In discussing the Vice President’s declassification authority yesterday, we should have noted that some categories of information are protected by statute, not just by executive order. Such information, including intelligence sources and methods that are protected by the National Security Act, cannot simply be declassified by presidential (or vice presidential) fiat.
The point was made in “The White House’s maestro of secrets,” Roanoke Times, February 17.
The AIPAC case, involving the use of the Espionage Act to prosecute the receipt (and not merely the disclosure) of classified information, was viewed from Israel in “Washington: Lobbying for freedom of speech” by Nathan Guttman, Jerusalem Post, February 16.
“Criticism rained down on Vice President Dick Cheney this week for failing to disclose his hunting accident to the public for a day, but advocates of open government said the episode was nothing new. For five years, they said, Cheney has led the Bush administration’s efforts to curtail the flow of government information.”
See “Activists assert secrecy is Cheney’s hallmark” by Charlie Savage, Boston Globe, February 17.
The Federation of American Scientists supports H.R. 4420, the Cool Corridors Act of 2025, which would reauthorize the Healthy Streets program through 2030 and seeks to increase green and other shade infrastructure in high-heat areas.
The current lack of public trust in AI risks inhibiting innovation and adoption of AI systems, meaning new methods will not be discovered and new benefits won’t be felt. A failure to uphold high standards in the technology we deploy will also place our nation at a strategic disadvantage compared to our competitors.
Using the NIST as an example, the Radiation Physics Building (still without the funding to complete its renovation) is crucial to national security and the medical community. If it were to go down (or away), every medical device in the United States that uses radiation would be decertified within 6 months, creating a significant single point of failure that cannot be quickly mitigated.
The federal government can support more proactive, efficient, and cost-effective resiliency planning by certifying predictive models to validate and publicly indicate their quality.