Secret Government Documents 25 Years Or Older To Be Declassified On New Year's Day...

NY Times SCOTT SHANE December 21, 2006 09:25 AM

It will be a Cinderella moment for the band of researchers who study the hidden history of American government.

At midnight on Dec. 31, hundreds of millions of pages of secret documents will be instantly declassified, including many F.B.I. cold war files on investigations of people suspected of being Communist sympathizers. After years of extensions sought by federal agencies behaving like college students facing a term paper, the end of 2006 means the government's first automatic declassification of records.

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