About 13 million pages of declassified¹ documents from the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have been released online.

 

美国中央情报局在网上公开了约1300万页解密文件。

 

The move came after lengthy² efforts from freedom of information advocates and a lawsuit³ against the CIA.

 

The agency published the roughly 930,000 documents that make up the CIA Records Search Tool (Crest⁴) on Tuesday.

 

While much of the information has been technically⁵ publicly available since the mid-1990s, it has been very difficult to access.

 

The records were only available on four physical computers located in the back of a library at the National Archives in Maryland, between 09:00 and 16:30 each day.

 

"Previously⁶, in order to directly access Crest, a researcher was required to visit the National Archives at College Park, Maryland," according to the program's webpage. "CIA recognized that such visits were inconvenient⁷ and presented an obstacle to many researchers."

 

The Crest database features a wide range of different files, including former secretary of state Henry Kissinger's papers, and documents on Nazi⁸ war crimes. The collection also has files on UFOs, recipes for invisible ink and reports on research into telepathy.

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