More progress from Obama team opening up gov't

The Obama administration is eager to open up more and more for your observation, in distinction to prior years.

Next step is to provide means to start declassifying a lot of documents that should never have been classified, via the Public Interest Declassification Board:

On May 27, 2009, the President signed a Memorandum ordering the review of Executive Order 12958, as amended, "Classified National Security Information" (pdf). The review of the Order is to be completed within 90 days. On June 2, 2009, the National Security Advisor asked the PIDB to assist in this review by soliciting recommendations for revisions to the Order to ensure adequate public input as the review moves forward.           

 

In response to this request, the PIDB will first solicit recommendations through this blog. We expect to receive thoughtful comments that further the discussion of policy in four areas: declassification policy, a National Declassification Center, classification policy, and technology issues and challenges. We will begin today with declassification policy and allow commenting on this topic for three days before moving on to the next topic. 

 

Members of the Public Interest Declassification Board will post entries to frame the conversation, but we are really interested in hearing new and innovative ideas that might spark "new thinking" in the review process.

Comments

[Fred]

6/29/09 Firstly Craig what is implied in the following message received in the discussion forums: "there is a remporary ban on anon postings from this subnet. Please bear with us.." ?

Each time a post is attempted that reply appears prohibiting further posting.

Regarding the matter of Declassification thus far only two oages of the referrd to document has been read where prime emphasis was placed upon information having potentially adverse reciprocal military consequences resulting from widespread publication or access to such information.

How relevant such prohibition would prove in a world where Internet usage is widely accessible and essentially largely unregulated governmentally may nullify any intentions to render information "top secret" or "secret" on an international scale unless there is some international consensus and collaboration relevant thereto by international government officials; a state of collaboration not yet attained in international governmental circles.

Already there are instances of governments making accessible to their respective citizens information that was previously deemed classified in such nations and yet still so considered by other governments, such as information relating to encounters with non-terrestrial derived craft and non native other world visitors. Within the U.K. Brazil and even in Mexico such incidents have been widely observed by the citizenry and been widely discussed with decreased efforts on the part of gvernance in such countries to prevent public access to such information that is now widely accessible anyway via the Internet.

Since such events have posed no threat nationally or internationally -as would divulging of ways to produce a nuclear device- any classification that has as its objective preventing public scrutiny is untimely and impractical.