Free At Last

Let it not be said that we are not living in a free and open society.  After all, the National Security Agency just declassified a 202-year-old book on cryptography.  (I didn’t know the NSA was around 202 years ago to classify the book in the first place!)

In addition to the cryptography text, the NSA declassified 50,000 pages of venerable documents once considered so sensitive that our national security would be compromised should they ever be made public.

The document dump was “the first in a series of releases planned over the next two years” as part of NSA’s “commitment” to comply with President Obama’s January, 2009 memo demanding more transparency from federal agencies. Last month, the CIA released a trove of allegedly-explosive information from World War I, including the 90 year-old German formula for invisible ink.

Included in this new motherlode (.pdf) of supposedly secret-packed documents: a 1944 report on Japanese merchant ships, a 1946 dossier on Chinese railroads, and a 1954 German article on Lenin’s use of secret writing (with milk) while in prison. Presumably, this refers to Lenin’s stint in Siberia, in the mid-1890s. Exactly why Vladimir Ilyich’s reliance on lactose letters needed to be kept under wraps for 11 decades, the NSA doesn’t say.

The timing of the document dump is delicious, however. The government’s five-year effort to charge an NSA employee with violating the Espionage Act collapsed yesterday. Thomas Drake was charged with leaking to a reporter damaging — though not necessarily secret — information about a near-useless $1.2 billion project. Presumably, the government would have rather kept its billion-dollar boondoggle to itself for another two hundred years.