U.S. Government’s Classification of Secrets

Re “Is U.S. Keeping Too Many Secrets?” May 17: I thought it rather ironic that the left side of the front page had an article explaining that although the government keeps lots of secrets there is really nothing to any of these conspiracy theories, while the right side described the plight of the “Tuskegee survivors.”

I was at Cal State Northridge in 1968 when Bobby Kennedy spoke, and I vividly recall cries from the audience rising to a crescendo that Kennedy could not make out until an aide whispered, “They are calling for the archives to be opened,” referring to the records on JFK’s assassination. Kennedy demurred, but the point is that very few citizens believe the government’s explanation of this event. How long can a democracy survive where the populace is fed only heavily screened information?

STEVE EDWARDS

Oxnard

* Your story on government secrecy calls attention to the millions of pages of JFK assassination documents released through 1996, as well as to the potential use of the World Wide Web to increase public access to government information, but fails to make an important connection. Since 1995, a large and growing number of the JFK assassination papers have been made available to the public through a Web site operated by the National Archives and Records Administration (https://www.nara.gov/nara/ jfk/jfk.html).

Because of the widespread public distrust of the government’s version of the JFK assassination, NARA has deliberately refrained from making “corrections” in the JFK data, even for obvious misspellings, to avoid triggering any public concerns about altering the material in the database. I know this, since NARA uses our software to compile the JFK data and offer it over the Web, and they could have used it to globally correct spelling and other typographical errors.

Your story does not touch on a major technical issue that makes declassification difficult. If a given fact, such as the range of a radar device, is classified, the page containing that fact becomes classified, as does the entire document containing that page. The persons who later review documents for declassification may well not know precisely what data caused the document to be classified and, without a computer-based system to help them, they are limited to meat-ax decision-making. A follow-up story about how classification is really done and undone, without the bad guys-good guys slant of the present story, would be very instructive.

CARLOS A. CUADRA

Pres., Cuadra Associates

Los Angeles