CIA to post millions of declassified documents online.

• Position: GOVERNMENT RECORDS - Brief article

The CIA is moving more than 11 million pages of previously declassified documents to its public CIA.govwebsite, according to fcw.com.

In 2000, the agency created the CIA Records Search Tool (CREST), an electronic database of documents declassified under a Clinton administration executive order calling for the declassification of historically valuable records that are 25 years old or older.

CREST was quickly criticized, however, because although the documents had been publicly released, they could be accessed and searched only at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) facility in College Park, Md., where it was housed.

"The migration is certainly a welcome move, especially if the existing search functionality--which is quite good--is retained on the new site," said Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists' Project on Government Secrecy and a longtime critic of CREST being kept offline.

CIA spokesman Jonathan Liu said putting the documents online will "dramatically...