Removing Knowledge

Removing Knowledge Peter Galison Introduction You might think that the guarded annals of classified information largely consist of that rare document, a small, tightly guarded annex to the vast sum of human writing and learning. True, the number of carefully archived pages written in the open is large. While hard to estimate, one could begin by taking the number of items on the shelves of the Library of Congress, one of the largest libraries in the world: 120 million items carrying about 7.5 billion pages, of which about 5.4 billion pages are in 18 million books.1 In fact, the classified universe, as it is sometimes called, is certainly not smaller and very probably is much larger than this unclassified one. No one has any very good idea how many classified documents there are. No one did before the digital transformation of the late twentieth century, and now—at least after 2001—even the old sampling methods are recognized to be nonsense in an age where documents multiply across secure networks like virtual weeds. So we biblio-owls of Minerva are counting sheets just as the very concept of the classified printed page fades into its evening hours. Undeterred, we might begin with a relatively small subset of the whole classified world, about 1.6 billion pages from documents twenty-five years old or older that qualify as historically valuable. Of these 1.6 billion pages, 1.1 1. Assuming 3,000 pages per foot and 15 million pages per mile, the LOC contains approximately 500 miles of shelf and thus about 7.5 billion pages. This averages 60 pages per document, in contrast to the Joint Security Commission, which in 1994 estimated 3 pages per classified document. I take this to have been superseded by the Department of Energy, Analysis of Declassification Efforts, 12 Dec. 1996, http://www.fas.org/sgp/othergov/doerep.html,which uses a mean of 10 pages per classified document. Critical Inquiry 31 (Autumn 2004) ! 2004 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/04/3101-0006$10.00. All rights reserved. 229 230 Peter Galison / Removing Knowledge billion have been released over the last twenty years, with most opened since Bill Clinton’s April 1995 Executive Order 12958. How many new classified documents have been produced since 1978 or so is much harder to estimate—the cognoscenti disagree by several orders of magnitude—but there isn’t an expert alive who thinks the recent haul is anything less than much larger than the previous twenty-five post–World War II years. Some suspect as many as a trillion pages are classified (200 Libraries of Congress). That may be too many. In 2001, for example, there were thirtythree million classification actions; assuming (with the experts) that there are roughly 10 pages per action, that would mean roughly 330 million pages were classified last year (about three times as many pages are now being classified as declassified). So the U.S. added a net 250 million classified pages last year. By comparison, the entire system of Harvard libraries—over a hundred of them—added about 220,000 volumes (about 60 million pages, a number not far from the acquisition rate at other comparably massive universal depositories such as the Library of Congress, the British Museum, or the New York Public Library). Contemplate these numbers: about five times as many pages are being added to the classified universe than are being brought to the storehouses of human learning, including all the books and journals on any subject in any language collected in the largest repositories on the planet.2 If that were typical—or at any rate the right order of magnitude—then twenty-five years of such actions would yield a very rough figure in the range of 8 billion pages since 1978. The fact that the number has been growing is not to the point—even if it increased linearly from zero in 1978 to its current rate twenty-five years la