Declassified | Millions Of Pages Of Material Released By CIA

Since 2000, CIA has installed and maintained an electronic full-text searchable system named CREST (the CIA Records Search Tool), ... in College Park, Maryland. The CREST system is the publicly accessible repository of the subset of CIA records reviewed under the 25-year program in electronic format (manually reviewed and released records are accessioned directly into the National Archives in their original format). Over 11 million pages have been released in electronic format and reside on the CREST database, from which researchers have printed about 1.1 million pages.

Previously, in order to directly access CREST, a researcher was required to visit the National Archives at College Park, Maryland. [The] CIA recognized that such visits were inconvenient and presented an obstacle to many researchers. Therefore, in January 2017, the CIA published the records of the CREST collection online.

Declassified material includes information on The Family Jewels, Project Stargate, UFOs: Fact or Fiction, Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act, Atomic Spies: Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and POW MIA.

Wired published The Best of the CIA's 12M Pages of Files Online. Start Here on 19 February 2017.

Link to CREST online.

Kryptos

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Located on the grounds of the CIA's headquarters in Langley is the sculpture "Kryptos," created as an outdoor installation for the agency by artist Jim Sanborn with the help of former CIA cryptographer Ed Scheidt. The sculpture's cipher contains four sections, with 869 encrypted characters in total. Three of them have been solved (it took the agency's analysts seven years). The fourth section with its 97 characters, known as "K4," is still a mystery.

Wired's Steven Levy explored the brain-busting techniques used to create the codes, involving letter substitutions, intentional misspellings, and jumbled letters that can only be un-jumbled with complex mathematical formulas. What do the messages say? One plate paraphrased Egyptologist Howard Carter's account of opening Tutankhamen's tomb. Another spoke about mysterious information stored underground, and revealed coordinates to a location inside the CIA headquarters. Poetic embellishment, of course. And good luck solving the final plate ... A crowd-sourcing effort through a Yahoo Group has been working since 2003 on cracking the remaining characters. But Sanborn knows the answer, and he's still alive. If you think you have the answer too, you can submit it to his website. But you probably don't know. The CIA doesn't.

Wired