And another piece, from 2006 --
Classifying Toothpaste
Monday, February 27, 2006
"A 1950 INTELLIGENCE estimate, written days before Chinese forces crossed into North Korea....
<snip>...A 1962 telegram from Ambassador to Yugoslavia George F. Kennan featuring a translated newspaper article on China's nuclear weapons program.
Some of these documents are innocuous, some embarrassing, at least to the agencies involved. All were once freely available but -- in a fit of bureaucratic overzealousness -- have since been reclassified under a secret government program to disappear historical documents from public view.
In all, according to a new report by the National Security Archive at George Washington University, 9,500 documents totaling 55,500 pages, some dating as far back as World War II, have been reclassified and withdrawn from public circulation. The study's author, Matthew M. Aid, found that eight of the reclassified documents had actually been published as part of the State Department's official history series or made available on the CIA's own database.
This effort to stuff this harmless toothpaste back into the tube would be funny if it weren't so emblematic of a disturbing new culture of government secrecy."
Classifying Toothpaste