CIA places 12 million pages of documents online

The Central Intelligence Agency is based in Langley, Va. The agency has put more than 12 million declassified documents online. Photo by Carol M. Highsmith/Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division/Wikimedia Commons

COLLEGE PARK, MD.m Jan. 18 (UPI) — The Central Intelligence Agency has published more than 12 million pages of documents online — documents that were previously difficult to access.

The 930,000 documents were previously only available from four computer terminals at the National Archives in College Park, Md. Now they are on a website that is part of the Freedom of Information Act Electronic Reading Room.

“Access to this historically significant collection is no longer limited by geography,” said Joseph Lambert, the CIA’s information management director in a news release. “The American public can access these documents from the comfort of their homes.”

All of the documents have been previously declassified, but some information is redacted to protect sources and national security, CIA spokesperson Heather Fritz Horniak said.

The documents concern CIA activities from the 1940s through the 1990s, and include information from the Vietnam and Korean wars, and the Cold War. It even includes documents of purported UFO sightings and the organization’s “Star Gate” program that investigated possible psychic abilities.

“None of this is cherry-picked,” Horniak said. “It’s the full history. It’s good and bads.”

The CIA is required to declassify documents that are 25 years old, or older.

“Human beings can only do so many pages,” Lambert said in an interview with Bloomberg News. “It’s a difficult endeavor to make sure that you can put together the right technologies to assist a human being going forward to scale to hundreds of millions of pages.”

That includes using artificial intelligence and machine-learning tools, Lambert said.

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