The Geospatial Community and Public Interest Declassification Board

The National Archives Blog, Transforming Classification: Blog of the Public Interest Declassification Board recently asked different listservs –  “What records should the US Government prioritize for declassification?” They took suggestions from historians and the public in five categories:  older records (25+ years), newer records (less than 25 years old), records relating to nuclear weapons policies (also called “FRD information”), records of general interest, and  records from the various US Presidential Libraries.

They recently opened up their blog for comments on topics of interest that do not fall squarely into the previous categories. While almost all the topics are spatial in nature and some are very specific such as requesting historic FRD information on “Overseas storage locations and foreign port visits by the U.S. Naval ships”, no one has made any requests specific to geospatial technologies.

Geospatial technologies would span several decades of Presidential Libraries, yet even the priority requests for the Kennedy Library don’t include NASA, Nixon and Ford don’t include requests for the early days of GIS or Landsat, and there is no request for information on unmanned arial vehicles for either Bushes or Clinton.  What records would the geospatial community want the US Government to prioritize for declassification? Would the prioritized topics be? Remote Sensing, GIS, Landsat, Internet, Satellites, Dangermond…..