Tales back to the Crypt

by **Gouda** » Tue Feb 21, 2006 12:15 pm

Raving wild speculation here on my part, but after reading Jeff's last 2 posts regarding spooky ciphers, cryptography, number games etc, and coming across the following NYT article regarding the accelerated reclassification of seemingly "incocuous" declassified national documents, I just wondered if, maybe, in the age of the www and increased capacity for citizen, amateur, and whistleblower cryptologists (sic?) to find the hidden in the open and connect dots, if they are not actually trying to disappear a bunch of docs that hold some sort of occult/intelligence code. Or: speculating that there might be a civil war between powerful covert elite groups, perhaps it is better to hide as much...oh, never mind. But the twist in that speculation is that many scholars already have the to-be-reclassified docs, and plan to publish them. Strange. Hmmmm.... Well, that's my incomplete deep algebra for the day. <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/21/politics/21reclassify.html?ei=5065&en=3d2d327cc1d44a52&ex=1141102800&partner=MYWAY&pagewanted=print">www.nytimes.com/2006/02/2...nted=print</a> <blockquote>Quote:<hr> February 21, 2006 U.S. Reclassifies Many Documents in Secret Review By SCOTT SHANE WASHINGTON, Feb. 20 — In a seven-year-old secret program at the National Archives, intelligence agencies have been removing from public access thousands of historical documents that were available for years, including some already published by the State Department and others photocopied years ago by private historians. The restoration of classified status to more than 55,000 previously declassified pages began in 1999, when the Central Intelligence Agency and five other agencies objected to what they saw as a hasty release of sensitive information after a 1995 declassification order signed by President Bill Clinton. It accelerated after the Bush administration took office and especially after the 2001 terrorist attacks, according to archives records. But because the reclassification program is itself shrouded in secrecy — governed by a still-classified memorandum that prohibits the National Archives even from saying which agencies are involved — it continued virtually without outside notice until December. That was when an intelligence historian, Matthew M. Aid, noticed that dozens of documents he had copied years ago had been withdrawn from the archives' open shelves. Mr. Aid was struck by what seemed to him the innocuous contents of the documents — mostly decades-old State Department reports from the Korean War and the early cold war. He found that eight reclassified documents had been previously published in the State Department's history series, "Foreign Relations of the United States." "The stuff they pulled should never have been removed," he said. "Some of it is mundane, and some of it is outright ridiculous." After Mr. Aid and other historians complained, the archives' Information Security Oversight Office, which oversees government classification, began an audit of the reclassification program, said J. William Leonard, director of the office. Mr. Leonard said he ordered the audit after reviewing 16 withdrawn documents and concluding that none should be secret. "If those sample records were removed because somebody thought they were classified, I'm shocked and disappointed," Mr. Leonard said in an interview. "It just boggles the mind." If Mr. Leonard finds that documents are being wrongly reclassified, his office could not unilaterally release them. But as the chief adviser to the White House on classification, he could urge a reversal or a revision of the reclassification program. A group of historians, including representatives of the National Coalition for History and the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations, wrote to Mr. Leonard on Friday to express concern about the reclassification program, which they believe has blocked access to some material at the presidential libraries as well as at the archives. Among the 50 withdrawn documents that Mr. Aid found in his own files is a 1948 memorandum on a C.I.A. scheme to float balloons over countries behind the Iron Curtain and drop propaganda leaflets. It was reclassified in 2001 even though it had been published by the State Department in 1996. Another historian, William Burr, found a dozen documents he had copied years ago whose reclassification he considers "silly," including a 1962 telegram from George F. Kennan, then ambassador to Yugoslavia, containing an English translation of a Belgrade newspaper article on China's nuclear weapons program. Under existing guidelines, government documents are supposed to be declassified after 25 years unless there is particular reason to keep them secret. While some of the choices made by the security reviewers at the archives are baffling, others seem guided by an old bureaucratic reflex: to cover up embarrassments, even if they occurred a half-century ago. One reclassified document in Mr. Aid's files, for instance, gives the C.I.A.'s assessment on Oct. 12, 1950, that Chinese intervention in the Korean War was "not probable in 1950." Just two weeks later, on Oct. 27, some 300,000 Chinese troops crossed into Korea. Mr. Aid said he believed that because of the reclassification program, some of the contents of his 22 file cabinets might technically place him in violation of the Espionage Act, a circumstance that could be shared by scores of other historians. But no effort has been made to retrieve copies of reclassified documents, and it is not clear how they all could even be located. "It doesn't make sense to create a category of documents that are classified but that everyone already has," said Meredith Fuchs, general counsel of the National Security Archive, a research group at George Washington University. "These documents were on open shelves for years." The group plans to post Mr. Aid's reclassified documents and his account of the secret program on its Web site, www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv, on Tuesday. The program's critics do not question the notion that wrongly declassified material should be withdrawn. Mr. Aid said he had been dismayed to see "scary" documents in open files at the National Archives, including detailed instructions on the use of high explosives. But the historians say the program is removing material that can do no conceivable harm to national security. They say it is part of a marked trend toward greater secrecy under the Bush administration, which has increased the pace of classifying documents, slowed declassification and discouraged the release of some material under the Freedom of Information Act. Experts on government secrecy believe the C.I.A. and other spy agencies, not the White House, are the driving force behind the reclassification program. "I think it's driven by the individual agencies, which have bureaucratic sensitivities to protect," said Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists, editor of the online weekly Secrecy News. "But it was clearly encouraged by the administration's overall embrace of secrecy." National Archives officials said the program had revoked access to 9,500 documents, more than 8,000 of them since President Bush took office. About 30 reviewers — employees and contractors of the intelligence and defense agencies — are at work each weekday at the archives complex in College Park, Md., the officials said... -cut- Though the National Archives are not allowed to reveal which agencies are involved in the reclassification, one archivist said on condition of anonymity that the C.I.A. and the Defense Intelligence Agency were major participants. A spokesman for the C.I.A., Paul Gimigliano, said that the agency had released 26 million pages of documents to the National Archives since 1998 and that it was "committed to the highest quality process" for deciding what should be secret. "Though the process typically works well, there will always be the anomaly, given the tremendous amount of material and multiple players involved," Mr. Gimigliano said. A spokesman for the Defense Intelligence Agency said he was unable to comment on whether his agency was involved in the program. Anna K. Nelson, a foreign policy historian at American University, said she and other researchers had been puzzled in recent years by the number of documents pulled from the archives with little explanation.... -cut- "This is not a very efficient way of doing business," Mr. Leonard said. "There's got to be a better way."<hr></blockquote>

by **AlicetheCurious** » Tue Feb 21, 2006 3:00 pm

"Winston could not definitely remember a time when his country had not been at war... The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible The Party said that Oceania had never been in alliance with Eurasia. He, Winston Smith, knew that Oceania had been in alliance with Eurasia as short a time as four years ago. But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his own consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated. And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed -- if all records told the same tale -- then the lie passed into history and became truth. "Who controls the past," ran the Party slogan, "controls the future.- who controls the present controls the past." (Chap III, p.32) Winston's job as a clerk in the Ministry of Truth was to re-write history, "to rectify the original figures by making them agree with the later ones." "This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound tracks, cartoons, photographs -- to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance. Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary." (Chap. IV, 36) White House Web Scrubbing Offending Comments on Iraq Disappear From Site By Dana Milbank - Washington Post Staff Writer - Thursday, December 18, 2003 It's not quite Soviet-style airbrushing, but the Bush administration has been using cyberspace to make some of its own cosmetic touch-ups to history. White House officials were steamed when Andrew S. Natsios, the administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, said earlier this year that U.S. taxpayers would not have to pay more than $1.7 billion to reconstruct Iraq -- which turned out to be a gross understatement of the tens of billions of dollars the government now expects to spend. Recently, however, the government has purged the offending comments by Natsios from the agency's Web site. The transcript, and links to it, have vanished. This is not the first time the administration has done some creative editing of government Web sites. After the insurrection in Iraq proved more stubborn than expected, the White House edited the original headline on its Web site of President Bush's May 1 speech, "President Bush Announces Combat Operations in Iraq Have Ended," to insert the word "Major" before combat. Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, administration Web sites have been scrubbed for anything vaguely sensitive, and passwords are now required to access even much unclassified information. Though it is not clear whether the White House is directing the changes, several agencies have been following a similar pattern. The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and USAID have removed or revised fact sheets on condoms, excising information about their effectiveness in disease prevention, and promoting abstinence instead. The National Cancer Institute, meanwhile, scrapped claims on its Web site that there was no association between abortion and breast cancer. And the Justice Department recently redacted criticism of the department in a consultant's report that had been posted on its Web site. Steven Aftergood, who directs the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, said the Natsios case is particularly pernicious. "This smells like an attempt to revise the record, not just to withhold information but to alter the historical record in a self-interested way, and that is sleazier than usual," he said. "If they simply said, 'We made an error; we underestimated,' people could understand it and deal with it." For months after the April 23 Natsios interview on ABC's "Nightline," USAID.gov displayed the transcript. "You're not suggesting that the rebuilding of Iraq is going to be done for $1.7 billion?" an incredulous Ted Koppel asked Natsios. "Well, in terms of the American taxpayers contribution, I do," Natsios said. "This is it for the U.S. The rest of the rebuilding of Iraq will be done by other countries who have already made pledges, Britain, Germany, Norway, Japan, Canada and Iraqi oil revenues. . . . But the American part of this will be $1.7 billion. We have no plans for any further-on funding for this." A White House spokesman, asked later about these remarks, responded vaguely that he had not seen the statement in question. Then, sometime this fall, USAID made it easier for the administration to maintain its veil of ignorance on the subject by taking the transcript off its Web site. For a while, the agency left telltale evidence by keeping the link to the transcript on its "What's New" page -- but yesterday the liberal Center for American Progress discovered that this link had disappeared, too, as well as the Google "cached" copies of the original page. USAID spokeswoman Lejaune Hall, asked about this curious situation, searched the Web site herself for the missing document. "That is strange," she said. After a brief investigation, she reported back: "They were taken down off the Web site. There was going to be a cost. That's why they're not there." But other government Web sites, including the State and Defense departments, routinely post interview transcripts, even from "Nightline." And, it turns out, there is no cost. "We would not charge for that," said ABC News spokesman Jeffrey Schneider. "We would have no trouble with a government agency linking to one of our interviews, and we are unaware of anybody from [ABC] making any request that anything be removed." © 2003 The Washington Post Company <a href="http://webserve.govst.edu/pa/Political/Not-So-Great%20Expectations/orwell.htm">webserve.govst.edu/pa/Pol...orwell.htm</a>

by **Gouda** » Tue Feb 21, 2006 3:55 pm

Yes, that, together with faked news, faked science, high Fox ratings, and all the tomfoolery of congressional staffers on Wikipedia (our open-source, definition-of-reality-in-progress website)…suggests that today the Ministry of Truth has reified as a truly participatory, collaborative effort. AlicetheC, what do you make of the reclassification of innocuous, insignificant types of previously declassified documents, which would seem to have little or no historical significance to the ruling class' interests? Is it an attempt to bundle off some serious papers within a flurry of mundane? These historians seem to be alarmed not because serious documents are being taken from them (they have them stored anyway), but because the intelligence complex is taking back (seemingly) petty records. on edit: of course historians consider all documents to be of importance. perhaps they are just stupified as to why the intelleigence complex would take back docs which would only have importance to real historians...unless as you hint, the intelligence complex fancies themselves serious historians nowadays.... Edited by: <A HREF=http://p216.ezboard.com/brigorousintuition.showUserPublicProfile?gid=gouda@rigorousintuition>Gouda</A> at: 2/21/06 1:12 pm

by **AlicetheCurious** » Tue Feb 21, 2006 6:55 pm

Maybe it's just a beginning and they plan to eventually eliminate all the paper records, no matter how insignificant. Orwell could not have dreamed how easy it would become to change the past in the computer age. From voting machines to debit & credit cards, to newspapers to emails, etc., much of the documentation that only a short time ago had a physical, objective existence, can now be altered at will by those who control the technology. Digital photos can be changed, as can just about anything else, including bank balances, phone and medical records, and all kinds of archives. I mean, newspapers get thrown out daily, and if the newspaper archives are being fiddled with, there just won't be a need for too many Winston Smiths -- poor guy had to destroy the documents one by one. Thank God for books, eh? At least for now... I find it simply incredible that people don't notice that at a time when the US government is increasingly secretive and unwilling to expose itself to scrutiny, ordinary people are more vulnerable to abuse, violation and totalitarian oppression than at any other time in history. It boggles the mind...With increased power should come increased safeguards, but what is happening now, even on a global scale, is the opposite. Talk about a recipe for disaster...

by **StarmanSkye** » Tue Feb 21, 2006 11:07 pm

... changed -- "President Bush Announces Combat Operations in Iraq Have Ended," to insert the word "Major" before combat. Perhaps, with revisionist upgrading as necessary, one day this may read as: "Lawfully-appointed-for-life Norte America El Presidente Bush Forcefully Chided the Now-banned Democratic Congress Terrorist-Supporters for Their Treasonous Attempt to Derail Peace-Operations, Declaring Before the United World Assembly that as per the terms of the Northern Hemisphere Global Justice Contract the first Phase of Operation Enduring Freedom and Liberation for Ismalofascist-Occupied Territories of Greater Iraqistan (OEFLIATGE) Has Been Tentatively Concluded Under-Budget and On-Time Pending Phase Two Implementation of UN-Authorized Military-assisted Economic and Humanitarian Relief Services and Reconstruction Activities by the Eurasian Co-Prosperity Treaty Association Combined Forces of the Mitsubishi-Halliburton Syndicate." *** It DOES boggle the mind. Under the 'excuse' of eliminating anything that might 'aid the terrorists', the Government is shutting the blinds on transparency, cloaking itself with inscrutability, increasing the disconnect between its past actions and the world -- while increasingly identifying the 'enemy' with the ordinary people who make up the greater society-at-large, leading to a virtual war with the public. After all -- WHAT is the single-largest single source of organized violence and destruction directed for narrow political purposes? Besides evident retroactive image-management and ongoing revisionism to 'create' the desired social-construct 'reality', part of the seemingly-arbitrary vacuuming of docs is no-doubt due to the corporate-culture psychology of a dedicated, empowered bureaucracy to justify itself and its wasteful budget by makework busyness. But I've even found 'inconvenient' or critical information web pages being dissapeared from the Look Back and cached archives -- as just today I found all reference to a defense contractor's, tallyds, advertised-site Company Brochure link on shoulder-fired Fuel-air weapons (thermobaric urban destruction) to have dissapeared from its homepage index, the web AND cached archives. Just vanished, scrubbed ... If it's not found, it never existed -- would seem to be the PTB's attitude. Nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah! Like a child 'hiding' behind his outstretched hands ... Starman

by **marykmusic** » Wed Feb 22, 2006 12:44 am

Better re-read Fahrenheit 451 before you say, "At least we still have books! He who controls the past, controls the present. He who controls the present, controls the future. Paraphrased from George Orwell, but y'all get my point. --MaryK

by **BajaSur** » Wed Feb 22, 2006 5:09 am

Good stuff here: <a href="http://www.gwu.edu/~nsaarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB179/">Declassification in Reverse</a> Alot of links supplied to documents NARA seems most interested in. Also links to documents of political actions that made this all possible. Could not help noticing Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmonds name on some of the commitees that made it all this possible.

by **Gouda** » Fri Mar 03, 2006 1:05 pm

They must have read this thread. ***  Archivist Urges U.S. to Reopen Classified Files By SCOTT SHANE Published: March 3, 2006 WASHINGTON, March 2 — After complaints from historians, the National Archives directed intelligence agencies on Thursday to stop removing previously declassified historical documents from public access and urged them to return to the shelves as quickly as possible many of the records they had already pulled... rest here: <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/03/politics/03archives.html?_r=1&hp&ex=1141362000&en=04496c2a369e1a84&ei=5094&partner=homepage&oref=slogin">www.nytimes.com/2006/03/0...ref=slogin</a>

by **antiaristo** » Fri Mar 03, 2006 1:38 pm

This is a repost from the Guidelines for Research thread. I was feeling particularly grouchy at the time. <blockquote>Quote:<hr>I'd like to tell you all a little story. In 1986 the British Government announced that the British Library would be rebuilt. The world of letters was stunned. "But why?" Nobody had asked for this. Serious scholars were horrified at the prospect of losing the Reading Room. They loved it for itself and they loved it for its history. This workroom for, amongst many, Charles Dickens and Karl Marx. Nobody ever came up with a halfway sensible rationale, but still the project went ahead. It lasted from 1986 to 1999. During those thirteen years absolute chaos reigned. Some of the fuckups were so ridiculous you knew that something funny was going on. By 1999 two thoughts had gelled in my head. The first was the growing realisation that HM Government was HUGELY CORRUPT, even though nothing was being reported. The second was that the inexplicable goings on at the British Library might be related to the first. So I did what I always do. I put my insights to paper, directed it to a well-known figure with some direct responsibility, cc'd it to five or so with some indirect responsibility, and sent out a further large number of copies to those with an interest. A few months later, the reconstruction was announced as complete. I don't have a copy of my letter easily available. It is in one of the many piles of paper strewn about the room and I don't have the inclination to prove my veracity any further in this forum. So you can believe me or not, as you wish. When you read these "guidelines" being explained by the wise ones you should bear this story in mind. Frankly there is NOTHING INCRIMINATING LEFT in official sources. It has all been sanitised.<hr></blockquote> That was posted on February 6. I hope you can see why I put it here. Something else. A day or two later the British Government announced that the Child Support Agency was to be scrapped. The CSA has, for about thirteen years, been sabotaging family relationships within the United Kingdom. To use the language from above "During those thirteen years absolute chaos reigned. Some of the fuckups were so ridiculous you knew that something funny was going on." If there is anybody here that knows anything about the CSA, can you endorse or repudiate what I say here? Thanks. Added on edit It was February 9 <a href="http://politics.guardian.co.uk/homeaffairs/story/0,,1706354,00.html">politics.guardian.co.uk/h...54,00.html</a> <a href="http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,17129-2032560,00.html">www.timesonline.co.uk/art...60,00.html</a> Edited by: <A HREF=http://p216.ezboard.com/brigorousintuition.showUserPublicProfile?gid=antiaristo>antiaristo</A> at: 3/3/06 11:25 am

by **Gouda** » Fri Mar 03, 2006 2:13 pm

anti, i do not know for the CSA, but you wrote: "Frankly there is NOTHING INCRIMINATING LEFT in official sources." I can buy that to a good degree. But then why did the intel complex declassify innocuous docs, for all to see, only to later inexplicably, secretly, try to bury them again? Is this the Carter/Bush I/Clinton intel factions vs. the Bush II/Cheney/Goss/Rummy intel factions? Or something else weirder.

by **Gouda** » Fri Mar 03, 2006 2:20 pm

Just after I posted that, I see this, which relates to my initial post: <a href="http://news.yahoo.com/s/nf/20060303/bs_nf/41894">news.yahoo.com/s/nf/20060303/bs_nf/41894</a> <blockquote>Quote:<hr>Amateur Cracks Secret Nazi Code Walaika K. Haskins, newsfactor.com Thu Mar 2, 7:15 PM ET Nazi code that eluded the best cryptographers the Allied forces had to offer during World War II has been solved by an amateur codebreaker with the assistance of a network of computers. The three uncracked ciphers -- a cipher is a method of transforming text in order to conceal its meaning -- were encrypted in 1942 with a new version of the infamous German Enigma machine, which was used to direct attacks against Allied shipping in the Atlantic. To solve the puzzling mystery, details of which had been published in a cryptography journal in 1995, Krah wrote a codebreaking program and then went online in January to post information about his project and ask for assistance. In an interview with the BBC, Krah, a resident of Utrecht, The Netherlands, said it was "basic human curiosity" that prompted him to attempt to break the code. "Clearly, the project is from the 'because-we-can' department," Krah wrote on a bulletin board online. Super Sleuths Unite Krah was not looking for additional brain power when he posted his request for help online. Rather, he was trolling for more computer power. The program Krah created required the might of a series of connected computers to process his mathematical codebreaking formula... <hr></blockquote>

by **antiaristo** » Fri Mar 03, 2006 2:33 pm

Gouda, This is pure speculation, but might it have something to do with the Internet and search engines? The threat might lie in making CONNECTIONS between documents, rather than the documents themselves. I know from my own experiences that "library angels" flourish on Google and the like. Some of the unexpected material that has emerged from a simple search has been quite incredible, and pushed me in directions that had not even crossed my mind.

by **Qutb** » Fri Mar 03, 2006 4:11 pm

<blockquote>Quote:<hr>Is it an attempt to bundle off some serious papers within a flurry of mundane?<hr></blockquote> Probably. Or to hide the pattern among the documents they want to hide from the public by concurrently re-classifying a large amount of randomly selcted docs. <blockquote>Quote:<hr>The threat might lie in making CONNECTIONS between documents, rather than the documents themselves.<hr></blockquote> That I think is true.

by **Gouda** » Mon Mar 06, 2006 9:05 am

I'd missed this one. Last year, Lockheed was OK'd to control records in the national archive. Lockheed, Diebold, Sequoia...serving democracy, trust us. Those cumbersome magnetic tapes. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/11/AR2005091101019.html">www.washingtonpost.com/wp...01019.html</a> <blockquote>Quote:<hr>Lockheed to Lead Archives Project By Jason Miller Special to The Washington Post Monday, September 12, 2005; D04 The National Records and Archives Administration has responsibility for the billions of electronic records that federal agencies produce annually, including architectural plans for federal buildings, weapons systems designs, White House e-mails, and memos from every department and agency.  Last week, the agency tapped Lockheed Martin Corp. of Bethesda to build a $308 million system to store and maintain those records. Lockheed Martin's team includes BearingPoint Inc. of McLean; Electronic Data Systems Corp. of Plano, Tex.; Fenestra Technologies Corp. of Germantown; FileTek Inc. of Rockville; History Associates Inc. of Rockville; Image Fortress Corp. of Westford, Mass.; Metier Ltd. of Washington; Science Applications International Corp. of San Diego, and Tessella Inc. of Newton, Mass. Allen Weinstein, archivist of the United States, said the new system will make it possible for future citizens to understand the "history of our times."  The key to the system is to make sure records remain "authentic," which means users can view them in their original format even if the software that created the record is outmoded or no longer available... Most records are stored on magnetic tapes now and are not easily searchable, Thibodeau said. The agency successfully tested the concept behind the new system -- creating a searchable network of databases -- by putting information on about 100 databases. ... <hr></blockquote>

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