New reports from the Congressional Research Service on natural gas and miscellaneous other topics include the following (all pdf).

“Implication’s of Egypt’s Turmoil on Global Oil and Natural Gas Supply,” February 11, 2011.

“Israel’s Offshore Natural Gas Discoveries Enhance Its Economic and Energy Outlook,” January 31, 2011.

“Global Natural Gas: A Growing Resource,” December 22, 2010.

“The Army’s Ground Combat Vehicle (GCV) and Early Infantry Brigade Combat Team (E-IBCT) Programs,” January 18, 2011.

“Cuba: Issues for the 112th Congress,” January 28, 2011.

“Mexico’s Drug Trafficking Organizations: Source and Scope of the Rising Violence,” January 7, 2011.

“Is Biopower Carbon Neutral?,” January 25, 2011.

“Violence Against Members of Congress and Their Staff: Selected Examples and Congressional Responses,” January 25, 2011.

“The Obama Administration’s Feed the Future Initiative,” January 10, 2011.

The Director of National Intelligence on Monday did what has never been done before:  He disclosed the size of the coming year’s budget request for the National Intelligence Program.  For Fiscal Year 2012, “The aggregate amount of appropriations requested for the National Intelligence Program is $55 billion,” according to a February 14 ODNI news release (pdf).

The new disclosure was required by the FY2010 intelligence authorization act (sec. 364).  That legislation permitted an optional Presidential waiver of disclosure if necessary on national security grounds, but no waiver was asserted.

The disclosure of the budget request constitutes a new milestone in the “normalization” of intelligence budgeting. It sets the stage for a direct appropriation of intelligence funds, to replace the deliberately misleading practice of concealing intelligence funds within the defense budget.  Doing so would also enable the Pentagon to (accurately) report a smaller total budget figure, a congenial prospect in tight budget times.  (See “Intelligence Budget Disclosure: What Comes Next?”, Secrecy News, November 1, 2010.)

The publication of the intelligence budget request is the culmination of many years of contentious debate and litigation on the subject.

Until quite recently, intelligence community leaders firmly opposed disclosure both of the intelligence budget total and of the total budget request.  In response to a 1999 lawsuit brought by the Federation of American Scientists, Director of Central Intelligence George J. Tenet said that revealing the budget request would damage national security and compromise intelligence methods.

“I have determined that disclosure of the budget request or the total appropriation reasonably could be expected to provide foreign intelligence services with a valuable benchmark for identifying and frustrating United States’ intelligence programs,” DCI Tenet wrote in a sworn declaration.  The court upheld the classification of the requested information.

Was DCI Tenet wrong then about the damaging effects of disclosure?  Is DNI Clapper wrong now to dismiss the significance of such damage?  Could they somehow both be right?

From our perspective, Mr. Tenet was wrong in 1999, and the damage he foresaw would not have resulted from the disclosure that he prevented. (It turns out that the FOIA litigation process is not an effective way to contest such judgments.)

More fundamentally, the changing official assessment of the need to classify this information reflects the subjectivity that is inherent in the classification process, which makes it possible for two intelligence community leaders to reach opposing conclusions.

The same subjectivity prevails today.  Thus, while the budget request for the National Intelligence Program (NIP) has now been disclosed, the request for the Military Intelligence Program (MIP) remains classified.  We have requested release of this information.

The $55 billion requested for the NIP in FY 2012 represents a slight increase over the $53.1 billion appropriated for the NIP in FY 2010.  The FY 2011 NIP appropriation has not yet been published.  It is supposed to be disclosed at the end of the current fiscal year.

The Central Intelligence Agency invoked the state secrets privilege in 2004 to cover up a case of environmental contamination at a CIA facility that caused illnesses to an Agency employee and his family, according to the employee, Kevin Shipp.

The episode was revealed in the Washington Post and the New York Times on February 11 after Mr. Shipp decided to go public with his account of the sealed case.

The story was elaborated yesterday in the Washington Post with the disclosure that the CIA also failed to respond to inquiries from Mr. Shipp’s congressman, Rep. Frank Wolf, and that the congressional intelligence committees refused to respond to Mr. Shipp at all.  See “Intelligence panels ignored CIA officer’s pleas” by Jeff Stein, February 14.

By invoking the state secrets privilege, the government denied Mr. Shipp the basic right to argue his case and to seek a remedy.  Although the Obama Administration’s September 2009 policy on state secrets held out the promise that “credible allegations of government wrongdoing” in state secrets cases facing dismissal would be referred to agency Inspectors General, there is no record of any such referral by the Obama Administration or its predecessor.

Having been refused access to judicial review of his claims and with no response from congressional overseers, Mr. Shipp evidently chose to violate the court order sealing his case and the classification controls restricting its disclosure.  He did not “leak” the information anonymously.  Instead, he publicly revealed at least the outlines of his case.  He may now pay an additional price for these violations.  But he may also have reckoned that the state secrets privilege has no force in the court of public opinion.

The National Declassification Center (NDC) at the National Archives will declassify the full text of the Pentagon Papers as well as the underlying documentation on which they are based, along with investigative material concerning the 1971 leak of the Papers by Daniel Ellsberg, the NDC said yesterday.

“One matter to keep in mind concerning the Pentagon Papers is that there is no complete record of the report in the public domain,” the NDC blog said.

The Pentagon Papers Project “is both an interagency and intra-agency effort.  NARA is working closely with its partners in the intelligence and defense communities, and the Department of Justice to ensure that we make available as much of this historical collection as possible.”

But one wonders why a “project,” complete with inter- and intra-agency coordination, is necessary at all to process defense policy records that were mostly made public 40 years ago.  A better use of public resources would be to wave a wand and simply declare the records open.

The Central Intelligence Agency has taken no action to carry out the Fundamental Classification Guidance Review, a mandatory effort to eliminate obsolete or unnecessary classification practices.

The Fundamental Review is a systematic attempt to combat overclassification by subjecting thousands of current classification instructions to critical scrutiny and revision.  It was required in President Obama’s December 2009 executive order 13526 (section 1.9), which came into effect in June 2010.  “These reviews can be extremely important in changing the habits and the practices of classifiers throughout government,” said William H. Leary of the National Security Staff last year.  But that will be true only if the required reviews are actually implemented.

In response to a Freedom of Information Act request for CIA records on its implementation of the review process thus far, CIA reported last week (pdf) that “We did not locate any records responsive to your request.”

This does not necessarily imply that the CIA is being insubordinate or that the Fundamental Review will not eventually be performed there, an Administration official said, noting that agencies were given two years — until June 2012 — to complete the Review process.  The CIA’s latest statement “means only that they have not done anything to date,” the official said.  “There are  a ton of things that agencies have to do that did not come with a two-year implementation window.”

Nevertheless, it is not very encouraging to see that the CIA, which is one of the government’s most prolific classifiers, evidently does not consider the Fundamental Review to be a matter of urgency and a high priority.  Its lethargy is in contrast with the energetic response of the Department of Energy, which developed a detailed workplan last November to implement the Review.  (See “A Bumpy Start for Fundamental Classification Review,” Secrecy News, January 18, 2011.)  The Department of Homeland Security began its Fundamental Review even earlier, in July, according to internal DHS correspondence (pdf) also released under FOIA.

Reducing government reliance on secrecy is an appropriate response to current technological and political realities, according to a report released by the American Bar Association (ABA) Standing Committee on Law and National Security (“No More Secrets: National Security Strategies for a Transparent World,” January 2011).  It would also reduce the nation’s growing susceptibility to unauthorized disclosures, and would therefore enhance national security.  “The report recommends that the government operate with fewer secrets to gain a significant advantage over those who ‘continue to cling to traditional notions of indefinite information monopoly’.”

The ABA report did not present an actionable plan that agencies could adopt to reduce the number of national security secrets they keep.  But that is what the Fundamental Classification Guidance Review was intended to provide.  The Review’s success — or its failure — will determine, for better or worse, the feasibility of reversing the growth of national security secrecy.

I made a pitch for rigorous implementation of the Fundamental Classification Guidance Review in the current issue of Nature Medicine.  See “Review of classification rules represents an opportunity, even for medicine,” February 2011 (sub. req’d).  See also “ISOO Spurs Agencies to Perform Classification Review,” Secrecy News, February 2, 2011.

The Congressional Research Service took a decidedly skeptical view of the Obama Administration’s Open Government Initiative in a recently updated report (pdf).  The report called into question not only the implementation of the Administration’s transparency policy but also its underlying rationale.

“Arguably, releasing previously unavailable datasets to the public increases transparency,” the report granted.  “The new datasets offer the public more information than was previously available, making the particular issue area more transparent.  But this type of transparency does not give Congress or the public much insight into how the federal government itself operates or executes policies,” the CRS report said.

Thus, “the dataset on child safety seats released by the National Traffic Highway Safety Administration (NTHSA), for example, increases public knowledge of child safety seats and may inform a consumer’s future purchases, but it does not affect the general transparency of NHTSA’s operations.”

But even bona fide transparency may not be altogether positive, the CRS report suggested.  “Increased transparency and mandatory public participation requirements can slow down government operations by elongating the deliberative process.  Increased participation may increase trust in the federal government while concurrently reducing the speed of government action.  Additionally, increased government transparency may prompt security and privacy concerns.”

In lieu of any conclusion, the CRS report equivocated that “Congress can decide whether to codify any of the new Obama Administration transparency policies.  On the other hand, Congress can decide whether to enact a law prohibiting the implementation of any of the open government policies.  Congress could also leave these policy decisions up to the executive branch.”

The bulk of the CRS report was written last year, but it was updated last month.  See “The Obama Administration’s Open Government Initiative: Issues for Congress,” January 28, 2011.

Last week, the Obama Administration withdrew a pending proposal to enhance federal contract transparency. “Incredibly, today’s decision would seem to place the Obama Administration in opposition [to] subsequent transparency legislation co-sponsored by then-Senator Obama,” wrote Scott Amey of the Project on Government Oversight.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) will be “reduced in its size and budget,” DNI James R. Clapper Jr. told the House Intelligence Committee last week (pdf).

“We, I think, all understand that we’re going to be in for some belt-tightening. And given, you know, the funding that we have been given over the last 10 years since 9/11, that’s probably appropriate,” DNI Clapper said on February 10.

“Shortly after I became DNI, exactly six months ago today, I began a thorough review of the organization. I examined the intelligence reform law, other statutes and executive orders, and the activities that they direct the DNI to execute,” he said.

“Upon review, I decided to reduce or eliminate functions not required by law or executive order that are not core missions of the DNI. I also identified elements that should transfer out of the ODNI to another agency who would serve as the executive agent on my behalf and carry out these services of [common] concern on behalf of the ODNI. In other words, we don’t need to do everything on the DNI staff itself.”

“Based on this efficiencies review, the Office of the DNI is being reduced in size and budget,” DNI Clapper said.  The details of the reduction remain to be spelled out.

See, relatedly, these updated Congressional Research Service reports on intelligence (all pdf).

“Director of National Intelligence Statutory Authorities: Status and Proposals,” January 12, 2011.

“Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) Acquisition: Issues for Congress,” January 20, 2011.

“Intelligence Authorization Legislation: Status and Challenges,” January 20, 2011.

“Satellite Surveillance: Domestic Issues,” January 13, 2011.

“The National Intelligence Council: Issues and Options for Congress,” January 10, 2011.

“Intelligence Estimates: How Useful to Congress?”, January 6, 2011.

Secrecy News reported Monday on strange new guidance from the Air Force Materiel Command declaring that Air Force employees and even their family members could be prosecuted under the Espionage Act for accessing the WikiLeaks web site. On Monday night that new guidance was abruptly withdrawn.

Lt. Col. Richard L. Johnson of Air Force Headquarters released this statement:

“Air Force Materiel Command (AFMC) recently published an internal news story that discussed the implications of downloading presumed classified information from WikiLeaks. The release was not previously coordinated with Headquarters Air Force and has been removed from the AFMC website. The Air Force has provided guidance to military members and employees to avoid downloading what could be classified information into Air Force unclassified networks and reminded them that publication of information does not itself constitute declassification of such information. The Air Force guidance did not address family members who are not Air Force members or employees. The Air Force defers to the Department of Justice in all non-military matters related to WikiLeaks.”

A copy of the withdrawn release is archived here.  See also “US air force backtracks over WikiLeaks ban” by Ewen MacAskill, The Guardian, February 8,  and “No espionage charges for airmen on Wikileaks” by Scott Fontaine, Air Force Times, February 8.

“Aftergood is too close to the center of power,” said Julian Assange.  “He is not an independent fighter for freedom of information.”

The passing criticism of me (I’m also “jealous”) was the first thing that caught my eye in the new book “Staatsfeind WikiLeaks” by Der Spiegel reporters Marcel Rosenbach and Holger Stark.  But the book itself is quite a bit more interesting and perceptive than that.

The authors, who are neither fans nor opponents of WikiLeaks, go out of their way to gather new information about the origins and development of the project.  They seek out contrasting perspectives and bring them to bear in interesting and challenging ways.  Of course, the story is unfinished.

“WikiLeaks is an organization in transition, with a dialectical relation to the mass media.  WikiLeaks has changed journalism, but journalism has also changed WikiLeaks,” they write.

See the Spiegel website on “Staatsfeind WikiLeaks” here.  An English-language excerpt, published last month, is here.

At the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, “The original classification of information is rarely necessary,” according to an October 2010 ODNI Instruction.  But that’s because most relevant information is already classified.  There is not much need for new classification activity.

Several recent ODNI Instructions that govern the administration of the classification and declassification programs within the Office were released this week under the Freedom of Information Act (all pdf):

“Classification of ODNI Information,” ODNI Instruction 80.12, October 25, 2010.

“Original Classification Authority Delegation,” ODNI Instruction 80.16, October 21, 2010.

“ODNI Director, Information Management,” ODNI Instruction 10.20, May 18, 2009.

“Particular care should be exercised to avoid both over and under classifying ODNI information,” the Instructions say.

CIA analysts studied data on major floods due to rainfall in North Korea since 1996 in order to devise a framework for evaluating the significance of such floods and their likely consequences for North Korean agriculture.

The analysts identified four principal variables:  the intensity of the rainfall, the location of the rainfall, the time of year, and damage to non-agricultural infrastructure.

“Rainfall intensity and geography of flooding appear to be key variables with the most impact,” their report (pdf) said. “Critical periods in the agricultural growth cycle — for sowing, growing, and harvesting — and the scope and severity of infrastructure damage are compounding variables that can magnify the impact of major floods in key food producing areas.”

All four elements were present in 1996 and 2007, when flooding produced the most severe agricultural impact.  But using the methodology described, analysts judge that the cumulative impact of two instances of heavy rain in 2010 “has been relatively low.”

A copy of the CIA report was obtained by Secrecy News.  See “North Korea: Assessing the Impact of Flooding on Agricultural Output,” CIA Open Source Works, December 15, 2010.

Updated below to reflect withdrawal of the new Air Force guidance

Americans who have accessed the WikiLeaks web site may have violated the Espionage Act, under an extreme interpretation of the law advanced by Air Force officials last week.

Many government agencies have instructed their employees not to download classified materials from the WikiLeaks web site onto unclassified computer systems.  The government’s position is that although the material is in the public domain, its classification status is unaffected.  Therefore, to preserve the integrity of unclassified systems, the leaked classified information should not be accessed on such systems.  If it is accessed, it should be deleted.

But on February 3, Air Force Materiel Command (AFMC) at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base issued startling new guidance stating that the leaked documents are protected by the Espionage Act and that accessing them under any circumstances is against the law, not simply a violation of government computer security policy.

“According to AFMC’s legal office, Air Force members — military or civilian — may not legally access WikiLeaks at home on their personal, non-governmental computers, either. To do so would not only violate the SECAF [Secretary of the Air Force] guidance on this issue,… it would also subject the violator to prosecution for violation of espionage under the Espionage Act,” the AFMC legal office said.

Then, in an astounding interpretive leap, the AFMC went on to say that similar prohibitions apply to the relatives of Air Force employees.

“If a family member of an Air Force employee accesses WikiLeaks on a home computer, the family member may be subject to prosecution for espionage under U.S. Code Title 18 Section 793.”

This is a breathtaking claim that goes far beyond any previous reading of the espionage statutes.

“That has to be one of the worst policy/legal interpretations I have seen in my entire career,” said William J. Bosanko, director of the Information Security Oversight Office, by email.

If taken seriously for a moment, the AFMC guidance raises a host of follow-on questions.  What if a family member accessed WikiLeaks on a computer outside the home?  What if a non-family member accessed WikiLeaks on the home computer?  What if one learns that a neighbor has accessed WikiLeaks in the neighbor’s home?  Is the Air Force employee obliged to intervene or to report the violation to authorities?  And how could any of this possibly be constitutional?

Since the AFMC guidance is not based in existing case law or past practice, these questions have no immediate answers.

Last December, a Department of Homeland Security official complained to Secrecy News that government policy on WikiLeaks produced the incongruous result that “my grandmother would be allowed to access the cables but not me.”  But if the new Air Force guidance can be believed, this is incorrect because the official’s grandmother would be subject to prosecution under the Espionage Act.

In reality, there does not seem to be even a remote possibility that anyone’s grandmother would be prosecuted in this way.

Instead, ironically enough, the real significance of the new AFMC guidance could lie in its potential use as evidence for the defense in one of the pending leak prosecutions under the Espionage Act.  Defendants might argue that if the Espionage Act can be seriously construed by Air Force legal professionals to render a sizable fraction of the American public culpable of espionage, then the Act truly is impermissibly broad, vague and unconstitutional.

For a standard view of the general subject see “The Protection of Classified Information: The Legal Framework” (pdf), Congressional Research Service, January 10, 2011.

Update: Josh Gerstein at Politico was told by the Air Force Monday afternoon that the AFMC guidance “is being taken down pending a further review of the legal opinions it was based on.”

However, several copies of the AFMC statement were also entered into the Lexis-Nexis database by States News Service, Targeted News Service and US Fed News. Those remain in circulation and unaffected.

Update 2: Air Force Lt. Col. Richard Johnson provided this statement on the evening of February 7:

“Air Force Materiel Command (AFMC) recently published an internal news story that discussed the implications of downloading presumed classified information from WikiLeaks. The release was not previously coordinated with Headquarters Air Force and has been removed from the AFMC website. The Air Force has provided guidance to military members and employees to avoid downloading what could be classified information into Air Force unclassified networks and reminded them that publication of information does not itself constitute declassification of such information. The Air Force guidance did not address family members who are not Air Force members or employees. The Air Force defers to the Department of Justice in all non-military matters related to WikiLeaks.”