Executive Order 12065 Revises Classification and Declassification Rules
President Jimmy Carter signed Executive Order 12065 on June 28, 1978. It limited prolonged classification, required systematic review of permanently valuable records at 20 years, and allowed public interest in disclosure to outweigh continued protection in some cases.
Background
Scope of the order
Executive Order 12065 governed the classification, marking, and declassification of national-security information. It did not amend the Freedom of Information Act, although it referred to FOIA requests in several classification and review provisions.
Declassification rules
Information classified for more than six years generally had to receive the earliest practicable declassification or review date, normally no later than 20 years after original classification. Permanently valuable government records were to undergo systematic review when they reached that age. Even where classification criteria continued to apply, an authorized official could determine that the public interest in disclosure outweighed the expected national-security damage.
Relevance to UAP records
The order does not mention UFOs or UAPs. Its relevance to historical UAP records is limited to the classification and declassification framework in force at the time. Whether a particular record became accessible because of the order requires examination of that record’s release history.