11 Million Pages of CIA Files May Soon Be Shared By This Kickstarter by Joseph Cox.
From the post:
Millions of pages of CIA documents are stored in Room 3000. The CIA Records Search Tool (CREST), the agency’s database of declassified intelligence files, is only accessible via four computers in the National Archives Building in College Park, MD, and contains everything from Cold War intelligence, research and development files, to images.
Now one activist is aiming to get those documents more readily available to anyone who is interested in them, by methodically printing, scanning, and then archiving them on the internet.
“It boils down to freeing information and getting as much of it as possible into the hands of the public, not to mention journalists, researchers and historians,” Michael Best, analyst and freedom of information activist told Motherboard in an online chat.
Best is trying to raise $10,000 on Kickstarter in order to purchase the high speed scanner necessary for such a project, a laptop, office supplies, and to cover some other costs. If he raises more than the main goal, he might be able to take on the archiving task full-time, as well as pay for FOIAs to remove redactions from some of the files in the database. As a reward, backers will help to choose what gets archived first, according to the Kickstarter page.
“Once those “priority” documents are done, I’ll start going through the digital folders more linearly and upload files by section,” Best said. The files will be hosted on the Internet Archive, which converts documents into other formats too, such as for Kindle devices, and sometimes text-to-speech for e-books. The whole thing has echoes of Cryptome—the freedom of information duo John Young and Deborah Natsios, who started off scanning documents for the infamous cypherpunk mailing list in the 1990s.
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Good news! Kickstarter has announced this project funded!
Additional funding will help make this archive of documents available sooner rather than later.
As opposed to an attempt to boil the ocean of 11 million pages of CIA files, what about smaller topic mapping/indexing projects that focus on bounded sub-sets of documents of interest to particular communities?
I don’t have any interest in the STAR GATE project (clairvoyance, precognition, or telepathy, continued now by the DHS at airport screening facilities) but would be very interested in the records of Allen Dulles, a war criminal of some renown.
Just so you know, Michael has already uploaded documents on Allen Dulles from the CIA Records Search Tool (CREST) tool:
History of Allen Welsh Dulles as CIA Director – Volume I: The Man
History of Allen Welsh Dulles as CIA Director – Volume II: Coordination of Intelligence
History of Allen Welsh Dulles as CIA Director – Volume III: Covert Activities
History of Allen Welsh Dulles as CIA Director – Volume V: Intelligence Support of Policy
To describe Allen Dulles as a war criminal is no hyperbole. Among his other crimes, overthrow of President Jacobo Arbenz Guzman of Guatemala (think United Fruit Company), removal of Mohammad Mossadeq, prime minister of Iran (think Shah of Iran), are only two of his crimes, the full extent of which will probably never be known.
Files are being uploaded to That 1 Archive.