It is no coincidence, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Area 51), that the agency behind some of the most secret and dangerous acts out in the desert has changed its name four times:
First it was called the Manhattan Project, during World War II. Then, in 1947, it changed its name to the Atomic Energy Commission, or AEC. In 1975 the agency was renamed the Energy Research and Development Administration, or ERDA. In 1977 it was renamed again, this time the Department of Energy, “the government department whose mission is to advance technology and promote related innovation in the United States,” which conveniently makes it sound more like Apple Corporation than the federal agency that produced seventy thousand nuclear bombs. Finally, in 2000, the nuclear weapons side of the agency got a new name for the fourth time: the National Nuclear Security Administration, or NNSA, a department nestled away inside the Department of Energy, or DOE. In August 2010, even the Nevada Test Site changed its name. It is now called the Nevada National Security Site, or NNSS.
Since the National Security Act of 1947 reorganized government after the war, the Department of Defense, the CIA, the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force have all maintained their original names. The cabinet-level Departments of State, Labor, Transportation, Justice, and Education are all called today what they were when they were born. The Federal Bureau of Investigation has changed its name once since its formal beginning in 1908. Originally it was called the Bureau of Investigation, or BOI. By changing the name of the nation’s nuclear weapons agency four times since its creation in 1942, does the federal government hope the nefarious secrets of the Atomic Energy Commission will simply disappear? Certainly, many of its records have.
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In 1995, after President Clinton ordered his Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments to look into Cold War secret-keeping at the Atomic Energy Commission, disturbing documentation was found. In a memorandum dated May 1, 1995, the subject line chosen by Clinton’s committee to sum up early AEC secret-keeping protocol read: “Official Classification Policy to Cover Up Embarrassment.” One of the more damaging documents unearthed by Clinton’s staff was a September 1947 memo by the Atomic Energy Commission’s general manager John Derry. In a document Clinton’s staff called the Derry Memo the Atomic Energy Commission ruled: “All documents and correspondence relating to matters of policy and procedures, the given knowledge of which might compromise or cause embarrassment to the Atomic Energy Commission and/ or its contractors,” should be classified secret or confidential.
Clinton’s staff also discovered a document that read: “… there are a large number of papers which do not violate security, but do cause considerable concern to the Atomic Energy Commission Insurance Branch.” In other words, the commission classified many documents because it did not want to get sued. A particular problem arose, the memo continued, “in the declassification of medical papers on human administration experiments done to date.” To find a way around the problem the commission consulted with its “Atomic Energy Commission Insurance Branch.” The conclusion was that if anything was going to be declassified it should first be “reworded or deleted” so as not to result in a legal claim.
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In 2011 there are an estimated 1.96 billion Internet users worldwide—almost one-third of the people on the planet—and the most popular conspiracy Web site based in America is AboveTopSecret.com. According to CEO Bill Irvine, the site sees five million visitors each month. AboveTopSecret.com has approximately 2.4 million pages of content, including 10.6 million individual posts. The Web site’s motto is Deny Ignorance, and its members say they are people who “rage against the mindless status-quo.”