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The Declassification Engine: What History Reveals About America’s Top Secrets

byMatthew Connelly

Historian Matthew Connelly uses millions of declassified records and computational methods to examine how the United States creates, protects, and eventually releases secrets. Nuclear policy, covert operations, diplomacy, surveillance, and bureaucratic habits reveal a classification system that expanded beyond meaningful control. Excessive secrecy can hide wrongdoing, impede research, waste resources, and make genuinely sensitive information harder to identify. Connelly presents declassification as an analytical “engine” for discovering historical patterns, while arguing that democratic accountability requires better rules, technology, and institutional incentives for deciding what the public should be allowed to know.

Publisher

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

Publication date

2023

Format

Print edition

Pages

—

ISBN

9781101871577