16
intervention by the president himself, all JFK assassination-related information must be disclosed by 2017.
The standards for postponing the disclosure of information were much stricter than under the FOIA. Information was presumed to be immediately disclosable unless an agency claim for postponement was supported by a determination setting the date for postponement was approved by a five-person citizens board, the Assassination Records Review Board ("ARRB" or "Review Board"), There was no equivalent under the JFK Act for the withholding of materials under FOIA Exemption 5. In addition, the standards for classified information were much more stringent than under the FOIA.
As a consequence of this, a mass of new information became available under the JFK Act, leading ultimately to a collection reportedly housing more than 5 million pages.
The JFK Act also nullified the provision of the CIA FOIA, which provided that operational files were exempt from disclosure except in three very limited circumstances. As a result, for the first time in history great quantities of the CIA's operational records had to be released to the public.
E. The Push for Digitization After the JFK Act
17
The passage of the JFK Act resulted in a mammoth increase in the amount of available information on the assassination of President Kennedy and related matters. The situation which researchers now confronted brought to mind the old Chinese proverb: "Be careful what you wish for. Your dream may come true." Researchers now had piles of records on every subject under the sun. Going through it and making sense of it would require gargantuan efforts. This posed a daunting problem: how to make use of all of this information?
By the 1990s, when the JFK Act came into being and massive amounts of records began to be released with few or no redactions, the computerization scene had begun to change dramatically. By then
personal computers had become common and scanning technology had developed apace. And the mountain of information on political assassinations, particularly the JFK case, was reaching astronomical proportions. Primarily through the efforts of Harold Weisberg, the first and by far the most persistent users of the FOIA, and Kennedy assassination researcher Mark Allen, the avalanche of King and Kennedy assassination records had become huge by the early 1990s, with probably something in the neighborhood of some 400,000 pages having been released, albeit frequently
18
in highly-redacted form. It remained unclear, however, how anyone was going to be able to make use of the new volume of information potentially made accessible by the JFK Act.
As usual in life, what happened historically surpasses the best fiction.
One day in the spring of 1998, Rex Bradford was "half-watching "JFK' while reading a book on the C++ programming language." He says that "[b]efore then, [I] could have maybe named Oswald and Ruby,,,, and that's about it." But having seen the movie, he bought a couple of books on the assassination. "I subsequently visited a bookstore and bought and read Mark Lane's Plausible Denial." Over the summer and fall, Rex read several more books including Case Closed and Best Evidence. He "somehow found out (by myself, no friends in the business yet) about the Lancer and COPA conferences in November 1998 and went to both. This was the last "group COPA' conference." [1] By this time, Rex "already had brewing in my mind
19
vague ideas of an online documentary of some kind." At one of the Dallas conferences, he met Lenny Mather in the elevator at that conference and the two of them chatted. He thinks that Lenny may have brought up my name "even then."
Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
3
3
2
