Your points are well taken, both about the Venona project, which Ann Coulter in her book “Treason,” a lot of the people at Human Events, and others have dissected to prove the points you just made. That George Clowney would make the movie he did in the fact of the truth shows just how imprevious to it so many people are.

I think you’re arguing for the continuing to keep the treasure trove classified because it’s difficult to determine the impact of even innocuous-looking items. OK, I’ll accept that. But why can’t someone in the government working closely with historical archivists put some kind of high-level overview together that says “this is what these docs and other things tell us,” especially if they go against the so-called conventional wisdom?

James

First I’d like to point out that the Venona Project intercepted and decoded thousands of secret Soviet messages during the Cold War. These documents proved that there was a vast network of Communist spies in the US government, some of whom had access to sensitive information.

Venona began declassification in 1995, and some of the decoded messages have been available online since that time. Yet the Left in this country still portrays the so-called “McCarthy Era” as a dark time when nasty Conservatives ruined the lives of completely innocent people for no reason except their desire to scare the voters so much that they would be re-elected. When are they actually going to admit that Venona proves that they were wrong?

My second point is about classifying large amounts of information, even if it doesn’t directly put people’s lives in danger. (Which, I think, is Tom’s objection.)

Espionage isn’t James Bond. There’s almost never the one document that breaks the case. Real spies instead deal with data mining, looking at matters that only tagentially relate to the big secrets. All of that data has to be classified, even if it appears to be silly to someone who simply looks at one or two documents and can’t see what they have to do with protecting vital secrets.

Not only that, but even knowing which data is being hidden will tell someone a great deal about what is going on. This means that even more data has to be classified, stuff that has nothing at all to do with anything, in order to produce a smoke screen to throw potential enemies off the scent.

James

It was also a one day story on Nightline which you covered back on 2/15: http://www.bizzyblog.com/?p=1457 .