Latest news with #JFKAssassinationRecords
Yahoo
25-04-2025
- General
- Yahoo
The National Archives needs your help transcribing UFO and JFK files
I just spent an hour reading and typing out the journal of a man who claimed to see a UFO over Kentucky back in 1969. He clarified, many times, that he hadn't had anything to drink that day. All in a day's work for a citizen archivist. You can dive in too, if you want—the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) Records are one of the many Citizen Archivist Missions anyone with a keyboard, some free time and the inclination to contribute can help out with. Other notable projects include the JFK Assassination Records and Consular Records dating between 1872 and 1917. It's a potentially fascinating—and certainly helpful—way to kill a few hours. We've talked about citizen science projects you can do at home and how you can help out The National Archive by reading cursive. It turns out the National Archive has a bunch of what it calls Citizen Archivist Missions going right now. To get started all you need is a account (if you're American there's a good chance you already have one). After that it's recommended that you watch this YouTube video to get a feel for the process before diving in. You can choose a mission, then choose a document you want to work on. After that you'll see a list of documents—choose whatever looks interesting or just click something. You will see the first page of the document and a panel to the right with other pages. At the top of the page you can see if there is a transcription for the page already—the word 'Available' means someone has already made a transcription and the word 'Not Started' means that no one has yet. You are free to look at, and even edit, existing transcriptions. The real fun, though, is transcribing fresh pages. To find one, click 'Show Details' in the top-right corner, then click the 'List' view, then scroll until you see something listed as 'Not Started'. You will jump to the page, which is hopefully as interesting as the one I found. Click the 'Transcription' button to open the transcription panel, where you can start typing. The Archives asks that you try to re-create the text as it exists—that means re-creating typos exactly as they are seen on the page, as much as this may hurt to do. If a word is hyphenated at the end of a line, however, you should drop the hyphen and type the full word so that it's searchable. You can read more guidelines here. I'm going to be honest: I created my account, and started transcribing, mostly because I was assigned to write about this for Popular Science, but I think I might be hooked now. There was so much humanity and weirdness in the first document I worked on and I can't help but wonder what other tidbits I might pick up. If this sounds at all interesting to you, I highly recommend creating an account, helping out, and seeing what kinds of interesting things you might find.
Yahoo
22-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
What the JFK File Dump Actually Revealed
In 1962, the CIA had a driver's license made for one of its officers, James P. O'Connell. It gave him an alias: James Paul Olds. We know this because the document containing the information was released to the public in 2017—part of an effort to declassify information related to John F. Kennedy's assassination. But now, thanks to an executive order from President Donald Trump calling for the release of all the classified information pertaining to the incident, we know a bit more. It was, specifically, a California driver's license. This is an irrelevant detail in an irrelevant document. As far as anyone knows, O'Connell had nothing to do with the assassination; the inclusion of his story was probably just a by-product of an overly broad records request. But there it was on Tuesday evening, when the National Archives and Record Administration uploaded to its website about 63,400 pages of 'JFK Assassination Records.' Given Trump's order, the release of all this information sounded dramatic, but much of what has been revealed is about as interesting as that driver's-license detail. Many of these documents were already public with minor redactions, and many of them have almost nothing to do with the Kennedy assassination and never did. This is why the Assassination Records Review Board, which processed them in the 1990s, labeled so many of them 'Not Believed Relevant.' Hundreds of thousands of such documents have been released since the '90s, including thousands released during Trump's first term and the Biden administration. (This is thanks to the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, which was passed in response to overwhelming public interest in the case after the release of the Oliver Stone movie JFK.) But one of Trump's 2024 campaign promises was to release all the rest; he said that it was 'time for the American people to know the TRUTH!' His health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—John Kennedy's nephew—has been animated about the issue and framed the secrecy around the last files as evidence to support his conspiratorial view of history. [Read: RFK Jr. won. Now what?] There are still some documents that the Archives could not make public, because they are subject to IRS privacy laws or because they come from sealed grand-jury proceedings. These may come out eventually, but they will likely follow the same drip, drip, drip as all the rest. It seems possible that the public's curiosity will never be fully satisfied, at least in my lifetime. A new batch will always come out, but there will always be something left. I'm one of the people who cares a lot about the Kennedy assassination. I'm currently finishing a book about the case. On principle, and out of selfish personal interest, I agree that the government should make all of the documents public if it can. Of course I scanned this new batch to see whether there was anything exciting. There wasn't, but some of it was kind of funny. In many cases, the removed redactions reveal proper nouns that a reader could have easily inferred before or that seem totally inconsequential. For instance, there is a 1974 memo about the Watergate conspirator E. Howard Hunt's history with the CIA. A previously released version of the document mentions that the Office of Finance had asked a CIA station whether Hunt had received payments from it while he was living in Madrid. We did not know which station had been asked. Now we know it was the Madrid station. (Wow!) A 1977 document about the New York Times reporter Tad Szulc includes a rumor about Szulc being a Communist; in previous versions of the document, this information was 'apparently from a [REDACTED] source.' With the redaction removed, we now know that it was 'apparently from a British source.' Some of it was less funny. The files also contain the unredacted personal information—including Social Security numbers—of dozens of people, seemingly published accidentally, though the National Archives site now suggests this was an inevitable result of the transparency effort. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt acknowledged the problem to The New York Times on Thursday, saying, 'At the request of the White House, the National Archives and the Social Security Administration immediately put together an action plan to proactively help individuals whose personal information was released in the files.' The National Archives did not respond to my request for comment. In my scan, I came across the late-'70s personnel files of dozens of staff members of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, all of which contained Social Security numbers. A good number of those people are likely still alive. The document dump contains the Social Security number of a journalist who was active in the anti-war movement during the '60s. There are, by my count, 19 documents about his personal life and employment history; none of the documents about him appears to have the faintest relevance to the assassination. Bizarrely, the new release also contains an unredacted arrest record for a Dealey Plaza witness who testified in front of the Warren Commission in 1964. This record—for the alleged theft of a car in 1970—has nothing whatsoever to do with the assassination of President Kennedy. Yet it is reproduced in full and it includes the man's Social Security number and a full set of his fingerprints. [From the February 1964 issue: A eulogy for John F. Kennedy] Relatively few of the documents even mention Kennedy. I saw only one addressed to him: a June 30, 1961, memo from his special assistant, confidant, and eventual biographer, Arthur Schlesinger about the growing power of the CIA. Most of it has been public since 2018, but the version released on Tuesday removed a final redaction about the agency's extensive use of State Department jobs as cover for its agents. Schlesinger informed Kennedy that about 1,500 CIA agents abroad had State-provided cover stories at the time—too many, in his opinion; he wrote that 'the effect is to further the CIA encroachment on the traditional functions of State.' The Paris embassy had 128 CIA people in it at the time, he added as an example. 'CIA occupies the top floor of the Paris Embassy, a fact well known locally; and on the night of the Generals' revolt in Algeria, passersby noted with amusement that the top floor was ablaze with lights.' Again, this is at best 'kind of interesting' and at most trivia. It doesn't meaningfully affect the historical understanding of President Kennedy's tense relationship with the CIA, which is very well documented elsewhere. After decades of releases, it may be that these are the only kinds of secrets the Archives still hold about the Kennedy assassination—tiny bits of color on things that are already well understood and boring details about people whose connections to the event are minimal if they even exist. But there's no way to know until we see everything … if we see everything, if we ever can. Even then, when the count of secret things ticks down to zero, how will we know that was really, really all? We won't, of course. We never will. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
22-03-2025
- Politics
- Atlantic
What the JFK File Dump Actually Revealed
In 1962, the CIA had a driver's license made for one of its officers, James P. O'Connell. It gave him an alias: James Paul Olds. We know this because the document containing the information was released to the public in 2017—part of an effort to declassify information related to John F. Kennedy's assassination. But now, thanks to an executive order from President Donald Trump calling for the release of all the classified information pertaining to the incident, we know a bit more. It was, specifically, a California driver's license. This is an irrelevant detail in an irrelevant document. As far as anyone knows, O'Connell had nothing to do with the assassination; the inclusion of his story was probably just a by-product of an overly broad records request. But there it was on Tuesday evening, when the National Archives and Record Administration uploaded to its website about 63,400 pages of 'JFK Assassination Records.' Given Trump's order, the release of all this information sounded dramatic, but much of what has been revealed is about as interesting as that driver's-license detail. Many of these documents were already public with minor redactions, and many of them have almost nothing to do with the Kennedy assassination and never did. This is why the Assassination Records Review Board, which processed them in the 1990s, labeled so many of them 'Not Believed Relevant.' Hundreds of thousands of such documents have been released since the '90s, including thousands released during Trump's first term and the Biden administration. (This is thanks to the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, which was passed in response to overwhelming public interest in the case after the release of the Oliver Stone movie JFK.) But one of Trump's 2024 campaign promises was to release all the rest; he said that it was 'time for the American people to know the TRUTH!' His health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—John Kennedy's nephew—has been animated about the issue and framed the secrecy around the last files as evidence to support his conspiratorial view of history. There are still some documents that the Archives could not make public, because they are subject to IRS privacy laws or because they come from sealed grand-jury proceedings. These may come out eventually, but they will likely follow the same drip, drip, drip as all the rest. It seems possible that the public's curiosity will never be fully satisfied, at least in my lifetime. A new batch will always come out, but there will always be something left. I'm one of the people who cares a lot about the Kennedy assassination. I'm currently finishing a book about the case. On principle, and out of selfish personal interest, I agree that the government should make all of the documents public if it can. Of course I scanned this new batch to see whether there was anything exciting. There wasn't, but some of it was kind of funny. In many cases, the removed redactions reveal proper nouns that a reader could have easily inferred before or that seem totally inconsequential. For instance, there is a 1974 memo about the Watergate conspirator E. Howard Hunt's history with the CIA. A previously released version of the document mentions that the Office of Finance had asked a CIA station whether Hunt had received payments from it while he was living in Madrid. We did not know which station had been asked. Now we know it was the Madrid station. (Wow!) A 1977 document about the New York Times reporter Tad Szulc includes a rumor about Szulc being a Communist; in previous versions of the document, this information was 'apparently from a [REDACTED] source.' With the redaction removed, we now know that it was 'apparently from a British source.' Some of it was less funny. The files also contain the unredacted personal information—including Social Security numbers—of dozens of people, seemingly published accidentally, though the National Archives site now suggests this was an inevitable result of the transparency effort. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt acknowledged the problem to The New York Times on Thursday, saying, 'At the request of the White House, the National Archives and the Social Security Administration immediately put together an action plan to proactively help individuals whose personal information was released in the files.' The National Archives did not respond to my request for comment. In my scan, I came across the late-'70s personnel files of dozens of staff members of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, all of which contained Social Security numbers. A good number of those people are likely still alive. The document dump contains the Social Security number of a journalist who was active in the anti-war movement during the '60s. There are, by my count, 19 documents about his personal life and employment history; none of the documents about him appears to have the faintest relevance to the assassination. Bizarrely, the new release also contains an unredacted arrest record for a Dealey Plaza witness who testified in front of the Warren Commission in 1964. This record—for the alleged theft of a car in 1970—has nothing whatsoever to do with the assassination of President Kennedy. Yet it is reproduced in full and it includes the man's Social Security number and a full set of his fingerprints. From the February 1964 issue: A eulogy for John F. Kennedy Relatively few of the documents even mention Kennedy. I saw only one addressed to him: a June 30, 1961, memo from his special assistant, confidant, and eventual biographer, Arthur Schlesinger about the growing power of the CIA. Most of it has been public since 2018, but the version released on Tuesday removed a final redaction about the agency's extensive use of State Department jobs as cover for its agents. Schlesinger informed Kennedy that about 1,500 CIA agents abroad had State-provided cover stories at the time—too many, in his opinion; he wrote that 'the effect is to further the CIA encroachment on the traditional functions of State.' The Paris embassy had 128 CIA people in it at the time, he added as an example. 'CIA occupies the top floor of the Paris Embassy, a fact well known locally; and on the night of the Generals' revolt in Algeria, passersby noted with amusement that the top floor was ablaze with lights.' Again, this is at best 'kind of interesting' and at most trivia. It doesn't meaningfully affect the historical understanding of President Kennedy's tense relationship with the CIA, which is very well documented elsewhere. After decades of releases, it may be that these are the only kinds of secrets the Archives still hold about the Kennedy assassination—tiny bits of color on things that are already well understood and boring details about people whose connections to the event are minimal if they even exist. But there's no way to know until we see everything … if we see everything, if we ever can. Even then, when the count of secret things ticks down to zero, how will we know that was really, really all? We won't, of course. We never will.
Boston Globe
20-03-2025
- Politics
- Boston Globe
Social Security numbers and other private information unmasked in JFK files
More than 60,000 pages related to the 1963 assassination were released this week by the Trump administration. Many of the pages had been previously disclosed, but with redactions. Many, but not all, redactions have been removed. The records have been posted to the National Archives webpage under the headline 'JFK Assassination Records - 2025 Documents Release.' Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up The Post, in its review of the previously redacted material, discovered the Social Security numbers, birthplaces and birth dates of more than 100 staff members of the Senate Church Committee, established in 1975 to investigate abuses by America's intelligence agencies and government. The Post also discovered more than 100 Social Security numbers of staff members of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, which investigated the killing of Kennedy. Many of the individuals are still alive. Advertisement The Department of Justice had no comment Wednesday evening. The National Archives did not respond to a request for comment. John F Kennedy smiles at the crowds lining their motorcade route in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. Bettmann/Archive Photos via Bloomberg The release of the information raises legal questions under the Privacy Act of 1974, according to experts. 'Social Security is literally the keys to the kingdom to everybody,' said Mary Ellen Callahan, former chief privacy officer at the Department of Homeland Security. 'It's absolutely a Privacy Act violation.' Many whose Social Security numbers were exposed had become high-ranking officials in Washington. They include a former assistant secretary of state, a former U.S. ambassador, researchers in the intelligence world, State Department workers and prominent lawyers. Advertisement In announcing the release of the material Tuesday, The Office of the Director of National Intelligence said the roughly 80,000 pages were 'previously-classified records that will be published with no redactions.' 'It's astonishing that our personal information is now just out there for anyone to see. Someone dropped the ball,' said Loch Johnson, a retired intelligence expert and professor emeritus at the University of Georgia. 'I hope they weren't as sloppy in the JFK files with covert agents and assets overseas.' Mark Zaid, a national security attorney who fought for the JFK records to be made public, called the release of private information 'incredibly irresponsible.' 'In some of these documents, the only thing that was being redacted for the last 20-plus years was someone's Social Security number,' Zaid said. 'It is dangerous for these individuals, who can now be doxed.' DiGenova said he had no idea his name and personal information - including his Social Security number and date and place of birth - were included in the JFK files until a Post reporter called him while he was shopping for groceries. 'It makes sense that my name is in there,' he said, because of his work in the 1970s investigating intelligence abuses, 'but the other sensitive stuff - it's like a first-grade, elementary-level rule of security to redact things like that.' 'It was fascinating work,' diGenova said. 'One of the lawyers on our team located the girlfriend of a mafia guy who was supposedly seeing JFK at the same time. He found her in Nevada or Arizona and got chased away by her husband. Other work we did was looking into assassination plots against Castro and people who were assets of the CIA. Incredible stuff.' Advertisement DiGenova said the government should pay to help protect those who had their personal information released, as some companies do with credit score agencies after a data breach. At its peak, the Church Committee had 150 staffers. According to Senate records, the select committee held 126 meetings, interviewed 800-some witnesses and combed through 110,000 documents, and it identified abuses by multiple agencies, including the CIA, FBI, Internal Revenue Service and National Security Agency. In the unredacted files, the former Church Committee staffers' names and personal information appear in tidy typewritten columns on pages that list which of them had been cleared for 'access to classified information up to and including TOP SECRET.' 'This was in the wake of Watergate and Nixon,' said one former Senate staffer, who spoke on the condition anonymity to avoid becoming a target of identity theft. 'The whole idea was to unveil the secret, illegal activities going on.' That former staffer, who later worked for the State Department, said she was furious at now having to worry about financial fraud and identity theft. 'It just shows the danger of how this administration is handling these things with no thought of who gets damaged in the process.' Three other former staffers for the committee said that since learning from The Post that their Social Security numbers had become public, they had called their banks to freeze their accounts and credit cards. One had started to talk to others about whether it would be possible to sue the National Archives. 'It seems like the damage is done, but clearly we have to talk to some lawyers,' that former staffer said. Christopher Pyle, a former Army officer, exposed the Army's hidden domestic intelligence operations and testified before Congress. He said his activities as a whistleblower landed him on the Nixon administration's 'enemies list.' Advertisement Pyle was unaware that his Social Security number had become public until a Post reporter reached him by phone Wednesday. 'I'm fascinated that this ended up in the released papers,' he said. 'Good Lord, government doing foolish things as usual.' Pyle said he worries the released data could hurt those who worked so hard in the 1970s to uncover nefarious government actions. 'Why did they even have anything on the Church Committee?' he said. 'I would be interested to know that.' Jonathan Edwards, Kyle Rempfer, Alec Dent, Evan Hill, Azi Paybarah, Alexandra Tirado Oropeza, Anthony J. Rivera, Anumita Kaur, Beck Snyder, Ben Brasch, Ben Pauker, Chris Dehghanpoor, Daniel Wu, Danielle Newman, Elana Gordon, Hari Raj, HyoJung Kim, Ian Shapira, Jada Yuan, Jorge Ribas, Kelly Kasulis Cho, Kelsey Ables, Kim Bellware, Leo Sands, Meghan Hoyer, Kyle Melnick, Tom Jackman, Niha Masih, Razzan Nakhlawi, Sally Jenkins, Sarah Cahlan, Tobi Raji, Joseph Menn and Vivian Ho contributed to this report.
Axios
18-03-2025
- Politics
- Axios
Trump releases JFK assassination files
The Trump administration released thousands of pages of files Tuesday related to the assassination of former President John F. Kennedy. Why it matters: Trump pledged on the campaign trail to release the remaining files pertaining to the assassination and has already released some records since entering office. Driving the news: "The records of the President's Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, more commonly known as the ' Warren Commission,' are actively being digitized," per a post on the JFK Assassination Records page. Among the trove of documents are administrative records related to the Warren Commission's investigation and compilation of its report, along with information it received from federal agencies, photos, recordings and commission hearings. The page notes that many of these records are now available in the National Archives Catalog. The big picture: Trump told reporters Monday that his administration planned to release "all of the Kennedy files" the next day. "People have been waiting for decades for this," he added, noting that roughly 80,000 pages of files would be released. "I don't believe we're going to redact anything," the president added. Between the lines: It's not clear how many of the 80,000 pages have previously been made public. Zoom out: Trump signed an executive order in January demanding the release of all JFK assassination records. Last month, the FBI discovered a new tranche of records that had previously not been made public. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., JFK's nephew, has long called for greater disclosure about the assassination, believing his uncle's death to be part of a broader conspiracy involving his family.
