Interim IG Report on Surveillance Program Released
When Congress amended the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act last year, it enacted a requirement that the Inspectors General of agencies that participated in the Bush Administration’s warrantless surveillance program must prepare a comprehensive review of that program, which was conducted from 2001 to 2007 outside of the FISA legal framework that normally regulates intelligence surveillance.
The final report of the Inspectors General, due in July 2009, is supposed to address “all of the facts necessary to describe the establishment, implementation, product, and use of the product of the Program,” among other things. It “will include both unclassified and classified volumes.”
An interim report, completed last fall, has just been released. The three-page letter report does not present any new findings, but rather lays out the scope of the ongoing review and the division of labor among five agency Inspectors General.
The subject matter of the review ranges widely from legal assessments of the Program (DoJ) to its technical operation (NSA) to communications with private-sector entities concerning the Program (ODNI) to the involvement of the Office of the Secretary of Defense (DoD) and the threat assessments supporting reauthorization of the Program (CIA).
Furthermore, “Each of the IG teams will be alert to other matters … that should be examined as part of a comprehensive review of the Program,” the interim report states.
The newly disclosed interim report was originally submitted to Congress in classified form last September. An unclassified version of the report (which entailed the removal of one sentence) was prepared for the Senate Intelligence Committee in November. But the unclassified report, dated November 24, 2008, was only approved for public release this week, in response to a request from Secrecy News.
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.