Nearly 13 million pages of declassified files have been published online by the Central Intelligence Agency. Previously, the documents were only accessible from the National Archives College Park, Maryland from four terminals.
The declassified documents contain information on UFO sightings, Human telepathy, Nazi war crimes and the Cuban Missile Crisis. It's taken a while for the documents to be released. During Bill Clinton's tenure, he ordered the agency to release all documents at least 25 years old with historical value to be declassified. Fortunately, the CIA complied, however access to the documents was limited since anyone who wanted access had to make their way to the US National Archives in Washington D.C.
In a report issued by engadget, back in 2014, a nonprofit organization called MuckRock filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit pressing the CIA to post all of its documents online. However, the agency stated that it would take up to six years to scan all its content.
In a move aimed at applying pressure to the CIA, journalist Mike Best crowd-funded more than $150,000 to visit the archives to print out and then publicly upload the records one by one. The CIA's Information management director, Joseph Lambert has made it clear that access to the historically significant collection is no longer limited by geography. Adding that the agency managed to publish the content ahead of the planned schedule.
The declassified documents reveal details on how the CIA conducted its operation throughout the Cold War conflicts in, Korea and Vietnam. The documents also contain information on UFO sightings and psychic experiments from the Stargate program. Events from the 1940s and the 1990s with details of the fight of war criminals from Nazi Germany, the internal intelligence bulletins and memos from former CIA directors, UFO reports and the quarter-mile Berlin tunnel that was built to tap Soviet telephone lines.
Several hundred thousand pages of intelligence analysis and science research and development and papers of Henry Kissinger during his tenure as Secretary of State under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford are also included in the release.
