The release of the executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA’s post-9/11 interrogation program is, among other things, an epic act of record preservation. Numerous…
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Updated below The Intelligence Community Inspector General (IC IG) received a tip last year that the Intelligence Community might have assembled a database containing US person data in violation of…
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In the United States Air Force, “intelligence components do not engage in experimentation involving human subjects for intelligence purposes.” That unsolicited assurance was reiterated in the latest revision of Air…
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Most of the national security agencies in the executive branch have now been granted approval to exempt certain 50 year old classified information from automatic declassification.
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It is entirely proper for a court to conduct in camera review of documents and testimony that the government asserts are subject to the state secrets privilege,…
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In preparing its recent report on the Section 702 surveillance program, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) demonstrated an unusual mode of declassification, in…
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Updated below The National Security Agency would be required to prepare an unclassified report on “all NSA bulk collection activities,” the Senate Appropriations Committee directed in…
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The House of Representatives yesterday approved an amendment to cut the budget for the National Security Council by one third in response to NSC moves to block congressional…
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Is there any act of overclassification that is so egregious that the classifier would be held accountable for abusing his classification authority? The answer is unknown, since no one has…
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Of the many lessons to be learned from the unauthorized disclosures of classified intelligence information by Edward Snowden, one of them is that the congressional intelligence oversight process did not…
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