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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

The CIA has released around 13 million pages of declassified documents online [bbc.com] in a much more easily accessible form, following a lawsuit and other pressure:

Among the more unusual records are documents from the Stargate Project, which dealt with psychic powers and extrasensory perception. Those include records of testing on celebrity psychic Uri Geller in 1973, when he was already a well-established performer. Memos detail how Mr Geller was able to partly replicate pictures drawn in another room with varying - but sometimes precise - accuracy, leading the researchers to write that he "demonstrated his paranormal perceptual ability in a convincing and unambiguous manner".

[...] While much of the information has been technically 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. A non-profit freedom of information group, MuckRock, sued the CIA to force it to upload the collection [muckrock.com], in a process which took more than two years.

At the same time, journalist Mike Best crowd-funded more than $15,000 [kickstarter.com] to visit the archives to print out and then publicly upload the records, one by one, to apply pressure to the CIA. "By printing out and scanning the documents at CIA expense, I was able to begin making them freely available to the public and to give the agency a financial incentive to simply put the database online," Best wrote in a blog post [glomardisclosure.com]. In November, the CIA announced it would publish the material, and the entire declassified CREST archive is now available on the CIA Library website [cia.gov].

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