Declassified, But Still Unavailable

Two hundred and seventy million pages of FBI files were recently declassified. Why can’t the public access them?

By Nat Parry

At the stroke of midnight on December 31, hundreds of millions of pages of secret government documents—including 270 million pages of FBI files—were instantly declassified, promising to shed light on everything from the Cuban Missile Crisis to government surveillance of antiwar and civil rights activists in the ’60s and ’70s.

It was to be a “Cinderella moment,” said the New York Times, for researchers of the government’s secret history. But upon contacting the National Archives, researchers learned that declassification is not the same thing as release—none of the documents were publicly available for review.

Read on.