The Declassification Engine: What History Reveals About America’s Top Secrets by Matthew Connelly is a detailed read about America’s Top Secrets. Connelly and his team created the world’s largest database of declassified documents and with the help of machine learning, they sifted through it all.
Pairs With: Dark Chocolate Kettle Corn and an inquisitive mind.
Overview
The Declassification Engine by Matthew Connelly is a detailed read about America’s Top Secrets. Connelly and his team created the world’s largest database of declassified documents and with the help of machine learning, they sifted through it all. Their algorithm allowed them to organize the data in a useful way and extrapolate what the US government had and has been deeming important enough to classify.
Connelly highlights that the US government is classifying exponentially more documents year over year and declassifying less and less. “As I write this, the government can no longer even estimate how many secrets it creates each year, or how much it is spending to try to protect them all.”
Connelly states that with the help of machine learning, he discovered, “What we can now see is that secrecy was never just about national security. It served the interests of people who wanted to avoid democratic accountability.” Connelly’s discoveries led him to ask, how can a government and its elected officials be held accountable if so much is deemed classified? And how can we learn from history if the truth is kept locked away?
Fascinating Facts
A few facts that blew me away were:
- As of 2023, The National Archives will no longer accept paper documents, “in part because it has no place to put them.”
- “Now there are over twenty-eight million cubic feet of government files locked up in records centers all across the country. This is equivalent in volume to twenty-six Washington Monuments.”
- “In just ten years, 1947 to 1957, the government created some seven hundred million pages of classified material. If stacked up in archival boxes, this pile of secrets would have been sixty-six miles high, and reach into space.”
- “Year after year, the National Archives budget has been shrinking… Fewer people currently work at the National Archives than during the Reagan administration. And yet their workload is far bigger: twenty-seven million cubic feet of federal records awaiting review and processing, almost twice as many as in 1985, and more than three times more cubic feet of archival holdings. That load includes records from eight new presidential libraries.”
- “… there were thirteen million electronic records in 1991, now there are 21.5 billion, with two billion more every year.”
Conclusion
This one is for you if you enjoy history, global politics, or learning about the US Government. If you sifted through Hilary’s emails when they were leaked then you will most likely like this one as well. Although none of the secrets revealed were overly shocking (I imagine those are still classified). It was still fascinating to read about what information the government has been deeming important enough to have classified. Check this one out if you’d like to learn more about the past and present of US secrets!
P.S. If you liked this one you may also like A Promised Land by Barack Obama. Or you may like, Dark Money by Jane Mayer!
