Review: The real classified documents scandal is larger than any ex-president
. For the last eight years, the group has employed machine-learning tools to decipher what the U.S. government wants to keep us from knowing, and why. “The Declassification Engine” builds on History Lab’s work to explore the origins and implications of America’s long-standing addiction to secrecy.
The U.S. government didn’t always maintain classified records. Connelly begins by emphasizing that the nation’s founders were committed to public transparency. In an age of small government — and an age in which lawmakers and officials answered only to propertied White men — keeping an open book proved straightforward. Systems for protecting secret records periodically emerged in response to military conflicts.
“The Declassification Engine” also reveals that historians have oversimplified some of America’s most controversial diplomatic maneuvers during the Cold War. The CIA’s ouster of Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz in 1954 wasn’t merely a product of the well-documented lobbying campaigns of the United Fruit Company. It was a result of a backroom deal between the White House and American oil executives in the Middle East.
Connelly’s computer-assisted approach is useful in upending the narratives of government transparency on which American politicians often campaign. Every president since Franklin Roosevelt has issued new protocols for protecting government secrets, often while portraying their administrations as more open than those of their predecessors. In practice — and at big-data scale — the numbers belie those stories. Jimmy Carter turns out to have classified documents at the same rate as Richard Nixon.
Readers will doubtless look to “The Declassification Engine” to make sense of the classified files that are now in the news. Yet to insist on the timeliness of Connelly’s research may be to miss its most powerful lesson. There is a much sadder story detailed in the pages of “The Declassification Engine” — a story about the existential threat that secrecy poses to civic knowledge.
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