This post was published 2 years 11 months 1 day ago and its content may not be valid anymore.

After 25 years, secret classified files and documents will be automatically declassified making them fair game for the general public. Who out there is going to be digging through the piles of information?

It will be a Cinderella moment for the band of researchers who study the hidden history of American government.

At midnight on Dec. 31, hundreds of millions of pages of secret documents will be instantly declassified, including many FBI cold war files on investigations of people suspected of being Communist sympathizers. After years of extensions sought by federal agencies behaving like college students facing a term paper, the end of 2006 means the government’s first automatic declassification of records.

Prepare yourselves for a flood of websites devoted to unearthing US secrets multiplying tenfold as historians, paranoids, and bread-crumb hunters take a stab at making sense of the declassified documents. Oh what fun *sarcasm*.