Beginning in 1974, the U.S. intelligence community provided the public with a broad selection of foreign news reports, updated daily.  These were collected and translated by the Central Intelligence Agency’s Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS), which was reconstituted in 2004 as the Open Source Center (OSC).

But the CIA has now terminated public access to those news reports, as of December 31.  The Open Source Center cut off its feed to the National Technical Information Service’s World News Connection, which was the conduit for public access to these materials (through paid subscriptions).

Translation of foreign news reports had been one of the few direct services that U.S. intelligence agencies offered to the American public.  Many journalists, scholars and researchers benefited from it, and citations to old FBIS translations can be found in innumerable journal articles and dissertations.  The utility of this public service was diminished somewhat in recent years by copyright constraints on publication. But it remained a valuable if eclectic source of alternative perspectives on regional and international affairs in a searchable global database that extended across decades.

Now it’s over.

Of course, the CIA will continue to collect and to translate foreign news reports at its Open Source Center. It just won’t permit the public to access them.

CIA spokesman Christopher White explained: “The Open Source Center (OSC) remains committed to its mission of acquiring, analyzing, and disseminating open source information within the U.S. government. As technology evolves rapidly, the open source feed of information to the National Technical Information Service, Department of Commerce, has become outdated and it would be cost prohibitive to update this feed. In addition, publicly available open source information and machine translation capabilities are now readily available to individuals on the Internet.”

The original 1974 decision to allow public access to FBIS products was “a particularly significant event,” said FBIS deputy director J. Niles Riddel, speaking at a 1992 conference organized by Robert Steele‘s Open Source Solutions. Public access enabled “expanded participation in informed analysis of issues significant to U.S. policy interests,” he said.

In fact, in the climate that prevailed in the early 1990s, public access to FBIS products was actually promoted by intelligence community officials. Mr. Riddel said then that it was “strongly supported by our customers in both the Intelligence and Policy Communities who value the work of private sector scholars and analysts who avail themselves of our material and contribute significantly to the national debate on contemporary issues such as economic competitiveness.”

But that’s all finished.  Instead of adapting and expanding its open source product line in response to the needs and wants of the interested public, this four-decade CIA experiment in public engagement is concluded. Americans are invited to look elsewhere.

“We are sad to be losing this popular file,” said Sherry Grant of ProQuest, which managed public subscriptions to the NTIS World News Connection. “However, as you can see, it’s beyond our control.”

There are some alternatives. “You can access a similar service from BBC Monitoring,” suggested Rosy Wolfe, head of business development at BBC Monitoring. “I’d be happy to provide you with more information.”  At least someone is happy.

*    *    *

A comparative assessment of foreign news coverage by FBIS and the BBC was presented in “The Scope of FBIS and BBC Open-Source Media Coverage, 1979-2008” by Kalev Leetaru, Studies in Intelligence, vol. 54, no. 1, March 2010.

“Unfortunately, many misconceptions about the application of OSINT [open source intelligence] continue to endure throughout the [intelligence] community,” wrote Lieutenant Colonel Craig D. Morrow in “OSINT: Truths and Misconceptions,” Military Intelligence Professional Bulletin, April-June 2013, pp. 31-34.

“Though the future of FMM [foreign media monitoring] is unclear at this time, current users agree that it fills a capability gap to automatically collect, organize, and translate open source content near real time, making sense of the overwhelming amount of foreign language data available to intelligence analysts today.” See “Foreign Media Monitoring: The Intelligence Analyst Tool for Exploiting Open Source Intelligence,” by Tracy Blocker and Patrick O’Malley, Military Intelligence Professional Bulletin, July-September 2013, pp. 36-38.

 

Digitally-based virtual worlds and online games such as Second Life and World of Warcraft represent a qualitatively new phenomenon that could have profound impacts on culture, politics and national security, according to a newly disclosed report  (large pdf) prepared in 2008 for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

“This technology has the potential to be an agent for transformational change in our society, our economy, and our efforts to safeguard the homeland,” the report stated. “If virtual world technology enters the mainstream, criminals and US adversaries will find a way to exploit this technology for illegal and errant behavior.”

The study was conducted as part of the 2008 ODNI SHARP (Summer Hard Problem) program and was just released under the Freedom of Information Act in redacted (and partially illegible) form. Though sponsored by ODNI, it was prepared by a mix of governmental and non-governmental authors and does not necessarily represent the views of the U.S. intelligence community. See “3D Cyberspace Spillover: Where Virtual Worlds Get Real,” July 2008.

Around the same time (2007-2009), U.S. intelligence personnel were actually exploring online games and gathering information on their users, according to classified documents released by Edward Snowden and reported in the New York Times last month.  See “Spies Infiltrate a Fantasy Realm of Online Games” by Mark Mazzetti and Justin Elliott, New York Times, December 9, 2013.

The authors of the ODNI-sponsored report acknowledged that the empirical basis for their inquiry was thin.

“Much of the information in the public domain about the alleged terrorist exploitation of virtual worlds has been speculative rather than based upon substantive evidence. Although there is reliable information available concerning extremist and terrorist exploitation of the internet, for example Web 1.0, the same cannot be said of virtual world or Web 2.0.”

“As of this report, there is little evidence that militant Islamist and jihadist groups have begun extensively exploiting the opportunities presented by virtual worlds.”

“However, given that the more sophisticated groups of this type, including al-Qa’ida, have exploited the internet in very refined ways, they will likely soon seek to exploit newer virtual world technologies for recruiting, raising and transferring funds, training new recruits, conducting reconnaissance and surveillance, and planning attacks by using virtual representations of prospective targets.”

Fancifully, the authors envision the creation of a virtual Usama bin Ladin carrying out his mission for centuries to come.

“Imagine that jihadist supporters create a detailed avatar of Usama bin Ladin and use his many voice recordings to animate the avatar for up-close virtual reality experiences that could be used to preach, convert, recruit, and propagate dogma to the media.”

“The Bin Ladin avatar could preach and issue new fatwas for hundreds of years to come, as the fidelity of his likeness would be entirely believable and animated in new ways to keep him current and fresh.” (p. 72)

The report includes various incidental observations of interest. It notes, for example, that “In many ways, South Korea is the world leader in adopting new technologies” including online games.

But it also reaches far afield, including references to Barbie Girls (“a quickly growing virtual world,” though now closed) and Club Penguin (“over 12 million active users,” now over 200 million, but most of whom are probably under ten years old) (p. 82).

“The growing number of global users, in conjunction with ongoing technological changes, will likely increase the difficulty that the Intelligence Community (IC) will encounter in its efforts to monitor the virtual realm,” said the study, which was classified at the Confidential level. “Accordingly, outreach programs that enlist users as educated observers and reporters will be required to survey current and emerging systems more effectively.”

Years ago, the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, conducted routine audits and investigations of the National Security Agency, such that the two agencies were in “nearly continuous contact” with one another. In the post-Snowden era, GAO could perform that oversight function once again.

“NSA advises that the GAO maintains a team permanently in residence at NSA, resulting in nearly continuous contact between the two organizations,” according to a 1994 CIA memorandum for the Director of Central Intelligence.

“NSA’s practice has been to cooperate with GAO audits and investigations to the extent possible in accordance with DOD regulations,” the CIA memorandum said. “This includes providing the GAO with documents requested, including CCP CBJB’s [congressional budget justification books for the consolidated cryptologic program] as long as (1) the request was in support of a valid audit or investigation and (2) the recipients of the classified material had the requisite accesses and could meet security requirements for classified data control and storage. Documents provided in the past have included CCP CBJBs.”

At a 2008 Senate hearing, Sen. Daniel Akaka asked the GAO about its relationship with NSA. “I understand that GAO even had an office at the NSA,” Sen. Akaka noted.

“We still actually do have space at the NSA,” replied David M. Walker, then-Comptroller General, the head of the GAO. “We just don’t use it. And the reason we don’t use it is we are not getting any requests [from Congress]. So I do not want to have people sitting out there twiddling their thumbs.”

Today, the justification for restoring the type of on-site, investigative oversight of NSA that GAO could provide may be newly apparent– though no one seems to have noticed that GAO could actually provide it.

The recent report of the the Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies includes an appendix citing the various components of oversight of U.S. intelligence, but it does not mention GAO at all.

Whether NSA bulk collection programs are ultimately extended, modified, or terminated, GAO could play a useful role as the eyes and ears of Congress at NSA. While there are several other oversight mechanisms in place, GAO would bring some unique features to the mix.

NSA has a fairly robust Office of the Director of Compliance to perform internal oversight, but it answers to the NSA Director, and reflects his priorities, not necessarily those of Congress.  Inspector general oversight focuses on compliance with the letter of the law, and it is probably less well-suited than GAO to consider systemic problems, performance issues and policy alternatives.  (Last November, the IC Inspector General deflected a request from Senator Leahy to conduct oversight of NSA surveillance programs, citing resource limitations and other issues.)

If it were directed to conduct audits and investigations on behalf of Congress, there is reason to believe the GAO could add a valuable dimension to NSA oversight. Just as a proposed third-party advocate might “thicken” the deliberations of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court concerning surveillance law, so too might GAO investigators enrich the oversight of NSA programs as they are executed in practice.

In Intelligence Community Directive 114, issued in 2011 following years of stagnation in GAO oversight of intelligence, DNI James Clapper instructed U.S. intelligence agencies to be responsive to GAO, at least within certain boundaries.

“It is IC policy to cooperate with the Comptroller General, through the GAO, to the fullest extent possible, and to provide timely responses to requests for information,” the DNI wrote.

Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper has been widely criticized for making a false statement at a March 2013 hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee.  What has gone unremarked, however, is the fact that the Committee permitted that statement to stand uncorrected.

Sen. Ron Wyden asked DNI James Clapper at a March 12, 2013 hearing “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?”

DNI Clapper replied “No, sir.” He added “Not wittingly. There are cases where they could, inadvertently perhaps, collect — but not wittingly.”

Based on this exchange, and in light of the revelations to the contrary made by Edward Snowden, some have concluded that DNI Clapper “lied to Congress,” as the New York Times editorial board put it last week. Some go further to suggest that the DNI should be prosecuted and imprisoned, as Sen. Rand Paul did yesterday.

It is of course wrong for officials to make false statements, as DNI Clapper did when he denied that NSA collects “any type of data at all” on ordinary Americans. But did the DNI actually “lie to Congress”?

In ordinary usage, lying usually connotes an intent to deceive.  In this case, DNI Clapper could not have intended to deceive the Senate Intelligence Committee because the true answer to Senator Wyden’s question was already known to Senator Wyden and to all the other members of the Committee (as noted the other day by ODNI General Counsel Robert S. Litt). Committee members could not have been misled by the DNI’s response, and it makes no sense to say that he intended to mislead them.

What remains true is that others — especially attentive members of the public — were deceived by the DNI’s statement.  If DNI Clapper “lied,” it was to them, not to the Senate Intelligence Committee, that he did so. But the Committee permitted that deception to occur, and to persist, and so it must take its share of responsibility for that.  Yet unlike the DNI (who apologized, several months after the fact, saying he misunderstood the question), the Committee has not acknowledged any failure on its part.

When Senator Wyden posed his question in open session, he was evidently attempting to corner the DNI and to compel him to involuntarily reveal classified information about the NSA bulk collection program. At the time, it seemed to be a clever rhetorical maneuver. Even if the DNI refused to respond or requested to answer the question in closed session, that would have indicated that something pertinent was being concealed.

However, by answering falsely, the DNI turned the tables on Senator Wyden and the Senate Intelligence Committee.  Whether by design or not (almost certainly not), the DNI’s response challenged the Committee to make its own choice either to disclose classified information about the NSA program — in order to rebut and correct the DNI’s answer — or else to acquiesce in the dissemination of false information to the public.

(There was another conceivable option. Without revealing specific classified information, the Committee could have issued a statement that the record of the March 12 hearing included certain erroneous and misleading statements, and that it should not be relied upon.)

As it turned out, the Senate Intelligence Committee made exactly the same choice that DNI Clapper is accused of making. The Committee evidently decided that national security classification trumped any obligation it had to produce an honest and accurate public record. As a result, the Committee itself became complicit in an act of public deception.

This is deeply unfortunate. It means that unclassified Committee statements and publications cannot be granted an unqualified presumption of accuracy or good faith. With the Clapper gambit, the Senate Intelligence Committee moved beyond the familiar practice of secrecy and into the propagation of false and misleading information.

After a declassification review that lasted nearly twenty years, the history of CIA covert action in the Congo from 1960 to 1968 was finally published last week by the State Department, filling an awkward gap in the historical record.

“In August 1960, the U.S. Government launched a covert political program in the Congo lasting almost 7 years, initially aimed at eliminating [Prime Minister Patrice] Lumumba from power and replacing him with a more moderate, pro-Western leader,” an editorial note introducing the new publication stated. See Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS), 1964-1968, Volume XXII, Congo, 1960-1968.

“The U.S. Government provided advice and financial subsidies…. These funds were to be channeled in such a way as to conceal the U.S. Government as a source.”

“At the same time, based on authorization from President Eisenhower’s statements at an NSC meeting on August 18, 1960, discussions began to develop highly sensitive, tightly-held plans to assassinate Lumumba. After Lumumba’s death at the hands of Congolese rivals in January 1961, the U.S. Government authorized the provision of paramilitary and air support to the new Congolese Government….”

“In addition, the covert program included organizing mass demonstrations, distributing anti-Communist pamphlets, and providing propaganda material for broadcasts,” the editorial introduction said.

The new publication supplements previously published official histories of U.S. policy during the Congo Crisis, which were harshly criticized by historians and others for withholding documentary evidence of U.S. covert action.

By excluding CIA covert action, the 1994 FRUS volume on the Congo Crisis “omitted vital information, suppressed details concerning US intervention, and generally provided a misleading account of the Congo crisis,” wrote David N. Gibbs, a political scientist at the University of Arizona in a review entitled “Misrepresenting the Congo Crisis” (African Affairs: Journal of the Royal African Society, vol. 95, no. 380, pp. 453-459, 1996).

In another 1995 paper on Secrecy and International Relations, Prof. Gibbs said the persistent classification of the Congo covert action exemplified the use of secrecy to evade the democratic process.

“According to this approach, governments seek to conceal potentially controversial activities or ones that could generate public opposition,” he wrote. “In the Congo case secrecy successfully concealed government activities (such as the efforts to assassinate Lumumba) that were potentially very controversial.”

Historian Philip Zelikow told his colleagues on the State Department Historical Advisory Committee in 1999 that by refusing to admit the role of covert action, the earlier Congo volume “did enormous damage to the credibility of the Foreign Relations series and of the CIA.”

The current Historian of the State Department, Dr. Stephen P. Randolph, acknowledged that the earlier FRUS volumes “did not… contain documentation of the U.S. covert political action program. There were also no records in the two volumes concerning U.S. planning and preparation for the possible assassination of Patrice Lumumba.”

“This volume consists of a selection of the most significant of those previously unavailable documents,” Dr. Randolph wrote in the Preface to the new FRUS volume.

The first part of the new volume “contains numerous CIA cables to and from the Station in Leopoldville, which documents the chaotic nature of the Congo crisis and the pervasive influence of U.S. Government covert actions in the newly independent nation,” he wrote.

The second part “documents the continuation of the U.S. covert political action programs and their role in providing paramilitary and air support to the Congolese Government in an effort to quell provincial rebellions.”

Astonishingly, “The declassification review of this volume began in 1994 and was finally completed in 2013.”  Even so, it resulted in a number of redactions, some of which are not very credible.

The Central Intelligence Agency insisted on censoring cost figures for its covert action programs, even when they are half a century old. So, for example, document 170 in the new collection states that “To date covert support of Adoula’s government has cost a total of [dollar amount not declassified].”

A helpful editorial note (at p. 5), however, supplies some of the missing information: “The Special Group/303 Committee-approved aggregate budget for covert action in the Congo for the years 1960-1968 totaled approximately $11,702,000 (Political Action, $5,842,000; Air Program, $3,285,000; and Maritime Program, $2,575,000).”

The State Department Historical Advisory Committee, composed of non-governmental historians, advised and supervised the preparation of the final manuscript, and ultimately recommended its publication.

Even with the remaining redactions, the Committee said it “assesses the volume as a reliable guide to the trajectory of U.S. policy toward the Congo from 1960 until 1968 and an exceptionally valuable addition to the historical record.”

More than a dozen professional societies and public interest groups wrote to the Director of National Intelligence last week to ask him to preserve public access to foreign news reports gathered, translated and published by the Open Source Center and marketed to subscribers through the NTIS World News Connection.

The CIA, which manages the Open Source Center for the intelligence community, intends to terminate public access to the World News Connection at the end of this month. (CIA Halts Public Access to Open Source Service, Secrecy News, October 8.)

Among other things, the groups said that this move is inconsistent with the President’s Open Government National Action Plan.

Rather than reducing the existing level of public access, “the U.S. government should expand public access to open source intelligence by publishing all unclassified, uncopyrighted Open Source Center products.”

The December 18 letter was coordinated by the National Coalition for History and is posted here.

Mary Webster, the Open Source Center Deputy Director for Information Access at CIA, did not respond to a request for comment.

BBC Monitoring in the United Kingdom provides a global news aggregation service that is comparable to the NTIS World News Connection and even includes many of the same translations.  A spokeswoman for BBC Monitoring told Secrecy News that her organization would gladly welcome new American customers if the US Government is unable or unwilling to meet their needs.

Updated below

The report of a White House advisory group on intelligence surveillance said that reducing undue secrecy was one of its main objectives.

“A central goal of our recommendations is to increase transparency and to decrease unnecessary secrecy, in order to enhance both accountability and public trust,” the report of the President’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies stated (p. 80). “Excessive surveillance and unjustified secrecy can threaten civil liberties, public trust, and the core processes of democratic self-government (p. 12)”

The Review Group specifically recommended that “detailed information” about legal authorities to compel disclosure about communications records be made public and that “general data” concerning orders to disclose telephone records and other business records be routinely disclosed as well (Recommendations 7-10).

In a more tentative, roundabout way, the report implied that the NSA program to collect telephone metadata in bulk should not have been classified.

“We recommend that the decision to keep secret from the American people programs of the magnitude of the section 215 bulk telephony meta-data program should be made only with due consideration of and respect for the strong presumption of transparency that is central to democratic governance. A program of this magnitude should be kept secret from the American people only if (a) the program serves a compelling governmental interest and (b) the efficacy of the program would be substantially impaired if our enemies were to know of its existence,” the report stated (Recommendation 11).

But the force of this recommendation is diminished by the fact that the proponents of the NSA telephony metadata collection program clearly believed that both of the stated criteria had been met in that case.

More generally, “There is a compelling need today for a serious and comprehensive reexamination of the balance between secrecy and transparency,” the Review Group stated (page 125).

But the adjectives — compelling, serious, comprehensive — are left to do most of the work here.  The proposed reexamination of national security secrecy policy is beyond the Review Group’s scope and is not to be found in this report.

“At the very least, we should always be prepared to question claims that secrecy is necessary,” the report said. “That conclusion needs to be demonstrated rather than merely assumed.”

Not only that, but “Part of the responsibility of our free press is to ferret out and expose information that government officials would prefer to keep secret when such secrecy is unwarranted.”

The Review Group’s most significant recommendation was that the NSA should no longer be permitted to routinely acquire telephone metadata of US persons in bulk, a step that if adopted would significantly transform existing intelligence surveillance programs.

“As a general rule…, the government should not be permitted to collect and store mass, undigested, non-public personal information about US persons for the purpose of enabling future queries and data-mining for foreign intelligence purposes,” the report stated (p. 17)

One way to appreciate the audacity of the Review Group is to compare its report with the original tasking that it received from President Obama in his August 12 memorandum to the Director of National Intelligence.

“The Review Group will assess whether, in light of advancements in communications technologies, the United States employs its technical collection capabilities in a manner that optimally protects our national security and advances our foreign policy while appropriately accounting for other policy considerations, such as the risk of unauthorized disclosure and our need to maintain the public trust,” the President wrote.

This was a weak formulation that barely specified a coherent problem.  But the Review Group took it and ran with it, filling in gaps along the way.

Although the President gave prominence in this one-sentence tasking to “unauthorized disclosure,” that term is only mentioned twice in the 300 page Review Group report (though a revamping of security clearance procedures is the subject of Recommendations 37-41). The matter of “public trust” seemed to be given greater weight and is referenced 18 times.

Meanwhile, although “civil liberties” was not mentioned in the President’s memorandum at all, it appears more than 50 times in the report. And “privacy,” which was likewise outside the Review Group’s explicit terms of reference, is mentioned well over 100 times.

As if to justify its somewhat expansive interpretation of its assignment, the Review Group argued that privacy is actually a type of security.

“The United State Government must protect, at once, two different forms of security: national security and personal privacy” (p. 43). If this seems contrived, the Review Group offered the Latin etymology of the word “securus,” which it claimed encompasses both physical security and personal privacy (p. 45). So…

At any rate, the Review Group exceeded expectations by providing an independent, critical assessment of the issues it was directed to review. Although its non-binding recommendations by themselves do not compel any changes, they already seem to have altered the policy landscape. And together with a December 16 court ruling that NSA bulk collection programs “likely violate the Fourth Amendment,” they appear to have substantially shifted the center of the debate.

Update: Although the President’s August 12 memorandum did not mention privacy or civil liberties, the White House press secretary issued an August 27 statement about the Review Group which did include these terms.

Because the Intelligence Community utilizes commercial products including those that may be manufactured abroad, it could be vulnerable to threat or compromise through its supply chain.  Intelligence Community Directive 731 issued by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper on December 7 establishes IC policy on “Supply Chain Risk Management.”

“Many IC mission-critical products, materials, and services come from supply chains that interface with or operate in a global marketplace. A greater understanding of the risks inherent in the IC’s participation in the global market place is crucial to safeguarding our nation’s intelligence sources, methods, and activities,” the Directive said.

“Supply chain risk management is the management of risk to the integrity, trustworthiness, and authenticity of products and services within the supply chain.”

“It addresses the activities of foreign intelligence entities … and any other adversarial attempts aimed at compromising the IC supply chain, which may include the introduction of counterfeit or malicious items into the IC supply chain,” the Directive said.

In order to restore public trust, the U.S. intelligence community ought to be “aggressive” about reducing classification, former intelligence officials said last week.

Secrecy “is an enormous problem,” said Michael Leiter, who directed the National Counterterrorism Center from 2007 to 2011. “I hope the DNI is very aggressive about moving towards less classification and more effective security clearances.”

He didn’t specify what information he thought should cease to be classified, or exactly how a policy of less classification should be implemented. But he said that current secrecy policies have eroded public confidence.

“I think what Snowden has really illustrated better than anything else is [that] the trust that we need to have in a democratic society between those elements which should remain secret and its public is broken,” Mr. Leiter said. He spoke at a December 11 program on The Current State of Intelligence Reform held at the Bipartisan Policy Center.

“We struck a balance basically in the early 70s — with the FISA Court, Church-Pike– that has broken down,” he said. “And we no longer trust that the HPSCI, or the SSCI, or the FISA Court as its currently constructed or the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board or the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board– people don’t know those names, they don’t know those acronyms, and they don’t trust the US intelligence Community because people don’t believe those organizations are conducting the oversight they should.”

“So I hope out of this Snowden affair we end up with a new modern form of oversight which provides the trust that we need to do the things that have to remain secret,” he said.

Michael Allen, former staff director of the House Intelligence Committee, defended congressional oversight and said that criticism of the quality of intelligence oversight masked a policy disagreement.

“I think Congress has been working better in these respects in the past few years,” he said.

“The reason I think you see some potshots about congressional oversight as related to the Snowden matter is because Congress knew about the [bulk collection] programs and people who don’t like the programs are mad at Congress for going along with them in the first place. So they assault congressional oversight writ large, when they’re really making a policy judgment that they don’t support the underlying programs, and they’re casting aspersions against anyone who might have known or been comfortable with them,” he said.

But Mr. Allen agreed that the intelligence community needed to provide the public with more insight into its activities and with more access to its products.

“I think for the intelligence community to be able to survive and [for] many of the collection programs to be able to be successful, the intelligence community has got to rethink its declassification policy,” he said.

The IC should “consider trying to put out more examples of where its collection programs have been successful in order to fight for the authorities to keep them.” Likewise, it “might consider putting out more of its analysis so that a broader swath of people can have an appreciation for what they [intelligence agencies] do,” Mr. Allen said.

While there has been significant declassification of records concerning NSA surveillance programs, a comparable reassessment of intelligence classification policy in other topical areas remains to be accomplished.

As for public disclosure of other intelligence analysis, that currently seems remote. The ODNI Open Source Center stubbornly refuses to release even unclassified, uncopyrighted products that it generates (though some do leak from time to time).

In fact, current trends point in the opposite direction, towards reduced disclosure.  Later this month the Open Source Center, which is managed by CIA, will terminate longstanding public access to translations of foreign news reports which have long been available (to paid subscribers) through the NTIS World News Connection.

Last week, the Obama Administration argued in court that the CIA should not be obliged to publicly release a 30 year old draft history of the 1961 Bay of Pigs episode.

The National Reconnaissance Office, which builds and operates U.S. intelligence satellites, has just released the unclassified portions of its FY 2014 Congressional Budget Justification, a detailed account of its budget request for the current year.

Although more than 90% of the 534-page document (dated April 2013) was withheld from public release under the Freedom of Information Act, some substantive material was approved for public disclosure, providing a rare glimpse of agency operations, future plans and self-perceptions.  Some examples:

*    NRO says it recently achieved an “88 percent reduction in collection-to-analyst dissemination timelines,” facilitating the rapid dissemination of time-sensitive data.

*    The 2014 budget request “represents the biggest restructure of the NRO portfolio in a decade.”

*    The NRO research agenda includes “patterns of life.” This refers to the “ability to take advantage of massive data sets, multiple data sources, and high-speed machine processing to identify patterns without a priori knowledge or pattern definition… to detect, characterize, and identify elusive targets.”

*    Other research objectives include development of technologies for “collecting previously unknown or unobservable phenomena and improving collection of known phenomena; providing persistent surveillance; reducing satellite vulnerability; … innovative adaptation of video game and IT technologies…” and more.

*    “A primary responsibility of the NRO is ensuring that the entire NRO [satellite] constellation is replenished efficiently and in time to guarantee mission success.”

*    The NRO’s implementation of the Intelligence Community Information Technology Enterprise (IC ITE), an effort to establish a common IC-wide IT architecture, is discussed at some length. “The DNI’s IC ITE architecture paves the way for a fundamental shift toward operating as an IC Enterprise that uses common, secure, shared capabilities and services.”

*    With respect to security, NRO employs “automated insider threat detection tools, analyzes collected data in conjunction with disparate data sources to produce investigative leads, [and] performs assessments to rule out malicious activity occurring on NRO networks.”  NRO counterintelligence activities “concentrate on insider threat, traditional, and asymmetric methodologies.”

The National Reconnaissance Office has an annual budget of approximately $10 billion ($10.4 billion in FY 2012), according to classified budget documents obtained by the Washington Post. It employs around 975 people.

“I am proud to report that all of our major system acquisition programs are green– meeting or beating all performance, costs and schedule goals,” said Betty Sapp, director of the National Reconnaissance Office, at a March 2013 hearing. “Additionally, for the fourth year in a row, the NRO received a clean audit opinion on our financial statements,” an unprecedented feat in the U.S. intelligence community, which has largely eluded financial accountability.

“Over the coming years, the NRO will incorporate revolutionary new technologies into our architecture that will provide enhanced support to the warfighter while also improving the resiliency of our systems,” Director Sapp testified.

 

In a new report to Congress, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence identified the seven external advisory committees that currently support and advise the DNI.

Ordinarily, government advisory committees that include non-governmental members are subject to open meeting requirements under the Federal Advisory Committee Act. It mandates that “the Congress and the public should be kept informed with respect to the number, purpose, membership, activities, and cost of advisory committees.” The Act was intended to provide a check on the government’s many advisory committees, which have sometimes played an influential role in the formulation of public policy.

But the Act also provides that committees established by the DNI may be exempted from public reporting requirements, as are all of the intelligence-related Committees listed in the new report. The report was released by ODNI under the Freedom of Information Act, with the names of all committee members redacted.  In numerous cases, however, committee members have identified themselves in their own online bios.

The current DNI advisory committees are:

1. Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Senior Advisory Group (SAG) which is supposed “to provide external perspective to the DNI on policy, industry best practices, technology breakthroughs, and best-in-class solutions relevant to current intelligence issues.” SAG members include Jane Harman, Joanne Isham, and Paul Kaminski.

2. National Counterterrorism Center Director’s Advisory Board (NCTC DAB) advises NCTC on counterterrorism policy and technology.  Members include Jared Cohen and Michael Leiter.

3. National Counterproliferation Center (NCPC) Senior Counterproliferation Partners Advisory Board (SCPAB) advises the Center on “a variety of issues facing the Counterproliferation community” including assessments of significant intelligence events and guidance on interacting with military commands.

4. Homeland Security and Law Enforcement Partners Board (HS/LE PB) provides perspectives on the intelligence needs and equities of State, Local and Tribal partners.

5. Advanced Technology Board provides “linkages between the Intelligence Community and the scientific community” as well as “early notice of developments in science that might affect the Intelligence Community.” Members include Robert Fein.

6. Financial Sector Advisory Board (FSAB) provides “insights on information sources, developments, and other areas expected to improve the Intelligence Community’s ability to produce actionable intelligence in the financial arena.” Current members include Bob Rose of Thomson Reuters (who also sits on the NCTC Director’s Advisory Board).

7. Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies is the advisory group established at the direction of the President in response to the controversy generated by the Snowden disclosures. The Review Group members, disclosed by the White House but redacted by ODNI, are Richard Clarke, Michael Morell, Geoffrey Stone, Cass Sunstein, and Peter Swire.

DNI Clapper stated in 2012 that he had “reduced the number of advisory boards to the DNI as part of an efficiency review.”  Among the defunct advisory groups was the Intelligence Science Board, which produced an important study of the science of interrogation practices that became public in January 2007.

The President would have to prepare a written plan for responding to the possibility of an unauthorized disclosure of any CIA covert action program, according to a provision adopted last month by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

The requirement was introduced by Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) and was adopted by voice vote in the pending FY 2014 Intelligence Authorization Act (section 307).

The measure represents an implicit acknowledgment that the secrecy of CIA covert action today cannot be assured or blithely assumed, particularly when compartmented intelligence programs are regularly reported in the press.

Covert action by definition is a CIA activity that is intended to be deniable and unattributable to the U.S. government.  Covert action is considered to be an option when public disclosure of the operation would render it unfeasible, diminish its utility, or generate adverse consequences for the United States.

The history of CIA covert action, which remains obscure in large part, includes some notable successes, such as the clandestine support of Poland’s Solidarity movement. But the record also includes terrifying failures, like the overthrow of Guatemala’s leadership in 1954, which inaugurated decades of violent oppression in that country.

Analysts and former intelligence officials (such as Greg Treverton, Roy Godson, and Loch Johnson) have long argued that covert action should never be undertaken without a degree of confidence that the American public would support it if it were known.

The Schakowsky provision would effectively force such consideration of public reaction by requiring officials to anticipate and plan for the unintended disclosure of each covert action program.

Although her amendment was adopted by the House Intelligence Committee without objection, Rep. Schakowsky ended up opposing the Committee markup of the FY2014 intelligence bill.  As explained in the Minority Views appended to the Committee report, she objected to the bill’s failure to ban so-called “signature strikes,” referring to the targeted killing of unknown persons based on their suspicious behavior, or signature.

Another proposal favored by Rep. Schakowsky but not adopted by the Committee would have required “an independent alternative analysis prior to striking a U.S. person.”