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This is Fresh Air.

I'm Dave Davies in today for Terry Gross.

We've heard a lot lately about presidential mishandling of classified documents and no doubt

we'll hear more in the coming months.

Our guest today, Matthew Connelly, says one recent confidential records get where they

shouldn't is that there are way way too many of them and that has some serious consequences.

Connelly has studied the subject for years and he says nowadays the US government

classifies so many records that it's become almost impossible to preserve them all,

much less review and declassify them for future study by researchers and historians.

He writes that there are enough government files locked up in record centers across the

country to fill 26 Washington monuments.

Connelly says records are often classified simply to protect the reputations of officials involved.

His new book is a history of the cynical use of government secrecy and an account of his

own effort to address the problem.

He and some data scientists have used artificial intelligence and machine learning to develop

a system to analyze huge troves of records to determine which should be truly classified

and which can be made public.

He'll tell us in a bit what happened when he tried to interest government officials in that idea.

Matthew Connelly is a professor of international and global history at Columbia University

and principal investigator at History Lab, a project that's been funded by the National Science

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