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What Hillary Clintons Emails Really Reveal
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of New York Times


New York Times, March 4, 2015
Posted: March 8th, 2015
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/04/opinion/what-hillary-clint...

How will history judge a generation of leaders who dont preserve the historical record? The revelation on Monday that Hillary Rodham Clinton used only a personal email account when she was secretary of state and did not preserve her emails on departmental servers seems to reflect a troubling indifference to saving the history she was living. Mrs. Clintons aides eventually turned over 55,000 pages of correspondence. But the State Departments Office of the Historian estimates that the department produces two billion emails a year. The bigger problem is that the government produces an astounding volume of email, much of it classified, and the public doesnt get to see it unless archivists can preserve and process it. According to the nonpartisan Public Interest Declassification Board, a single intelligence agency is producing a petabyte of classified data every 18 months, or the equivalent of 20 million four-drawer file cabinets. The National Archives estimates that, without new technology to accelerate the process, that information would take two million employees a year to review for declassification. Instead, there are just 41 archivists working in College Park, Md., to review records from across the entire federal government one page at a time. The government is producing more classified documents than it knows what to do with. The National Archives is buckling under the strain, and could collapse under an avalanche of electronic records. If it does, Americas commitment to transparent governance will become a thing of the past, because the past itself will be impossible to recover.

Note: More than 55,000 pages of historical documents have disappeared from the National Archives since 1999 because of a secret CIA deal to 'reclassify' declassified government records. Is it even possible to tell the difference between information overload and government corruption with such secretive policies?


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