[adamredwoods]

Most of the documents were declassified already, I think 99% of 170,000 files or some large number. This was through the The President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992. I don't know what's to gain in this release other than closure?

[nomel]

Someone previously decided that the remaining 1%, 1700 files, shouldn't be viewed by the public. Why? 1700 files is plenty to hold some interesting truths.

[IncreasePosts]

I think the idea was to wait for people mentioned in those documents to die, so as to not affect their privacy.

You want people to tell the truth to government investigations in the future, and not hold something back because they think in 15 years the government might just release a transcript of everything you told them.

[throw10920]

That's a legitimately good reason. Are the entirety of those remaining 1700 documents redacted? If so, then they should just redact parts that would uniquely identify those last surviving people and release the rest of the documents.

[agsnu]

Sounds like a bunch of work. I thought the priority was reducing waste of taxpayer dollars?

[throw10920]

This is a snide, low-effort comment that didn't have the bare minimum of effort put into it to research whether or not its core premise was correct, and actively degrades the quality of discourse on HN.

It would have taken thirty seconds to Google "President Trump administration priorities" and come up with https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/2025/01/pres...

The efficacy or utility of those priorities doesn't matter - the fact is that the claim that "the only (or top) priority is reducing waste" is trivially easy to invalidate, in addition to making the gross logical error that good uses of taxpayer money (of which "making sure that the taxpayers are aware of what their money is being used for" is one) and bad/inefficient uses of taxpayer money are equivalent, which doesn't even require a Google search to understand is wrong.

Comments like this shouldn't be on HN. The guidelines directly state "Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle." (which is what this comment did) and that HN is for intellectual curiosity, which also didn't happen because it took less than a minute to invalidate the core premise of this comment. HN is explicitly for intellectual curiosity and thoughtful discussion like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42874301 - not this.

[thejazzman]

i very much dislike that anytime i see a comment on HN that isn't a wall of text arguing with someone, then the police arrive to tell them they're not allowed to participate in that way

i hate the wall of text on this site. i hate how some people feel entitled to tell others their remarks aren't welcome.

it truly takes away from this site to see the police show up on almost every single thread.

[nomel]

The released files have redactions for this reason. Why couldn't the names be redacted in the remaining? Doesn't pass the smell test.

[declan_roberts]

That's not the stated reason why they're dragging their feet.

[yardstick]

What’s the stated reason?

[echelon]

And who stated a reason?

[hulitu]

> I think the idea was to wait for people mentioned in those documents to die, so as to not affect their privacy.

Are the Dulles still alive ?

[2-3-7-43-1807]

> I think the idea was to wait for people mentioned in those documents to die, so as to not affect their privacy.

you probably also think that mk ultra is a conspiracy theory.

[IncreasePosts]

It was a conspiracy.

[chrisco255]

If the transcript involves evidence against a random psychopath who committed murder against beloved public figures (with no connection whatsoever to the government), I don't understand why anyone involved with such an investigation would be upset about the release of such transcripts immediately, much less 15 years or 65 years in the future.

[yardstick]

And if those transcripts don’t have incriminating evidence, should they still be released?

If they interviewed everyone at that parade, what they were doing etc, and some of those people were completely uninvolved but maybe having affairs, or doing something immoral (whatever that is), then shouldn’t they be afforded privacy? Eg Imagine one would be mortified to have what sex toy was in their pocket at the time documented in public transcript.

[nepthar]

I think a simple redacted name would address that concern

[Someone]

For people taking part in the parade, I doubt that. Extreme example is Jackie Kennedy. “I was sitting next to the president” identifies her pretty well.

There were people in the crowd who can easily be identified, too. For example, Zapruder’s testimony would have to leave out that he shot a movie and was life on television that day, and quite a few other details to anonymize it.

[yardstick]

I’d mostly agree with that. After sufficient years have passed. Name isn’t the only way to identify someone.

[afavour]

In our conspiracy theory riddled world?

The first thing that comes to mind is Sandy Hook. Those poor parents being harassed by people accusing them of being “false flag” actors and all that nonsense. If you were a key witness in the JFK assassination you can bet nutjobs hell bent on some conspiracy theory or another are going to track you down and harass you.

Not to mention the way more vanilla stuff: people whose testimony incriminated friends, family members etc etc

[t-3]

They can still redact the released documents before releasing them. Many of those already released have been very heavily redacted.

[potato3732842]

If the documents truly are mundane and simply fill in gaps and dox a few old people then it would probably greatly reduce conspiracy theory stuff to reduce them because the gaps in the narrative is where those theories grow from.

[account42]

> In our conspiracy riddled world?

FTFY

[zombiwoof]

They will name informants and under cover folks and even how the secret service worked and works

[zombiwoof]

Truth to this government is funny

[dehrmann]

> I think the idea was to wait for people mentioned in those documents to die, so as to not affect their privacy

I also remember that story, but it's no justification for keeping something with this much public interest secret.

[MeetingsBrowser]

So you would like people to feel comfortable telling the whole truth, unless it’s something really important?

[dehrmann]

Secret witnesses aren't allowed to testify in the US. Not that these were court trials.

[lazide]

Except for FISA.

And don’t forget that cases ‘pertaining to national security’ get thrown out all the time. [https://www.fjc.gov/content/overview-7]

Either because key evidence is classified, or witnesses are, or testimony would be considered a threat to national security, etc.

[nozzlegear]

Is public interest the only thing we need to drum up if we want to strip away somebody's right to privacy?

[kelnos]

They can still redact parts of the documents, including names or other identifying information.

[ttyprintk]

Some people have seen those and are allowed to talk about them:

https://thecyberwire.com/podcasts/spycast/646/transcript

https://thecyberwire.com/podcasts/spycast/647/notes

[petee]

Allowed to talk about classified material? Doubtful

[ttyprintk]

Judge for yourself:

> the correct figure now is about 3,600 documents in the collection of 320,000 documents still contain redactions. That might mean we might have most of the document except for a sentence, a word, a name. In other cases, you know, several pages or, you know, I don't think there's any document that's withheld in its entirety. But, you know, it's still a lot of records. The bulk of those are CIA records. A lot you can tell from the context, like Mark says, stuff about surveillance techniques, covert arrangements with foreign governments. They're very -- they guard those very closely. That's one of the things that they're still keeping. But, you know, why is this necessary? I mean, again, to step back, you know, the JFK Records Act, all this stuff was supposed to be made public in 2017. Judge Tunheim, the head of the review board, I asked him, I said, What did you expect after 25 years? How many records would have to be -- remain secret? And he said, Out of the stuff that I saw, you know, maybe 100 documents. Not, you know, and when in 2017 the CIA and FBI came to Trump and said, We have 14,000 documents that have redactions that we couldn't possibly remove. So it's like, why is the presumption around a Presidential assassination that we're going to keep -- you know, keep these secrets for good?

[petee]

Sounds like that person knows very little and wants to sound important for a podcast. Security clearances are taken very seriously, you can't just spitball about classified things you've seen.

My dad had classified knowledge from his time in the air force, and he wouldn't even discuss the category of information let alone give an overview of the contents, 50 years onward

[ttyprintk]

Well, these records are special because of an act. Just because a President proactively blocked release does not promote them to a classification. But Mark Zaid on that podcast is a lawyer who specializes in people’s classification. There are many, many more people less qualified than him who are trying to sound important in this domain, like Roger Stone.

[legitster]

Former directors have answered this pretty openly. Anything that is left is just because it contains identifiable information for people still alive. Lots of home addresses, names of investigators, etc.

[rat87]

Interesting truths? Maybe. Possibly some embarrassing things for FBI Or CIA. But nothing likely to satisfy conspiracy theorists.

We know who killed JFK

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/671ky4/is_th...

> Yes, the official explanation that Lee Harvey Oswald was, on his own, responsible for murdering President Kennedy is overwhelmingly accepted as correct. It has largely held up to intense scrutiny over the past 50 years and there is no substantial evidence toward any other explanation.

> As I mentioned in my older post linked elsewhere, one of the reasons why there was so much criticism of the official explanation after the fact is that the investigation was not handled well. This resulted in a lot of seemingly contradictory and unexplained information that opened the door to questioning the overall conclusion as a whole.

[bentobean]

The remaining 1% is almost certainly where the good stuff is.

[CSMastermind]

Or just people's names. Something like "Joe Blow said he saw a person with a brown bag." You'd redact Joe's name even if there's nothing particularly interesting about him.

[giantg2]

You'd redact a name, but not an entire file.

[3eb7988a1663]

Depending on what remains, it may be possible to unblind the redacted names by considering the sum total of evidence. For example, these 10 people in the room all would have given testimony, but we only have nine statements with attached names. Who could this 10th unnamed persona be? Far easier to just keep the entire thing redacted.

[practice9]

With LLMs that even might be automated

[ben_w]

Constraint solvers would be a better choice, IMO.

LLMs may help convert the text into a form for the constraint solvers, but they're not the tool I'd use for actually connecting the dots.

[vkou]

And if it turns out that there isn't anything interesting in that 1%, will you abandon this heuristic, and be more ready to accept that maybe the mundane explanation of 'they were kept classified because the people involved are still alive' is the norm for stuff like this?

[ttyprintk]

This is the big question. I think Pompeo told Trump that the remaining 1% includes the names of US spies inside Havana and Moscow. How would you ensure their descendants are protected?

[9cb14c1ec0]

The theory is that there must be a big reason why those last 1% haven't been disclosed. I dunno, but curiosity did kill the cat. It's a powerful force.

[matwood]

> I don't know what's to gain in this release other than closure?

Classic Trump PR move. Claim he's doing something that's already done and then take credit loudly.

[kelipso]

It was a campaign process and obviously people want to know the whole story.

[SecretDreams]

> obviously people want to know the whole story.

And, yet, they never will.

[conception]

Or they already do.

[adastra22]

This isn't quite true. Those files were redacted. Now they would be unredacted.

[uoaei]

Are you assuming that the decisions of which pages were declassified was a random sample? Why would they have selected any pages to remain hidden?

[fastball]

Because they have assets who are still in the field that they don't want to expose or similar. Classified status is somewhat contagious, in that many of those documents aren't from the time period in question, they could be from yesterday if some government agent had a discussion about it.

[gitaarik]

You mean like details about who killed him and why?

[fastball]

No. All of the details about who killed JFK (and why) were already released.

[gitaarik]

Oh yeah?

https://www.axios.com/2025/02/10/trump-jfk-assassination-rec...

[floydnoel]

somebody who was an adult during the jfk assassination is still out working "in the field"? do you seriously believe that?

[fastball]

Please read the rest of my comment.

[whycome]

Why do you think a certain amount has remained classified?

[karaterobot]

To play devil's advocate, you could declassify 99% of the files, and still leave out the incriminating parts. I don't believe this is what happened, I'm just saying 99% of the truth can still leave a lot out.

[moralestapia]

JFK's assasination is one canonical event of US history.

Why would you not want this to be released?

Weird.