#declassification

Declassifying Federal Secrets: The Struggle for Transparency in a Post-Truth Era

The US House Oversight Committee’s announcement of the Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, led by Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna, has been met with both optimism and skepticism. This initiative aims to declassify information on several high-profile topics, including the assassinations of JFK, RFK, and MLK, Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAPs)/Unidentified Submerged Objects (USOs), the Epstein Client List, the origins of COVID-19, and 9/11 files. By examining the strengths and weaknesses of this task force, it becomes clear that its potential for transparency is substantial, yet its success is contingent upon navigating inherent challenges.

The commitment to transparency is undoubtedly a step in the right direction for a healthy democracy. Declassifying information on these longstanding topics taps into the public’s desire for truth, while the planned platform for public submissions encourages citizen engagement and inclusivity. Moreover, a genuinely bipartisan approach could mitigate partisan gridlock, serving as a model for future collaborative efforts. However, for this to materialize, the task force must ensure balanced membership, with diverse, topic-specific expertise to prevent politicization and enhance investigative capabilities.

Several concerns, if left unaddressed, could undermine the task force’s efficacy. The lack of clarity regarding its scope, authority, and powers may lead to jurisdictional conflicts and inefficient resource allocation. The broad scope of topics, although ambitious, risks diluted focus, particularly given the complexity of subjects like UAPs and COVID-19 origins. To compound these issues, the potential for politicization is heightened by the unclear nature of Democratic participation and the emphasis on President Trump’s executive order, which could skew findings and topic selection.

Furthermore, the task force’s investigative capabilities, expertise, and budget remain unspecified, a troubling omission given the specialized knowledge required for some topics. While the assurance of whistleblower protection is welcome, it lacks the necessary detail to be fully reassuring. To overcome these challenges, it is imperative that the task force establishes an unequivocal definition of its scope and authority, ensuring focused resource allocation and conflict avoidance.

A forward path necessitates the implementation of several key measures. The task force should guarantee transparent, robust mechanisms for whistleblower protection and witness handling, providing clear protocols to safeguard informants and manage sensitive testimonies. Realistic timelines and success metrics must be set to maintain public trust and facilitate progress evaluation. Committing to open meeting records, document releases, and regular updates will uphold the initiative’s transparency pledge. Finally, engaging relevant experts and stakeholders for each topic will enrich the investigative process and outcomes, ensuring the task force sheds light on historically and contemporarily significant secrets, and sets a precedent for collaborative, effective oversight in the U.S. government.

The Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets embodies a laudable pursuit of transparency and truth, with its success hanging in the balance. By adopting a balanced, transparent, and expert-driven approach, it can fulfill its promise and leave a lasting, positive impact on U.S. governance.

Lawmakers announce task force on declassification of federal secrets (NewsNation, February 2025)

All 215 present Republicans and all 204 present Democrats voted to pass Republican Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley’s legislation, which previously passed the Senate by unanimous consent. The White House has not signaled whether or not President Joe Biden will sign the bill, but it passed both chambers by more than the two-thirds support necessary to override a presidential veto. ...

The U.S. intelligence community is split on whether or not COVID-19 leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The Department of Energy recently concluded with “low confidence” that the virus emerged from WIV, joining the Federal Bureau of Investigation in its assessment. The FBI views a lab leak with “moderate confidence,” while four other intelligence agencies view natural spillover as the virus’ likely origin. Two agencies are undecided.

Chambers begins playing the classified record

The video Ledo watches shows something shocking: the Hideauze are humanoid and were originally human! This causes Ledo to come to the realization that he has been killing fellow humans. He regrets his genocidal actions and questions whether it is even worth fighting against the Hideauze at all. Undoubtedly, there is more trauma for Ledo, heightened when he holds the flesh of the dead squid in his hands. Even with this new information, which Chambers had claimed was "manipulated" by the "enemy", without providing any evidence, Chambers continues to argue for the just-ness of a war despite it being based on lies. It is later revealed, when Ledo seems to meet Kugel, his former commander, that upper echelons of the Galactic Alliance knew all along. However, they never informed the soldiers battling on the front lines. Without giving any more spoilers, Ledo remains on Earth without returning to space, with records causing an epiphany and causing the remaining Galactic Alliance mindset of fighting against the enemy no matter the cost to fall away.

Reprinted from my Wading Through the Cultural Stacks WordPress blog, where it was published on June 14, 2023.

All in all, although records, and their concealment, are a crucial part of the series, especially in Ledo's epiphany of sorts, reviewers don't mention them in their publications. However, they note how the premise feels "arbitrarily constructed" at times, while depicting intricate details successfully at other points, as part of a successful sci-fi story, that there is violence throughout, and that the production values are superb in many ways. [3] The focus on how classification of records can impede knowledge is something I haven't seen in an anime or animation series to date. The closest parallel I can come to is the archival work, of sorts, by Ura in Pale Cocoon. What happens in Gargantia is different in many ways, even from the depiction of classified records in The Crown or the classified archives of the CIA shown in an episode of Alias, as Archives in Fiction once noted.

For one, it shows the efforts the Galactic Alliance went to in order to conceal the truth. If the soldiers on the front lines knew that they were fighting humans, or more accurately humanoid descendants, there would likely be resistance, perhaps even mass desertion. So, their solution is to distort the reality, paint the "enemy" as a lesser lifeform, something that can't even think, when the Hideauze are just as smart as humans, although they might not seem that way. Secondly, the fact that Chambers immediately determines that the classified record is manipulated because it contradicts Alliance records shows how deeply entrenched his programming is with propaganda from the Alliance itself! As it has been said many times, no program, algorithm, technology, code, or anything is neutral. Rather, it is shaped by human perceptions. That is the case for Chambers.

What Ledo experiences is not a form of record erasure, alteration, or deletion, but, rather, a form of record concealment. The record he views does not have any completeness, as it is choppy, and the video is distorted. The latter may be part of the reasoning what Chambers claimed the records were manipulated, thinking it wasn't accurate. To Ledo, and the viewer, it appeared to be accurate. Furthermore, it was reliable in the sense it was "created by a competent authority, according to established processes", as it was a Galactic Alliance record. It is surprising it was left behind and not hidden. Perhaps the thinking was that it would never be found, so there was no need to destroy it, and it had lost all usefulness to them.

There is no doubt that the record is trustworthy, authentic, and genuine. Chambers clearly believes that the record is counterfeit, i.e. an item which is "falsely represented as the thing it imitates", an "unauthorized copy presented as an authentic original", or something worse: a forgery. Of course, Chambers likely has different definitions than the Society of American Archivists' Dictionary of Archives Terminology. The record, presented in the form of a degrade tape, is further confirmed as genuine by the testimony of "Kugel".

In the end, while there are no characters like Jocasta Nu in Star Wars or Nathan's grandfather in Stretch Armstrong, records remain an important part of the story in Gargantia, serving as an important plot point in more ways than one. There is no storage of records akin to R2-D2. Instead, there is recovery of lost data and records that were left behind/discarded, in an attempt to twist how people viewed the present. That is something unique to this series, as I can't think of any other series off hand, apart from Pale Cocoon, which focus on data recovery, and have declassification as something commanded by the protagonist. In that sense, Gargantia is different. That's all for this time. Until the next post sometime next month, likely on a different topic. Let me know in the comments what you think.

© 2022-2023 Burkely Hermann. All rights reserved.

Notes

David S. Ferriero (left), delivers the final installment of records to Argentina’s Minister of Justice and Human Rights, the Honorable Germán Carlos Garavano (right). Photo courtesy of Intelligence.gov.

Declassification Diplomacy: The United States Declassification Project for Argentina

By David S. Ferriero | Archivist of the United States Blog 

This morning I presented the final tranche of newly-declassified U.S. Government records to Argentine Minister of Justice and Human Rights, the Honorable Germán Carlos Garavano. The ceremony marks the successful completion of the U.S. Declassification Project for Argentina, the largest government-to-government declassification release in United States history.

This represents the final stage of an historic effort by the U.S. Government to search, identify, review for public access, and provide records that shed light on human rights abuses in Argentina between 1975 and 1984. More than 43,000 pages of U.S. documents from 16 Executive Branch agencies were provided to the Government of Argentina.

Declassification Diplomacy: The United States Declassification Project for Argentina

This morning I presented the final tranche of newly-declassified U.S. Government records to Argentine Minister of Justice and Human Rights, the Honorable Germán Carlos Garavano. The ceremony marks the successful completion of the U.S. Declassification Project for Argentina, the largest government-to-government declassification release in United States history.

This represents the final stage of an historic effort by the U.S. Government to search, identify, review for public access, and provide records that shed light on human rights abuses in Argentina between 1975 and 1984. More than 43,000 pages of U.S. documents from 16 Executive Branch agencies were provided to the Government of Argentina.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has posted the collection as a whole, which can be found here: intel.gov/argentina

Records released by the National Archives’ National Declassification Center are available to the public here:  https://www.archives.gov/argentina/humanrights

Read the full post on the AOTUS blog