Late last year the Attorney General approved revised guidelines for the use of confidential informants by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (pdf).
The guidelines require that confidential human sources be subjected to a new validation process to help ensure that their information is reliable.
The guidelines also generally require that the FBI and prosecutors inform responsible law enforcement authorities if they discover that an FBI source is engaged in “unauthorized criminal activity.”
“The FBI does not have any authority to make any promise or commitment that would prevent the government from prosecuting a Confidential Human Source for criminal activity that is not authorized…..”
See “Attorney General Guidelines Regarding the Use of FBI Confidential Human Sources,” approved December 13, 2006.
The Guidelines were included in voluminous FBI answers to questions for the record of a recently published Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on “FBI Oversight,” December 6, 2006 (14 MB PDF file).
Given the unreliability of private market funding for agricultural biotechnology R&D, substantial federal funding through research programs such as AgARDA is vital for accelerating R&D.
“Given the number of existential crises we must collectively confront, I have found policy entrepreneurship to be a fruitful avenue towards doing some of that work.”
We sit on the verge of another Presidential election – an opportunity for meaningful, science-based policy innovations that can appeal to lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.
Outdated Bureau of Labor Statistics classifications hampers the federal government’s ability to design and implement effective policies for emerging technologies sectors.