Automatic Declassification: Did Anything Happen?
The December 31, 2006 deadline for automatic declassification of historically valuable 25 year old classified records has come and gone. Was anything automatically declassified?
Yes, said Bill Leonard, director of the Information Security Oversight Office.
“Hundreds of millions of pages of records were automatically declassified at the FBI alone,” he said yesterday. Numerous other records were also declassified at some other executive branch agencies.
But he stressed that automatic declassification did not mean disclosure or immediate availability.
Declassified documents may still need to be reviewed for exempt material other than classified information (such as privacy data), and will need to be processed for public access.
Even so, public access to the records should be expedited by the elimination of a classification review requirement, Mr. Leonard said. And the deadline will continue to take new effect as more documents become 25 years old with each passing year.
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FAS and FLI partnered to build a series of convenings and reports across the intersections of artificial intelligence (AI) with biosecurity, cybersecurity, nuclear command and control, military integration, and frontier AI governance. This project brought together leaders across these areas and created a space that was rigorous, transpartisan, and solutions-oriented to approach how we should think about how AI is rapidly changing global risks.