Congress ordered the double-check in 1998 to protect nuclear weapons information that might be buried in the files. The Clinton declassification order did not apply to nuclear secrets, which are protected by the 1954 Atomic Energy Act, and DOE said its preliminary surveys showed that some weapons information had been improperly released and one document had even been posted on the Internet. Twenty other censors travel the country looking for secrets in the records of the presidential libraries and regional warehouses. Some are nuclear physicists and scientists. I think they're sort of the unsung heroes of this saga.
Some archivists have less flattering descriptions.
There's a general impression among most people here that they spread out and look at files that don't necessarily need to be looked at to justify their presence. The war in Vietnam is a case in point. The National Archives has more than 18,000 boxes of records about U.S. forces in Southeast Asia, stretching from 1950 to 1975, and Energy Department officials are looking at each one, even though no nuclear weapons were used in the conflict. The boxes are stuffed with 15 million pages covering 1,500 topics. Energy officials say they've checked out 1,100 and have just 400 to go.