Book Review: The Declassification Engine: What History Reveals About America’s Top Secrets

Abstract

Though more than a decade in the making, the History Lab and Connelly’s book was extremely timely in the age of former President Trump’s classified documents fiasco. Focusing on declassified (so, by nature, classified) documents, Connelly takes the reader through time in a historical account of how America has traditionally and nontraditionally used and shared information with the public and among the upper echelon of need-to-knows. This question, and the varying accounts of America’s positioning toward freedom of information, inspired his 2014 project, History Lab. With support from his institution and colleagues at Columbia University, as well as foundational support from a MacArthur grant, History Lab sought to apply algorithmic mathematics to swaths of declassified documents to determine how and why to declassifying documents. Connelly maintains that with a continually decreasing budget line and staff ratio at the National Archives, the nation’s archivists cannot possibly handle the number of documents marked as any level of classified. Moreover, as the interest in declassification among top leaders goes down and the number of secret clearances goes up, the public interest in access to government transparency and free information stands still as millions of documents remain classified with no real reason as to why. Even Connelly’s own lawyers warned him his work on declassified—mind you, de-classified—documents could lead him to be questioned under the Espionage Act.