A new law review article argues that government secrets can be usefully distinguished in terms of “depth”– i.e. “how many people know of their existence, what sorts of people know, how much they know, and how soon they know…. Attending to the depth of state secrets can make a variety of conceptual and practical contributions to the debate on their usage. The deep/shallow distinction provides a vocabulary and an analytic framework with which to describe, assess, and compare secrets, without having to judge what they conceal.” See “Deep Secrecy” by David Pozen, Stanford Law Review, forthcoming.
A new book revisits the case of Frank Olson, the Army biochemist who fell to his death in 1953 after having been unwittingly dosed with LSD in a CIA experiment. “A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments” by H.P. Albarelli Jr. was published this month by TrineDay, which says it “specializes in releasing books that are shunned by mainstream publishers due to their controversial nature.”
Closed child welfare hearings in the District of Columbia Family Court should be opened up, argued law professor Matthew I. Fraidin in recent testimony before the D.C. Council. Open hearings would promote improved protection for the children, increased professionalism by the adult participants, and greater accountability all around, he said. See “Opening Child Welfare Proceedings in the Family Court of the District of Columbia,” November 4, 2009.
About 86% of Colorado’s water is used for agriculture, but only about 30-60% of that water actually reaches crops. Conveyance efficiency through canal modernization is a powerful drought resilience and water saving strategy with proven technical feasibility.
“One thing became increasingly clear: AI doesn’t simply introduce a new category of risk. It changes the speed, scale, complexity, and interaction of risks that already exist.”
In an ideal world, we would not have state or federal climate intervention research bans. We would have researchers and institutions that would not shy away from revealing the good, the bad, and the ugly of these technologies and doing so responsibly.
“What excites me is that it’s very tempting to be very discouraged, and say, ‘Oh, we’ve got these archaic institutions that are calcified and you could never change them.’ But I think we’re in the middle of a technological revolution that will upend lots of things, and does provide a window.”