why they’ve done so. Under the FOIA, they can’t (legally) withhold something merely because it happens to be embarassing. When making a voluntary disclosure, they can withhold anything, for any reason whatsoever - and need not specify what is withheld, or why. To make things even more fun, the government can deny FOIA requests for records already “released”, or otherwise “publicly available”, on that basis alone.
Second, the FOIA is designed to be at least a little bit user-friendly, by making the government responsible for locating and, in some cases, identifying records responsive to a request, by providing guidelines, however minimal, for performance and resonsiveness, and laying out quite clear options to appeal adverse decisions and even seek legal judgement, if necessary. Too, some costs and fees - sometimes all costs and fees - associated with requests can be waived or dismissed, in the name of openness and public interest. Records the government makes “publicly accessible” need not be nearly so easy to access.
If you can adequately and accurately describe or identify a ten-page FBI report, you’re likely to get it within six months, probably sooner, at no cost, under the FOIA. If the FBI has transferred that document to the National Archives, though, you’ll have to visit the Archives to see it - or hire someone to do so, if you don’t live nearby, and be prepared to spend hours trying to locate what you want. Want a six-page historical report from the Air Force? Be prepared to shell out $30 for a copy of the roll of 16mm microfilm it’s been photographed onto - and four or five times that if you want someone to scan the microfilm for you.
The end result of these noble-sounding initiatives to create easier public access to government records is, usually, that the public loses out and the government wins, both in a big way. In a wickedly Orwellian fashion, by making their records “public”, the government agencies are actually making it more difficult for the public to see them, and reducing or outright eliminating the avenues of recourse that might otherwise be available to them.
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That’s a very interesting and insightful take on the issue.