Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2023 April 7

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April 7

CIA's "approved for release"

For some reason The New York Times article on the CIA website has the "approved for release 2010/04/26" stamp. What's the point of it if the information was published in the publicly available NYT which by definition is not classified? Brandmeister^talk 16:55, 7 April 2023 (UTC)

The document presumably needed some sort of indication that it had been internally reviewed. 136.56.52.157 (talk) 22:35, 7 April 2023 (UTC)

Just to clarify the above answer, it seems likely this document was classified or at least considered something that might need to be classified by someone at the CIA. It therefore needed some sort of formal review before it could be released no matter that what it contains seems innocuous. I assume that this hard-copy was part of a set of other documents used for something and the annotations/underlining was probably performed by a CIA agent or some official.

Note that it's a common concern that the US government and especially the CIA and other security agencies have the tendency to overclassify material. Indeed the recent controversies overclassified documents being found in the private houses or offices of Trump, Biden and Pence resulted in much discussion of this. Since putting aside what they actually had and whatever wrongs they may have done to end up in that situation or in how they responded after, many informed commentators said they weren't surprised for the simple reason that a lot of material is classified where there is no reason for it to be. This also came up with the Clinton email server controversy and many other times.

See e.g. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9]. As noted in these, even various politicians like Obama have acknowledged this and there is even an act Reducing Over-Classification Act intended to reduce it.

In this case the only annotations seem to be underlining certain parts so unless it's a secret code use by a spy to their handler, I'd agree it seems unworthy of classification. However I can easily see some official or agent saying the the underlining was enough to merit classification which IMO would be an example of the overclassification problem.

Yet I can also easily see that in some cases a simple comment on a news article would mean even staunch opponents of overclassification wouldn't consider it an example of the problem e.g. 'Way too close to what actually happened, do we have a leak?'. (This may depend on whether there's a reason for what actually happened to be classified but hopefully you get the idea.) In other words, something being an annotated hard copy of a public news article doesn't mean there is nothing in there that may justify classification.

Nil Einne (talk) 02:44, 8 April 2023 (UTC)

They incarcerated it in article prison, but the parole board let it out early for good behavior. Clarityfiend (talk) 22:54, 7 April 2023 (UTC)