The CIA has published online its entire history through the 1990s, and now the public can view more than 12 million pages of 930,000 declassified documents.
The documents are available in the CIA Electronic Reading Room at CIA.gov. Previously, the documents were available to the public, but only by going to the National Archives Records Administration in College Park, Maryland, in person.
“Access to this historically significant collection is no longer limited by geography. The American public can access these documents from the comfort of their homes,” said CIA Director of Information Management Joseph Lambert in a news release.
Some of the topics covered in these documents include the Cold War, Vietnam, terrorism, and military issues worldwide. Policy files and memoranda are also included. Imagery reports from a variety of locations and time periods also appear.
Some of the declassified records do include redactions, which the CIA says it tried to keep light.
“None of this is cherry-picked,” CIA spokesperson Heather Fritz Horniak said, CNN reported. “It’s the full history. It’s goods and bads.” The redactions were to protect sources or methods of operating that could harm current national security.
The agency had said in October 2016 that it hoped to have the records online by the end of 2017, but advances in technology and data management helped speed up the timeline and complete the massive project ahead of schedule, according to CNN.
Although the information in the archive has been available to the public for some time, putting it online will likely shed light on new information about the CIA’s activities throughout its history.
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