The CIA Just Put 12M Pages of Files Online. Start Here

This week, the Central Intelligence Agency posted its CIA Records Search Tool database online, making roughly 930,000 declassified documents—over 12 million pages in all—widely accessible for the first time. Since no one has time to sift through that many digital files, we did it for you. Here’s the last five decades of CIA papers, greatest hits edition.

The document trove, CREST, was already declassified and technically available to the public, but only in person, from specific computers at the National Archives in Maryland. Digitizing that big a haul has also been quite a process; in 2014, the CIA said it could take up to six years to get it all online. To help speed things up, journalist Michael Best launched a Kickstarter campaign to go to the National Archive CREST computers, print out each page of the database one by one, scan them, and digitally publish the archive that way. Probably better for all involved that it didn’t come to that.

There may not be many shocking revelations lurking inside the trove, but the newfound accessibility will legitimately aide researchers, academics, and curious citizens. “What it mostly is is magazine and newspaper articles from all over the world,” says Nick Cullather, a historian at Indiana University who specializes in US foreign relations and intelligence. “But that’s kind of interesting because it’s a collection of things people were reading at a particular time… It gives you a sense of how the CIA was perceiving the world.”