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Newer News: January 2012

December 2011 Intelligence News

• Science and Censorship: A Duel Lasting Centuries by William J. Broad, New York Times, December 27. "Science and secrecy go back centuries, their conflicting agendas often rooted in issues of war and advanced weaponry. Now the call for concealment is falling on one of the hottest of contemporary fields -- virology, where researchers are tinkering with the fundamentals of life to better understand whether altered flu germs might set off deadly epidemics."
• Bradley Manning's WikiLeaks case: The larger issue by Josh Gerstein, Politico, December 23. "The hearing also produced equally compelling evidence of the larger issue that is often overlooked in discussions of Manning's alleged misdeeds: the systematic breakdown in security that enabled a low-ranking enlisted man to abscond with a staggering quantity of classified Pentagon and State Department documents."
• Report: Solar Flares Unlikely to Spark Electrical Armageddon, National Defense blog, December 22. "Energy from solar flares can indeed harm electrical grids on Earth, but a new study says the sun probably won't plunge the United States into the Dark Ages, as some theorists have imagined."
• Why are we censoring bird flu science? by Jack Shafer, Reuters, December 21. "Even an unenforceable request by the government to suppress the flow of information rankles free-speech radicals like me. We believe in open inquiry and unfettered communications, and battle the redaction machine whenever the censors start its engine."
• Uncle Sam's 'Mal-intent' by Michael Solomon, In These Times, December 21. "With its FAST program, the federal government is trying to read minds to fight terrorism."
• National Archives works on declassifying massive backlog of documents by Peter Finn, Washington Post, December 3. "To cut through the mountain of paper, the NDC has introduced a risk-management approach to the documents. Instead of attempting to look at every document, all the relevant agencies agreed to look at a small sample of a particular series."