The Declassification Engine: What History Reveals About America's Top Secrets
by Matthew Connelly
View on GoodreadsColumbia historian Matthew Connelly's argument — built from a massive computational analysis of declassified documents — that the US classification system has metastasized into something nobody can audit, with implications for democracy, accountability, and historical memory.
Core ideas
- Classification is now the default, not the exception; vastly more is classified than can possibly be justified by genuine national security need.
- The cost is structural: democracy depends on informed consent; over-classification makes informed consent impossible, and the bureaucracy that grew around the secrecy state is itself a constituency for more of it.
- Computational methods can recover what manual review can't — patterns in declassified data reveal the shape of what's still hidden.
Published2023
Pages540
ISBN9781101871577
ReadMay 2023
