BOB GARFIELD: President Obama has promised to oversee a new era of transparency in government. One of his very first moves was to revive the ailing Freedom of Information Act. But even the best intentions can be thwarted by aging systems that aren't built to accommodate brave new futures. Slate columnist Fred Kaplan – who is, by the way, Brooke’s husband – wrote about a report by the National Archives and Records Administration with troubling implications. It concluded, wrote Kaplan, that in an era when nearly all records are stored on hard drives rather than typed on paper, the raw bits of history are evaporating. Fred, welcome back to the show.

FRED KAPLAN: Thanks a lot.

BOB GARFIELD: Okay, so your piece in Slate is fascinating because it reminds us that not everything produced within the federal government exists on paper to be archived. What other material is out there that’s slipping through the cracks?

FRED KAPLAN: Well, almost everything in the Pentagon, if it’s a briefing on a war plan, on a weapons procurement, it’s all done on PowerPoint these days. And the National Archive is currently unable to accept and process either PowerPoint slides or Microsoft Word documents. So the National Archives are basically telling all the federal agencies, listen, we can't do anything with these now so just hang onto them and file them rationally until we get around to it. They're currently –

[OVERTALK]

BOB GARFIELD: Hold on, hold on, hold on. The National Archive -

FRED KAPLAN: Yeah.

BOB GARFIELD: - is not equipped to accept -

FRED KAPLAN: That’s right.

BOB GARFIELD: - Word documents.

FRED KAPLAN: Yeah. Until a few years ago, they could not accept email with attachments, digital photos or PDF documents. That’s just in the last few years. They supposedly are putting together an electronic record archive, but it will not be ready for at least three years. I'm not quite sure why that’s the case. You know, a dot-com firm can get started up, go bankrupt, and the guys [BOB LAUGHS] can start a new dot-com firm in a year and a half. So [LAUGHS] – beats me. Maybe -

BOB GARFIELD: That’s the miracle of the government procurement process, I'm sure. [LAUGHS] But does it behoove agencies to themselves store all of these Word documents and PowerPoint presentations until such time as the Archives can process them?

FRED KAPLAN: They're supposed to. But an Air Force historian told me a few years ago that he was putting together the official Air Force history of the Panama operation, and he found out, almost by accident, that all of the briefings on the war plan were kept in this small Mac computer. He also found out that this small Mac computer was about to be thrown out – not deliberately – just, okay, here’s an old computer. Let's get rid of it. He printed out all the documents from that computer, and those printouts are the only copies of those briefings that are in existence.

BOB GARFIELD: So we're not talking about an administration that is intentionally trying to erase history. It’s just that the administrative infrastructure does not have the wherewithal to preserve any of this stuff.

FRED KAPLAN: That's right. You know, in the old days, when people used paper, what would happen is officials would write memos to each other. There'd be a secretarial pool that would type them up on carbons. Every once in a while the archivist would come around with a cart and take away all the carbons. And so, if you’re an historian and you want to research World War II or the Kennedy Administration or the Johnson Administration, you have a treasure trove of information. You can actually put together, you know, how the Vietnam War got started, this particular battle in World War II. My fear is that when historians 20 years from now go back and try to figure out why we invaded Iraq or Afghanistan or even - you know, it’s not just the Bush Administration. It’s about the Kosovo operation under Clinton or the Gulf War under the first President Bush. If somebody puts in a Freedom of Information Request asking for documents related to X, Y and Z, the answer might come back, sorry, no such documents exist.

BOB GARFIELD: Fred Kaplan, once again, thank you for joining us.

FRED KAPLAN: Thank you.

BOB GARFIELD: Fred Kaplan writes the War Stories column for Slate.com and is the author of Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power.