In response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, the National Reconnaissance Office last week released to the Federation of American Scientists the unclassified portions of the NRO Congressional Budget Justification Book for Fiscal Year 2006.
“You have joined a very exclusive club of people who not only win FOIA cases but actually get some documents as a result,” wrote Harry Hammitt, editor of the newsletter Access Reports.
The two-volume, 582-page document was almost entirely blacked out on national security classification grounds. But a few substantive narrative portions were released (and will be posted once our scanner is fixed).
Perhaps more important, the lawsuit successfully countered the claim that such records can be excluded from FOIA processing by designating them as “operational files.”
See “Watchdog wins release of National Reconnaissance Office documents” by Daniel Friedman, Federal Times, January 9.
Americans are paying too much for almost everything, because the United States has long treated its trucking industry as an artifact to be preserved rather than as an opportunity for innovation.
These ideas aim to advance the detailed policy solutions needed to foster public trust and implement fairness in the adoption of AI across diverse domains, from healthcare and government benefits to rural access, education, and worker protections.
The evidence is clear: algorithmic pay-setting is established in app-based work, and payroll/timekeeping failures show how software can produce systemic wage harm at scale
While a few states have taken steps to implement decision-making mechanisms for certain AI systems, too many leaders are simply accepting narratives about AI’s purported public benefit at face value – jumping to the “how” of AI implementation before thoroughly vetting potential systems and deciding whether they are appropriate to use at all.