Obama's newest FOIA-related order a boon for historians

President Obama came into office pledg­ing greater open­ness, and his lat­est exec­u­tive order seems to directly speak to that pledge — though it will likely ben­e­fit his­tor­i­cal inves­ti­ga­tions especially:

President Obama signed an exec­u­tive order on Tuesday that sets new rules for when gov­ern­ment agen­cies can keep doc­u­ments clas­si­fied. The order is full of pro­vi­sions that should make gov­ern­ment trans­parency activists swoon. For exam­ple, within the next four years, the gov­ern­ment will strive to declas­sify 400 mil­lion pages of his­tor­i­cal documents.

via Executive Order Reduces Total Of Classified Papers : NPR.

The White House blog has more details after intro­duc­ing the new order:

President Obama has issued a new exec­u­tive order on “Classified National Security Information” (the Order) that addresses the prob­lem of over-​​classification in numer­ous ways and will allow researchers to gain time­lier access to for­merly clas­si­fied records.

via Promoting Openness and Accountability by Making Classification a Two-​​Way Street.

Of par­tic­u­lar impor­tance to his­to­ri­ans is the “prin­ci­ple that no records may remain clas­si­fied indef­i­nitely and pro­vides enforce­able dead­lines for declas­si­fy­ing infor­ma­tion exempted from auto­matic declas­si­fi­ca­tion at 25 years.” It directs the Archivist of the United States to “develop pri­or­i­ties for declas­si­fi­ca­tion activ­i­ties under the NDC’s purview, with input from the gen­eral pub­lic and after tak­ing into account researcher inter­est and the like­li­hood of declassification.”

As an his­to­rian with at least a pass­ing inter­est in U.S. gov­ern­ment doc­u­ments, I believe this will help to, at the very least, estab­lish a new sense of pri­or­i­ties in exec­u­tive agen­cies that may counter their ten­den­cies towards secrecy (if in doubt, clas­sify it) that was bol­stered under the Bush Administration.

The order may have less of an impact on con­tem­po­rary trans­parency issues, despite the White House blog post­ing call­ing this the pro­mo­tion of “open­ness and account­abil­ity.” The order specif­i­cally rec­og­nizes the impor­tance of secrecy in the name of national secu­rity, for exam­ple, and cer­tainly there have been instances of con­tin­ued resis­tance to FOIA requests recently. (For more on FOIA bat­tles, see: EFF’s FOIA Litigation for Accountable Government and the Sunlight Foundation on the Freedom of Information Act.)

In short, this will be good for his­to­ri­ans, but may be of lim­ited use for those more inter­ested in con­tem­po­rary issues.