Here's Where It Gets Interesting - Declassifying America’s Best Kept Secrets with with Matthew Connelly

Episode Date: January 2, 2023

Today on Here’s Where It Gets Interesting, Professor Matthew Connelly gives us an overview of America’s history with classified information. What does it mean when information is classified? Who decides what information is kept from the public and what’s the process for classification and declassification?  Most importantly, how does government accountability affect the future of our democracy? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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who has written a book about government classification. And I guarantee you are going to learn something today that you did not know before. So let's dive into the declassification engine, what history reveals about America's top secrets. I'm Sharon McMahon, and here's where it gets interesting. Thank you for being here. Today I'm chatting with Professor Matthew Connolly. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me, Sharon. Oh my gosh, you study so many topics that I find personally very fascinating. And you have a new book coming out about the topic of classification. And first of all, let's start with the very basics. Most people have heard of the concept of like, oh, it's classified, classified documents. It's a secret. Like most

people know what that means, right? But can you give us like a more official definition of what it means for something to be classified? Yeah, happy to do that. So you're right. I mean, everyone's heard of this, like how things can be top secret and how, you know, oh, there are things that are even more secret than top secret. And I think a lot of us have also heard about people when they get their security clearances and their background checks and all the rest of it. And so like we hear about these things, it's, about these things in movies and television. And lately, there's a lot of it in the news. But the system itself is super complex. And you've probably seen already how it is that lots of experts have rushed out to try to explain things to people.

The way I explain things is that there's really two things here that we're talking about. One is how it is that when the people who are allowed by the government to decide something is secret, when they stamp something in that way, like literally in some cases, what they're basically saying is that the only people who are allowed to see that are people who have a need to know. People who have not only the appropriate security clearance, but whether they've also been read in to a particular program. And read in just means somebody who's already in that program has decided that they're allowed

to see all the secrets inside of it. And so what we're talking about here is like levels of secrecy that go from top secret on down. And then we're also talking about compartments. So you could have somebody with a top secret security clearance. Maybe they can see stuff related to nuclear weapons, but then maybe they're not given the need to know to see things related to cyber weapons, because these are in different departments. So having a top secret security clearance does not

mean you can see all the top secret things that happen within the United States government. It's both, you have the right to know, but then also you have to have a need to know about that. That's right. And, you know, in fact, you know, even people very senior in the White House, like even if they have, you know, the highest of security clearances, and even if they've been read into lots of highly classified programs, sometimes they don't know what they don't know. It's in the documentary record where you find officials in the White House scratching their heads trying to figure out what it is that's out there that they may not even be aware of. And so this whole system,

it is hierarchical. The people who are at the top, you know, have the highest level security clearances, who have been read into the most programs, they're clearly in a position of power. And they can even create new secrets and just designate, you know, new programs as top secret. But even those people, in some cases, they're clueless, right? There are things that are happening in government that they may be unaware of. Is there anybody who has a right to know all the things? Is that the president? Yeah, the president is sovereign over this whole system, meaning that they can decide things are secret and they could also decide when things should be declassified. And so every

president going all the way back to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, right up until Donald Trump issued an executive order that was supposed to set the rules for everybody in the executive branch to determine how these materials would be handled, who would have access to them, and when or if the public would eventually be allowed to see them. let's go back in time to the beginning of this system of classification i think most people could understand that some things absolutely do need to be secret from the public right like of course we didn't have nuclear weapons at america's founding but we can understand why we wouldn't want to just like have a nice little pdf with all the nuclear codes. Like we can all understand like, yeah, some things need to be secret. But can you give us a little a brief history of how did classification get started in the United States government? Who initiated this system? Yeah, I'm so glad you asked, because I think at this point, those of us who grew up living with

this, we take it for granted, right? And you may think that, well, you know, governments and government officials, they try to keep secrets. And it's a little bit like death and taxes, right? We're always going to live with this, whether we'd like to or not. But when you go back through history, it's a little surprising. Like if you go back, you know, all the way to the American Revolution, yes, you know, Ben Franklin, George Washington, they were very familiar with espionage. Ben Franklin ran disinformation campaigns when he was an ambassador in Paris. He was quite effective in doing so. George Washington had his own spy network. He was an agent handler. And even when

he became president, he continued to appreciate the importance of how certain kinds of information, like who's the secret agent, war plans, before you actually go to war. These are things that I think most people would understand need to be protected. But when you get past this period, the first founding of the Republic and the first years, for example, like reading right up to 1812, when, as we all know, the British invaded and sacked Washington. Up to that point, the U.S US continued to have practices that were meant to protect diplomatic communications, continue to protect military secrets and so on. But after that time, when the US, and for more than 100 years that followed,

when the US was, except for periods of war, when the US wasn't really at any risk, existential risk at least, the US was highly unusual among all the countries at the time, in that we had no central intelligence agency. There was no program that was meant to keep tabs on citizens who might be subversive. This was a time in which it was just the opposite. Congress was incredibly open in publishing information about proceedings of Congress, when the executive branch was very open and releasing information, even about things that would normally be secret. And that was true all the way up until the Second World War, with the only exception being in moments of grave crisis,

right, in times of war. And that's when the US ramped up efforts to gather intelligence and protect war plans and so on. But every time that system was dismantled, because the American people just wouldn't put up with a system of permanent secrecy. What does that mean that the American people wouldn't put up with it? Was there a public outcry to dismantle like a central clearinghouse for intelligence? Yeah, absolutely. An early and notorious example would be the Alien and Sedition Acts. So these were passed under a Federalist government, ostensibly, you know, to prevent American citizens from supporting the cause of, say, Napoleon's France or entangling

the U.S. in foreign wars. But the American people were outraged, and the Federalists were so badly beaten in the election that followed that they never recovered as a national party. There were also laws that prevented the government from carrying out surveillance. Like the U.S. Postal Act, when it was first passed and for the whole period that followed, more than 100 years, it was illegal for anyone to tamper with the mail, right? Even government officials could be prosecuted, and they could be convicted of felonies, right, if they were found to be tampering with the mail.

Okay, so you mentioned that that began to change during the period around World War II. And I'm curious, how much of that is related to J. Edgar Hoover? Oh, yeah. Well, you know, Hoover would have changed all this and tried to. And, you know, he first made a known name for himself during the First World War, you know, when he was one of the architects of these mass roundups, where they began to intern people and in some cases to expel them if they weren't citizens. They began to kick them out of the country for anything that could be deemed un-American. And so this is sometimes called the first red scare. And the Bureau of Investigation,

as part of the Justice Department, played a leading role in this vast system of surveillance and this crackdown on people for anything, again, that could be called un-American. But this is a case in point because Hoover was all before Congress, and he had to promise that he would never again try to conduct political surveillance, and he would stick to prosecuting actual criminal activities. Now, of course, we know now that Hoover continued carrying out this kind of work in secret. And we also know that even when it became illegal under the Federal Communications Act, when it became illegal to intercept communications by telegraph, that is cables, even so army intelligence continued intercepting these communications and decrypting them. And this continued because there were some people in government who wanted it to continue.

And they knew it was illegal, which is why they kept it secret. And the way they read the law was that as long as they didn't was illegal, which is why they kept it secret. And the way they read the law was that as long as they didn't tell anyone, as long as they didn't bring a case in court and show their evidence intercepted in this way, then they could continue conducting it in secret. I've heard it reported so many people in government knew or at least had a good idea of what J. Edgar Hoover was up to, including U.S. presidents. And I'm curious about your take on why nobody stopped him. Some people have said it's because he had information on them. And so they were afraid that whatever he had on them was going

to come out. Or maybe they suspected he had information on them and they didn't want to chance it. So they just let his power continue to sort of grow unfettered. I wonder if you have a take on why he was allowed to just continue to do what he was doing for so long. Well, you know, we like to blame Jack Groover because he was such a colorful character. He was around for so many decades. And there certainly are notorious cases where he would try to blackmail his political opponents or people he thought were vulnerable. And so the information he had on JFK and his affairs,

that's a notorious case. But the fact is most presidents were quite delighted that Hoover provided information to them. There's often talk in recent years about how there's some deep state must be like conspiring in secret, right? And subverting the will even of presidents. But what I've found is that over and over again, presidents at least eventually become aware, you know, of what's happening.

And in many cases, they're quite happy with it, right? So Johnson's a famous example of that. He was happy to be fed information by the NSA as well, right? And reading intercepts and so on. And presidents love this power because it's one of the few ways in which they can be accountable to no one. You know, it's basically up to presidents to decide what is secret. And if they call something a matter of national security, the courts are almost completely unwilling to tell them. Yeah, over and over. Even the Supreme Court has been like, listen, if it's national security, we don't really have much to do with it. So as long as you can demonstrate that it's national security, then there's not a lot we're going to do to insert ourselves in this situation.

There's a precedent going all the way back to the early 1950s, Reynolds versus the United States. And it's just so revealing because this was a case in which the Air Force was conducting a test of some electronic equipment aboard an American bomber. And aboard, there were a few technicians from RCA. So these weren't Air Force personnel. This plane crashed. Most of the men aboard died, including those technicians. And their widows sued the government, right? And they wanted to find out what happened. And the Secretary of the Air Force insisted that the crash report itself was classified and could not be revealed without revealing important national security information. So a federal judge accepted that. And ever since,

more than 800 times now, that case has been cited, not only to give the government, in this case, the executive branch, the power to classify information, but also to prevent judges from even looking at the information the government claims is too sensitive to show to anyone. And so hundreds of times, federal judges have decided they don't even need to look at what it is the government is telling everyone is too sensitive for anyone to see. Now, the scandal here is that eventually, when this report was released, it showed that there was no national security information in the report. There was no information that would have been of any use to any foreign

power. But what they did find in the report was that this plane was known to have a defect, that it was not airworthy. And these technicians were never given the safety training that might have allowed them to save their own lives. Nevertheless, the widows, without access to that report, were forced to settle their case with the government and accept a lot less money than they might have won otherwise. That happened, too, in the Horomatsu Supreme Court case, where the Supreme Court was just accepted that we needed to incarcerate 120,000 Japanese Americans. And then later it was uncovered that the underpinnings, the basis for, you know,

the national security arguments were completely in many ways, fraudulent people made up information that wasn't really happening. You know, like invented all these ship-to-shore transmissions that were allegedly happening on the West Coast, and it was so dangerous. And for our own security, we had to incarcerate everybody. And then we later came to find out that none of that was true. And I've spoken about this in previous podcasts, so I won't go into it too much. But of course, that had literally generation-changing consequences for hundreds of thousands of Americans.

Oh, absolutely. And one of the tragic aspects of this is that, as you said, Sharon, there really is information that can get people killed. I mean, there's information that I think most of us when it comes to things like sniper manuals or there's information on the open shelves of the National Archives about how you can, you know, make explosives at home. I mean, most of us, I think, would agree that, no, the public doesn't need to know every detail, whether it's nuclear launch codes, or more mundane things that can still be murderous in their consequences. But by trying to keep so many things secret, including, you know, many, many things that are really would be of no consequence or harm to anyone, except perhaps a few officials, right, who'd rather work in secret, because they have not created a more rational impossible to protect that truly vital information, that we see leaks on a scale we've never seen before. And where significant information that really does affect our national security gets published in the newspapers, sometimes even before it appears in intelligence

reports. And why is that? Is it because the secrecy machine is so big that it is impossible to protect what truly needs to be protected. Why are we seeing an increase in actually dangerous information making it into the public consciousness? It's basically the system has grown out of control. And so in its conception, it seemed rational, right? That you would screen people to make sure that they weren't security risks. And then you would have a system where you would have designations for particular kinds of secrets, right? And then over time, part of that system was that eventually these secrets would be released, right? And so you would, over time, manage the amount of information you're trying

to protect. But at every step of the way, the system is broken down. So to take an example, there are now more than 4 million people with security clearances. And, you know, some of the things that people have access to are really sensitive on a large scale. And so like, just to take the example of WikiLeaks, you know, Chelsea Manning, when he released quarter of a million diplomatic cables, and then when Julian Assange decided to make this information accessible to anyone who could guess an old password, what they ended up doing was jeopardizing the safety of many people whose only offense was to talk to an American diplomat. So we're talking about human rights activists, like Uyghur activists in China and so on,

who thought that they could speak in confidence to American Foreign Service officer. But because all of this information, hundreds of thousands of secret cables, activists in China and so on, who thought that they could speak in confidence to American Foreign Service officer. But because all of this information, hundreds of thousands of secret cables were shared with people who, in this case, was an army private, it means that that information is all out there for anyone to have. So the U.S. government has lost the capacity to protect truly sensitive information and it's put all of us at risk. But one risk I think that we can't forget is the profound and growing risk

to basic democratic accountability. Because at the end of the day, even historians, if even historians can't get access to this information, right? When so much of it is leaking, but so much more of it is kept hidden or destroyed, it means at the end of the day, these officials are accountable to no one. Visa and OpenTable are dishing up something new. Get access to primetime dining reservations by

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And you can get a $1 small coffee, a $2 small latte, or like me, a $1 small coffee and a $2 small latte. Available now until November 24th in Ontario only. Woohoo! Woohoo! I would love to hear you talk a little bit more about the process by which most information becomes classified. I know you mentioned that ultimately the president is sort of at the helm of this. They often write an executive order that controls how the process by which information is classified and declassified. And the assumption being that if a president doesn't write a new executive order, that they're still playing by the rules

of the previous executive order. But it's not like the president has time to sit and be like, this is medium classified. And this right here is really classified. The president, obviously, that's not their job. So I would love to hear more about the current official process for how information becomes classified and then declassified. According to these executive orders, there are some number of people, it's about 3000, who have what's called original classification authority. And these tend to be senior officials or political appointees. And what it means when you have original classification authorities, they could say, well, we have this new technique where we can listen in on audio recordings on people's personal computers.

It's a new program. We've discovered this. We paid for it on an open market for hacking tools, and we don't want people to know that we have it. Some one of those 3,000 people can decide that this is top secret, and they could also decide this is sensitive compartmentalized information. So you need both that top-level security clearance, and you also need to be read into that particular program if you're going to know anything about it.

Beyond that, it's not complicated because, in addition to those thousands of people, not a huge number, right, a few thousand who have the ability to decide some new program is going to be top secret, there could be a large number of people who will have access to that information. And then they, in turn, are going to write their emails and their text messages, and they're going to create their memoranda and their PowerPoint decks and all the rest of it. Every time they create any new information related to that original secret, that too is going to be classified at the same level. The result of this is that, yes, presidents over the years have reduced the numbers of

people who have that original classification authority. They also have said that they want to limit the amount of information that's designated at the top secret level. But because there are so many millions of people who have access to this information, and because they, for their part, are creating related information every day, the derivative classification has continued to grow and grow and grow. So that's one reason why, you know, as much as presidents say they want to limit, you know, what's secret and they want to strike a balance of accountability, it nevertheless means that the amount of classified information continues to grow exponentially. Now, the last stage of this process

is the most complicated and difficult of all. This is the stage at which officials are supposed to review these secrets and decide what can be released to the public. This can happen a few different ways. One that a lot of us are familiar with is, let's say you file a Freedom of Information Act request, right? They are required by law to give you an answer as to whether they can release that information. And if they can't, why not? Anybody who's filed a FOIA will know that it can take literally years, right, to get a meaningful response.

So the government created something called automatic declassification. According to this set of rules, after some decades, typically about 30 years, now here's the problem. The government now estimates that they're spending more than $18 billion every year just to protect state secrets. There's $8 billion for those secure, compartmentalized intelligence facilities. It's for all those retinal scanners and all the training and all the background checks and all the rest of it. How much do you think they spend on declassifying information?

I'm going to guess it's a little less. It's about half of 1%, right? So it's less than $100 million. So as much as presidents talk about how, oh, we're going to strike a balance, you know, on the one hand, we have to protect national security. On the other hand, we have to be accountable to the American people. Well, Sharon, I can tell you, there is no balance. $18 billion on one side, and you took less than half of 1% of that, less than $100 million, you put it on the other scale. What do you think is going to happen?

It's a system that is fundamentally broken. And the only way we're going to begin to fix it is if we undergo root and branch reform. I'm very curious about the subtitle of your book, the book is called The Declassification Engine. What history reveals about America's top secrets? And I would love to hear you tell people very briefly, what do you think history reveals about America's top secrets. And I would love to hear you tell people very briefly, what do you think history reveals about America's top secrets? Well, there are a lot of shocking things that you discover that people do when they think they're doing it in secret. Some of the kinds of experiments that were run, even now, I think it's just appalling, even decades later, the kind of surveillance operations that they continue to run, even when knowing that they're routinely breaking the law.

Another thing that I found kind of interesting is how a lot of, you know, what's classified, and including lots of information that's been secret for 70 years or more, it was never really secret to begin with. We know this, like when, for example, we look at like Hillary Clinton's emails, when government officials pass between themselves, you know, when they pass around like newspaper clippings, they will designate those newspaper clippings as secret, sometimes even toxic. When it was in a newspaper already. And unfortunately, this is the default. In government, it's often said that you can get in trouble if you don't classify something, but you're not going to get in trouble if you over classify something.

And so what you find is that if the default is to classify something, and in many cases, classify at the highest level, that's what they're going to do. They're going to classify enormous amounts of information. Now, let's look at WikiLeaks. There were lots of things that were deeply embarrassing and sometimes dangerous. And for a period, for a few months after these WikiLeaks cables became available, there were a whole series of stories, right, about the things that seemed kind of surprising, in some cases even shocking. But I can tell you, for the most part, those things were already well known. The vast majority of these things, even if they were reported in the press, were already public knowledge, right? I mean,

the fact that the US was conducting drone strikes over Yemen, everybody knew that. Everybody was paying attention. The fact that the Gulf states wanted to try to get the US to invade Iran, that too was public knowledge at the time. But a lot of what was classified as secret wasn't even interesting enough to report on in the newspapers. All of the WikiLeaks show you had a quarter of a million scandals. Did we have a quarter of a million newspaper stories? Not at all, right? We had a few dozen and maybe even fewer real stories.

The vast majority of that stuff was just not that interesting. So what we're talking about is bureaucrats basically keeping secret the things that they do every day, no matter how mundane, no matter how boring. There was a recent Supreme Court case even about torture, CIA torture, black sites. I'm sure you remember this. And that exact topic was brought up where people were like, listen, everyone already knows it's in Poland. Poland is like, yeah, it's here. But yet we're trying to insist on keeping it classified. And that's just like one other illustration of exactly what you're talking about, that sometimes information that's classified is information that's already out there in the world, in a newspaper.

Official statements of a foreign nation, you know, etc. Some of it we already know. And so it doesn't even really warrant a newsworthy coverage after it's been declassified. Right. And in a way, we're complicit with this, right? You know, when journalists, when authors, when they want to, you know, hype the books that they're trying to sell about what's top secret and history's mysteries and so on, sometimes we add to that, you know, impression. But it's really a false impression. Now, don't get me wrong.

I mean, I was really shocked and appalled at some of the things we discovered. But sometimes what you discover, the truth is stranger than fiction, right? So people, like, for example, when it comes to UFOs, they have all kinds of ideas, right, about what it is that they're hiding out in the desert. Like, could there be alien bodies, right? Could they have recovered spacecraft and so on? And what do we make of those videos that were released by the Navy or at least people had access to them a few years back? What we found – and it's not just me, it's others who worked in this field, data scientists, for example, looking at millions of declassified documents – what you find is that in terms of what gets released and when, the stuff that gets held

on to for the longest, the things that are really top secret and they are very reluctant to release even decades after the fact, are things related to nuclear weapons, things related to cyber weapons. And you can even quantify this. So there's a researcher named Hannah Wallach at Microsoft Research, and she calculated how long it took, on average, for nuclear secrets to be released, and she compared them to UFO secrets. The average age of a nuclear secret before it reaches the public is 57 years. When it comes

to unidentified flying objects, or what they now call unmanned aerial phenomena, it's 14 years. Just ask yourself. When you think about it, there's a simple explanation. Now, in Hollywood, they want us to believe that the government wants us to avoid panic. There are so many Hollywood scripts where when you discover, yes, the aliens are invading, they don't want to tell the public right away because they're too worried that people are going to get too upset too quickly. Well, unfortunately, we have a lot of history to show otherwise. Over and over again, the Air Force has wanted to panic people into appropriating more money, more weapons systems. Think about the bomber gap, the missile gap. Now we're talking about our gap with hypersonic missiles. Over and

over again, the military has tried to panic people by telling them things that turn out to be false about threats we face from abroad. Don't you think that if they had conclusive proof that the aliens are coming to get us, they would want everybody to know immediately? It's one better way to justify even more hundreds of billions of dollars for Pentagon appropriations. Some of the stuff that you discover, in a way, it's surprising. It's sometimes funny. Sometimes it's just bad, right?

But what I'm suggesting to you, it's like one of the best kept secrets in Washington is how much of this stuff that they're covering up was never even secret to begin with. And it's doing it for bureaucratic convenience. I'm curious about some of the more recent things in the news related to classified documents. Everybody listening is well familiar with the FBI's raid of former President Trump's home, Mar-a-Lago, their seizure of a large number of documents, some of which were found to have various types of classification markings, and his assertion that he declassified them before leaving the White House and that he was within his rights to take them with him. I'm curious if you have any thoughts about the process by which documents would have been declassified as he left the White House? Is he correct in stating that he blanket declassified everything? Is he allowed to keep them at his house? Do you have any thoughts about that entire situation?

Yeah, there's a few aspects of this that I feel haven't really gotten the attention they should. As much as there's been blanket media coverage, there's some critical elements to this story. Like one of them I've heard no one report on is how Donald Trump was the first president since Franklin Roosevelt not to issue an executive order regarding the handling of classified information. Donald Trump's administration was still operating under the rules of the Obama administration, because all of the procedures for classifying and safely handling sensitive information, these were rules developed back during the Obama administration. And Donald Trump never, you know, in any way,

indicated that he wanted to rewrite those rules or change them in any fashion. And so yes, presidents ultimately are sovereign over secrecy, but they can't just do whatever they want from day to day. They have to issue rules that are binding for the entire executive branch. So Donald Trump never did that. So he was operating still under the same rules as Barack Obama. And if, as some would now say, he wanted to be the transparency president, he wanted to release everything as quickly as he could, then why is it he never issued new rules to make the government more open and accountable? So that's one part of this. The second part of this

is that, you know, to me, it's kind of ironic that Donald Trump wanted to take these papers with him to Mar-a-Lago as if he was so protected, right? He wants to preserve these records, maybe for history, or maybe like for his own recollection, maybe some memoir he's yet to write. But this was a president who routinely tore up presidential papers in the Oval Office. There were two men whose more or less full-time job it was, you know, as public employees, was to try to scotch tape those papers back together. And we also know, you know, how it is that Donald Trump also ripped up papers and threw them in the toilet, tried to flush them down with mixed success. OK, so is this a president that you trust to be somebody who can safely handle records

that belong to all of us? I think that's the thing that a lot of people are missing. These papers were not the property of Donald Trump. The moment he stopped being president, they belong to history. They belong to the National Archives, because this is our national patrimony, right? We have a right to know. The American public has a right to know what it is that Kim Jong-il was writing to Donald Trump. We have a right to know what Donald Trump was saying in conversations with Vladimir Putin.

Now, we don't necessarily have a right to know all this immediately, but I think all of us believe that we live in a country where these kinds of records are preserved so that one day, one day at least, historians will be able to look back and reconstruct the story of our time. And who would want that more than the people, or who should want that more than the people or who should want it more than the people who feel that Donald Trump, you know, has been treated unfairly. They of all people should want these records preserved for history and stored at the National Archives. So that historians, you know, with some decades and with some perspective and detachment will be able to rewrite the history of our time if they feel that all of us have been unfair to Donald Trump. That's a very good point, that historians with perspective and detachment from the emotional

feelings that people have, like right now, most of us don't feel a lot of emotion about what happened in 1911. You know what I mean? We're able to look at it much more analytically, much more critically. And someday historians will do the same of what was happening in 2020, 2021, 2022. And if Donald Trump is being treated unfairly, you would want these documents to be preserved so that future historians would be able to demonstrate, make their case for the ways in which he was wronged. That's a very interesting, an interesting perspective. Yes. And just to be clear, you know, I would say the same thing about Hillary Clinton.

clear, you know, I would say the same thing about Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton, for her part, you know, she decided that her lawyers should be allowed to go through her email and decide which of those records were private. And they went on and deleted tens of thousands of email. So we may never know, right, what was in those communications and whether they were really private or not. So to me, it's a little sad because the American people, I think we should all be on the same side here. I think all of us should want our officials to preserve a record of what they're doing and to preserve that for history

because that history belongs to all of us and no public official, whether it's a secretary of state or even the president of the United States has a right to destroy that history without ever letting the rest of us even have a look at it. I love that. That's great. Okay, I have one last question. This is a question people ask me all

the time. Why is the information surrounding JFK's assassination still classified when multiple recent presidents have been like, I'm going to declassify it? And then they're like, actually, probably not. And then now Joe Biden has a chance to declassify it. And then they're like, actually, probably not. And then now Joe Biden has a chance to declassify it. And they're like, going to delay, not going to be released quite yet. We'll reevaluate. What is it? What is hiding in those records that we cannot declassify them all of these years later? Right.

Well, you know, there are a lot of shocking things that have been declassified. Like we know the CIA ran a program where they try to dose people LSD to turn them into assassins. You know, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Operation Northwoods, you know, they were proposing to the White House, the Kennedy White House, that they would sink ships on the open seas, that they would carry out bombings in American cities to try to provoke war with Cuba. seas that they would carry out bombings in American cities to try to provoke war with Cuba. So a lot of really shocking stuff has already been released. And so I can understand your question, like, what is it that's working in these JOK papers? Now, personally, you know, I can't know, right? I don't have any of that. But, you know, based on everything that I've learned so far, remember when I said the things that statistically we know now, you know, the government is most reluctant to release, it includes things that statistically we know now, you know, the government is most reluctant to release. It includes things like cyber weapons, right? Nuclear weapons, also includes programs to do with surveillance. And when I say surveillance, I mean, not just

domestic surveillance, but the way in which US government spies on other countries, including other countries. And, you know, government reports, you know, especially when it concerned the assassination of American president, I would bet you anything that they were using every available asset to gather as much intelligence as they possibly could, right, including the National Security Agency. And I'm sure that they were using methods that in some cases might still be sensitive even now. Right. So my best guess is they have all along for decades now, the NSA and the other 17 intelligence agencies have been doing everything within their power to prevent any president, including Donald Trump and now Joe Biden, from releasing what they think are the crown jewels, which are sources and methods related to the interception of communications, whether at home or abroad. So that's the kind of thing I think that they will never want to release. That and the names of confidential informants is another thing that they guard very, very closely. But it's a fair question.

Donald Trump, of all people, as you said, over and over again, he promised he was going to release this stuff. I'm sorry. It's 70 years now. It's 70 years. I mean, or 60, rather's 70 years now. It's 70 years. I mean, or 60 rather. 60 years. Like the idea that even now, the NSA was using methods and using informants where they still can't tell the public about it,

even though this continues to fuel really self-destructive conspiracy theories, I just don't buy it. It's just another example of how there are at least some people in the government who truly want to be accountable to no one. Yes. I mean, it has to be. That's what, you know, when people ask me about this, I'm like, it has to be something, right? There has to be some reason. It's not, it's not that he was killed by aliens. It's that there is something perhaps that the government itself

was doing that they don't want you to know about. Well, Sharon, the good news is we don't just have to sit and wait. You know, a lot of the research that I described in the declassification engine, it's work that I did with data scientists where we can now use artificial intelligence. You can use machine learning algorithms with massive amounts of data, millions of declassified documents, and we can actually begin to tell what it is they didn't want us to know. There's a lot you can do now to analyze redactions, analyze the words around redactions, analyze the stuff that was once blacked out, but has now been revealed. And we can begin to make more than educated guesses.

We can begin to make precise calculations as to the odds of different kind of information being withheld from us. And so that's exactly what we need to do. We need to do a lot more work like that and not just keep waiting for government officials to give up this power that they're so obviously unwilling to part with. Fascinating. Thank you so much for your time today. I learned a lot and I really enjoyed chatting with you.

Thank you, Sharon. I really enjoyed it as well. Thanks so much for being here today. Check out Matthew Connolly's new book, The Declassification Engine, what history reveals about America's top secrets. It is scheduled to be released in February of 2023. So pre-order or order it now. Thank you so much for listening to Here's Where It Gets Interesting. If you enjoyed this episode, would you consider sharing it on social media or leaving us a rating or review on your favorite podcast platform?

All those things help podcasters out so much. The show is written and researched by executive producer, Heather Jackson, Valerie Hoback, and Sharon McMahon. Our audio engineer is Jenny Snyder and it's hosted by me, Sharon McMahon. We'll see you again soon.