Obama Moves to Declassify US Secrets

More than 400 million pages of Cold War-era documents could be declassified as the federal government responds to President Obama's order to rethink the way it protects the nation's secrets. Among the changes Obama announced yesterday is a requirement that every record be released eventually and that federal agencies review how and why they mark documents classified or deny the release of historical records.

A National Declassification Center at the National Archives will be established to assist them and help clear a backlog of the Cold War records by Dec. 31, 2013. Obama also reversed a decision by George W. Bush that had allowed the intelligence community to block the release of a specific document, even if an interagency panel decided the information wouldn't harm national security.