Invoking the provisions of a seldom-used Senate resolution, Mr. Graham said he asked the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, Senator Pat Roberts, Republican of Kansas, and the top Democrat on the committee, Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, to start a process that permits the declassification of information if the Senate voted to release it -- even over the objections of the administration.
The White House has not responded to a week-old letter signed by every Democrat and aligned member of the Senate intelligence committee seeking declassification of "additional information concerning the Russian government and the US election".
This is the first time the CIA has not redacted the term Area 51, thus indicating a declassification of that information.
"Present practices for classification and declassification of national security information are outmoded, unsustainable and keep too much information from the public," the report says.
And a recent burst of declassification of military-satellite data filled in the picture with information on 8800 Pacific seamounts.
His estimate was derived using information from Freedom of Information Act requests, formal declassifications of documents, newspaper stories, and leaks, and he says it suggests that other states surely could do the same arithmetic.
So too were the plans for their use, although a combination of declassification of early U.S. war plans and the flood of information that came out of the Warsaw Pact countries following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 illuminated some of the darkness.
The declassification of the executive summary, in response to a Freedom of Information Act suit, comes at a time of intense interest in domestic spying after leaks by a former contractor for the National Security Agency.
While many of the documents are still obscured by heavy editing, the public release of information was the final round of a declassification process that President Clinton ordered last year to expose as much of the truth as possible about political violence in Chile from 1968 through 1991.
Even fundamental questions — who hatched the plot, who ultimately carried it out, who supported it inside Iran and how did it succeed — are in dispute," wrote Malcolm Byrne, the archive's director of research, who pursued the declassification of the coup history through an 11-year Freedom of Information Act request.
On other occasions, the disclosure of information will simply be deferred (e.g., through declassification procedures) or selective (e.g., to some types of actors only).
