The Obama White House has threatened to veto a pending intelligence bill if it includes a provision that would authorize the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to perform audits of intelligence programs at the request of Congress.  But a Department of Defense Directive issued last week explicitly allows for GAO access to highly classified special access programs, including intelligence programs, under certain conditions.

The newly revised DoD Directive 5205.07 (pdf) on special access programs (SAPs) states that:  “General [sic] Accountability Office (GAO) personnel shall be granted SAP access if:  a. The Director, DoD SAPCO [SAP Central Office], concurs after consultation with the chair and ranking minority member of a defense or intelligence committee [and] b. The GAO nominee has the appropriate security clearance level.”

In other words, the Pentagon’s new directive permits what the Obama Administration is stubbornly striving to prevent, namely a role for the GAO in intelligence oversight.

DoD special access programs are the most tightly secured of all the Pentagon’s classified programs.  They include activities within three classified domains:  intelligence, acquisition, and operations.

The previous version of the same DoD Directive (pdf) on special access programs, which was issued in 2006 and revised in 2008, made no mention of the GAO.  However, a 2009 DoD Instruction (pdf) stated that classified DoD information on intelligence and counterintelligence “may be furnished to GAO representatives having a legitimate need to know.”  (“DoD Should Not ‘Categorically” Deny GAO Access to Intelligence,” Secrecy News, February 4, 2009.)

As an historical matter, GAO has long had access to classified DoD programs of the highest sensitivity, and has produced numerous reports on special access programs, including many in unclassified form.  But the CIA and other non-DoD intelligence agencies have resisted GAO oversight.

“In practice, defense [intelligence] agencies do not adopt the ‘hard line’ CIA approach but generally seek to cooperate with GAO representatives,” the late Stanley Moskowitz of the CIA wrote in a 1994 memorandum for the Director of Central Intelligence.

Most recently, the Senate Intelligence Committee reportedly said it would yield to the White House and would renounce any right to use the GAO in its oversight activities.  But House Speaker Nancy Pelosi rejected that concession, and she has been insisting that a role for GAO in intelligence oversight must be recognized by the Administration.  To a significant extent, considering the dominance of defense intelligence agencies within the intelligence community, one could say that it now has been so recognized.  Only the details remain to be negotiated.

The intersection of science and national security in the 20th century produced many peculiar phenomena, some of which are illuminated in a new biography of physicist Hugh Everett III (1930-1982).

Everett is best known, if at all, as the originator of the “many worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics.  Roughly, this theory holds that whenever a quantum state is measured, every possible outcome of the measurement is realized in a different universe, which somehow means that the world is constantly branching out into a multiplicity of separate, parallel worlds.

“Many prominent physicists, including [Richard] Feynman, thought many worlds was a ludicrous idea,” notes Peter Byrne, the author of the new Everett biography.  But others were startled and impressed by its mathematical and conceptual coherence.  (The notion of parallel universes also became a staple of science fiction writing.)

Having made his controversial mark in physics, Everett went on to perform nuclear war planning for the top secret Weapons Systems Evaluation Group, a sort of Pentagon think tank which generated analysis for the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

“When Everett joined WSEG in 1956, it was analyzing the cost-benefits of global and limited nuclear warfare,” writes Mr. Byrne. “Ongoing studies examined nuclear blast and fallout kill ratios; the impact of jamming the electronics of guided missiles and airplanes; and the disturbing problem of the ‘nuclear blackout,’ i.e. massive electrical disturbances unleashed by nuclear bombs exploded high in the atmosphere.”  The WSEG’s “Report 50,” portions of which have recently been declassified along with other WSEG records, “became a basic source document” for nuclear war planning.

Everett apparently wrote the software for the first Single Integrated Operating Plan (SIOP), the U.S. nuclear warfighting plan.  He also designed the first “relational database” software, an early word-processing program, and more.

The new biography of Hugh Everett never veers off into hagiography, a temptation that might have been easy to resist since Everett had more than his fair share of shortcomings.  But investigative reporter Peter Byrne has produced a thoughtful account of an original figure and his diverse contributions to a momentous period in the history of science and national security.  One imagines that there are still many other such stories waiting to be told.

See “The Many Worlds of Hugh Everett III” by Peter Byrne, Oxford University Press, 2010.

The Journal of Defense Research (JDR) was a classified publication sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to encourage dissemination of classified research on topics of military or national security interest.  It began publication in 1969, replacing the former Journal of Missile Defense Research.

Many years later, most of the Journal’s contents still seem to be classified, but the table of contents of the Journal’s first decade (pdf) has been declassified and is now available on the Federation of American Scientists website.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, most of the names of the authors whose work was published in JDR are unfamiliar, with a few exceptions (e.g., Garwin and Augustine; Hugh Everett’s name does not appear).  The topics of the papers provide a snapshot of the technologies and the strategic concerns of the time, and give an indication of the scale of classified government research that was devoted to addressing them.

“The JDR is ‘mission essential’ as a classified research tool,” a Defense Science Board Task Force (pdf) stated in 1985.  “Being the only classified journal of its type, the JDR is used to communicate ideas amongst the defense community and is a basic tool for researchers.”

Update: Additional JDR index material is available here.

Congress has forbidden the Congressional Research Service to make its publications directly available to the public, so it is left to others to do so.  New CRS reports obtained by Secrecy News include the following (all pdf).

“Intelligence Reform After Five Years: The Role of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI),” June 22, 2010.

“Questioning Supreme Court Nominees About Their Views on Legal or Constitutional Issues: A Recurring Issue,” June 23, 2010.

“The ‘Volcker Rule’: Proposals to Limit ‘Speculative’ Proprietary Trading by Banks,” June 22, 2010.

“The Nunn-McCurdy Act: Background, Analysis, and Issues for Congress,” June 21, 2010.

“Environmental Considerations in Federal Procurement: An Overview of the Legal Authorities and Their Implementation,” June 21, 2010.

“EPA Regulation of Greenhouse Gases: Congressional Responses and Options,” June 8, 2010.

The National Reconnaissance Office — the U.S. spy satellite agency — “brings unique core capabilities to bear in support of national security objectives by acquiring and operating the most capable set of satellite intelligence collection platforms ever built.”

So begins the text of the newly released and redacted FY2010 NRO budget justification book (pdf).  A copy was obtained by the Federation of American Scientists under the Freedom of Information Act.

“The US is arguably more reliant on overhead collection than ever before,” the NRO said.  “To a large extent, satellite reconnaissance is the foundation for global situational awareness, and as such, it is an essential underpinning of the entire US intelligence effort.  Space collection provides unique access to otherwise denied areas… and it does so without risk to human collectors or infringing upon the territorial sovereignty of other nations.  It also enables users to quickly focus on almost any point on the globe to rapidly respond to emerging situations or to monitor ongoing events.”

“In times of heightened tensions, crisis, or even humanitarian or natural disasters, the value of NRO systems is even greater. At this time, NRO systems are not only the first responders of choice for the DoD, IC, or key decisionmakers–they are often the only source of information,” the NRO said.

Most of the NRO budget book and all of the budget figures have been withheld from disclosure.  Only 116 pages out of the total of 484 pages contain substantial intelligible text.  But the released portion at least provides a sense of the NRO budget structure as well as a sometimes detailed description of the agency’s less sensitive activities and initiatives.

So, for example: In FY2009, the NRO expected to “execute over 25 operational test and evaluation events for on-orbit SIGINT assets” (p. 162).  The NRO Security program supports government and industry personnel “in over 900 NRO-sponsored facilities and almost 3,000 information networks” (p. 253).  Due to competing demands on fewer launch vehicles, “NRO is likely to continue to experience some launch-related delays” (p. 335).  And so on.  Even the (redacted) glossary at the end may be of interest to close students of NRO.

Until quite recently, the NRO refused to disclose even these unclassified portions of its budget request, contending that they were “operational” and therefore exempt from the disclosure requirements of the FOIA.  But in a FOIA lawsuit brought by the Federation of American Scientists in 2006, Judge Reggie B. Walton ruled against the NRO (pdf) and ordered the agency to disgorge the unclassified budget material.

Since that time, most other U.S. intelligence agencies have followed suit and have released comparable material.  Only the National Security Agency, citing its own more expansive statutory exemption from disclosure, has refused to do so.

A new assessment of internal Pakistani affairs and U.S.-Pakistan relations was prepared by the Congressional Research Service in “Pakistan: Key Current Issues and Developments” (pdf), June 1, 2010.

An Inspector General Report on the FBI’s use of so-called “exigent letters” was examined in an April 14, 2010 hearing of the House Judiciary Committee that has just been published.

The inadvertent disclosure last year of a Transportation Security Administration security manual was discussed at another newly published hearing of the House Homeland Security Committee.  See “Has the TSA Breach Jeopardized National Security? An Examination of What Happened and Why,” December 16, 2009.

The National Archives Richard Nixon Library announced that it will release tomorrow a large cache of Nixon presidential records, mainly from the files of the late Senator Daniel P. Moynihan.  The release notably includes 5,000 pages of declassified national security records including “U.S. intelligence assessments before and during the 1973 Arab-Israeli War,… materials relating to US-UK relations, including correspondence between President Nixon and Prime Minister Edward Heath; backchannel Soviet-Israeli relations; the status of Berlin; Soviet strategic weapons; and the Vietnam War.”

The private Nixontapes.org has prepared a new set of transcriptions of Nixon White House tapes pertaining to U.S. policy towards Chile’s Salvador Allende in 1970-73, prior to his ouster (and death) in a military coup.

In the past week, both the Washington Post and the New York Times have referred to WikiLeaks.org, the web site that publishes confidential records, as a “whistleblower” site.  This conforms to WikiLeaks’ own instructions to journalists that “WikiLeaks should be described, depending on context, as the ‘open government group’, ‘anti-corruption group’, ‘transparency group’ or ‘whistleblower’s site’.”

But calling WikiLeaks a whistleblower site does not accurately reflect the character of the project.  It also does not explain why others who are engaged in open government, anti-corruption and whistleblower protection activities are wary of WikiLeaks or disdainful of it.  And it does not provide any clue why the Knight Foundation, the preeminent foundation funder of innovative First Amendment and free press initiatives, might have rejected WikiLeaks’ request for financial support, as it recently did.

From one perspective, WikiLeaks is a creative response to a real problem afflicting the U.S. and many other countries, namely the over-control of government information to the detriment of public policy.  WikiLeaks has published a considerable number of valuable official records that had been kept unnecessarily secret and were otherwise unavailable, including some that I had attempted and failed to obtain myself.  Its most spectacular disclosure was the formerly classified videotape showing an attack by a U.S. Army helicopter crew in Baghdad in 2007 which led to the deaths of several non-combatants.  Before mostly going dormant late last year, it also published numerous documents that have no particular policy significance or that were already placed in the public domain by others (including a few that were taken from the FAS web site).

WikiLeaks says that it is dedicated to fighting censorship, so a casual observer might assume that it is more or less a conventional liberal enterprise committed to enlightened democratic policies.  But on closer inspection that is not quite the case.  In fact, WikiLeaks must be counted among the enemies of open society because it does not respect the rule of law nor does it honor the rights of individuals.

Last year, for example, WikiLeaks published the “secret ritual” of a college women’s sorority called Alpha Sigma Tau.  Now Alpha Sigma Tau (like several other sororities “exposed” by WikiLeaks) is not known to have engaged in any form of misconduct, and WikiLeaks does not allege that it has.  Rather, WikiLeaks chose to publish the group’s confidential ritual just because it could.  This is not whistleblowing and it is not journalism.  It is a kind of information vandalism.

In fact, WikiLeaks routinely tramples on the privacy of non-governmental, non-corporate groups for no valid public policy reason.  It has published private rites of Masons, Mormons and other groups that cultivate confidential relations among their members.  Most or all of these groups are defenseless against WikiLeaks’ intrusions.  The only weapon they have is public contempt for WikiLeaks’ ruthless violation of their freedom of association, and even that has mostly been swept away in a wave of uncritical and even adulatory reporting about the brave “open government,” “whistleblower” site.

On occasion, WikiLeaks has engaged in overtly unethical behavior.  Last year, without permission, it published the full text of the highly regarded 2009 book about corruption in Kenya called “It’s Our Turn to Eat” by investigative reporter Michela Wrong (as first reported by Chris McGreal in The Guardian on April 9).  By posting a pirated version of the book and making it freely available, WikiLeaks almost certainly disrupted sales of the book and made it harder for Ms. Wrong and other anti-corruption reporters to perform their important work and to get it published. Repeated protests and pleas from the author were required before WikiLeaks (to its credit) finally took the book offline.

“Soon enough,” observed Raffi Khatchadourian in a long profile of WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange in The New Yorker (June 7), “Assange must confront the paradox of his creation: the thing that he seems to detest most–power without accountability–is encoded in the site’s DNA, and will only become more pronounced as WikiLeaks evolves into a real institution.”

Much could be forgiven to WikiLeaks if it were true that its activities were succeeding in transforming government information policy in favor of increased openness and accountability — as opposed to merely generating reams of publicity for itself.  WikiLeaks supporter Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com wrote that when it comes to combating government secrecy, “nobody is doing that as effectively as WikiLeaks.” But he neglected to spell out exactly what effect WikiLeaks has had.  Which U.S. government programs have been cancelled as a result of Wikileaks’ activities?  Which government policies have been revised?  How has public discourse shifted?  (And, by the way, who has been injured by its work?)

A less sympathetic observer might conclude that WikiLeaks has squandered much of the impact that it might have had.

A telling comparison can be made between WikiLeaks’ publication of the Iraq Apache helicopter attack video last April and The New Yorker’s publication of the Abu Ghraib abuse photographs in an article by Seymour Hersh in May 2004.  Both disclosures involved extremely graphic and disturbing images.  Both involved unreleased or classified government records.  And both generated a public sensation.  But there the similarity ends.  The Abu Ghraib photos prompted lawsuits, congressional hearings, courts martial, prison sentences, declassification initiatives, and at least indirectly a revision of U.S. policy on torture and interrogation.  By contrast, the WikiLeaks video tendentiously packaged under the title “Collateral Murder” produced none of that– no investigation (other than a leak investigation), no congressional hearings, no lawsuits, no tightening of the rules of engagement.  Just a mild scolding from the Secretary of Defense, and an avalanche of publicity for WikiLeaks.

Of course, it’s hard for anyone to produce a specific desired outcome from the national security bureaucracy, and maybe WikiLeaks can’t be faulted for failing to have done so.  But with the whole world’s attention at its command for a few days last April, it could have done more to place the focus on the victims of the incident that it had documented, perhaps even establishing a charitable fund to assist their families.  But that’s not what it chose to do.  Instead, the focus remained firmly fixed on WikiLeaks itself and its own ambitious fundraising efforts.

In perhaps the first independent review of the WikiLeaks project, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation considered and rejected an application from WikiLeaks for financial support.  The Knight Foundation was actively looking for grantees who could promote innovative uses of digital technology in support of the future development of journalism.  At the end of the process, more than $2.7 million was awarded to 12 promising recipients.  WikiLeaks was not among them.

“Every year some applications that are popular among advisors don’t make the cut after Knight staff conducts due diligence,” said Knight Foundation spokesman Marc Fest in response to an inquiry from Yahoo news.  “WikiLeaks was not recommended by Knight staff to the board.”

The Obama Administration has instructed government agencies that classify national security information to review and update all of their classification guides — which specify what information is classified and at what level — and to gather input on classification policy from “the broadest possible range of perspectives,” according to a new official directive.

“To the extent practicable, input should also be obtained from external subject matter experts and external users of the reviewing agency’s classification guidance and decisions,” wrote Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO) director William J. Bosanko in the new directive (pdf).

The ISOO directive, to be published in the Federal Register on Monday June 28, informs government agencies how they are supposed to implement President Obama’s December 2009 Executive Order 13526 on classification and declassification policy, which formally takes effect on June 27.

Among that executive order’s several interesting features is what is called the Fundamental Classification Guidance Review, which requires a complete reexamination of all agency classification practices to validate their contents and to cancel obsolete secrecy requirements.  This Review is the Obama Administration’s primary response to the pervasive problem of overclassification.

The Fundamental Classification Guidance Review is “the most important effort to address this problem [of overclassification],” said William H. Leary of the National Security Council last January.

“[It] is a totally new requirement that agencies conduct fundamental reviews of their classification guides and other guidance to ensure that they eliminate outdated and unnecessary classification requirements.  The first of these fundamental reviews has to be completed within two years, and agencies are required to make public the results so that people… can hold us responsible for the results,” said Mr. Leary, who spoke at a January 20 program at American University’s Collaboration on Government Secrecy. “These reviews can be extremely important in changing the habits and the practices of classifiers throughout government,” he said.

Opening the classification reviews to “the broadest possible range of perspectives,” as required by the new ISOO directive, has the potential to minimize the frivolous, self-serving or unnecessary use of classification authority.  At least, that’s the theory.

“We cannot simply throw open the doors today and make all information public, but we should rigorously push-back on current notions of what needs to be secret,” wrote Suzanne E. Spaulding in the Huffington Post yesterday.  See “No More Secrets: Then What?”

The financial costs of national security classification-related activities continued to rise in 2009, reaching a record high of $9.93 billion for the combined costs of protecting classified information in government and industry, the Information Security Oversight Office reported today (pdf).

Classification-related costs include not simply the act of classification, but also everything that follows from it:  physical security for classified materials, computer security for classified information systems, personnel security, and so forth. “The agencies also reported a modest, but welcome increase in spending on declassification programs,” wrote ISOO Director William J. Bosanko in his transmittal letter to the President.

The newly reported cost data do not include classification-related costs for CIA or the large Pentagon intelligence agencies — since those costs are themselves considered to be classified.  This means that the costs incurred by the most classification-intensive agencies are outside the scope of the published report, which significantly limits its value.  See “Report on Cost Estimates for Security Classification Activities for Fiscal Year 2009,” Information Security Oversight Office, June 25, 2010.

One of the simplest and most effective ways to strengthen congressional oversight of intelligence agencies would be to task cleared staffers from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), which is the investigative arm of Congress, to undertake specific audits or investigations of intelligence programs.  Perhaps the clearest indication of the power of this approach is the fact that the intelligence agencies hate the idea and the White House has threatened a veto if it is adopted by congress.

Senate intelligence committee leaders have already yielded to executive branch opposition on this point, but House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is insisting that the GAO has a role to play in intelligence oversight, and she says she is trying to ensure that Congress does not willingly surrender one of its most sophisticated oversight tools.  See “Pelosi Faces Off with Obama on CIA Oversight” by Massimo Calabresi, Time, June 25 and “Acting Spy Chief Plans Departure” by Siobhan Gorman, Wall Street Journal, June 25.

An unreleased opinion from the Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel reportedly holds that intelligence programs are outside the purview of the Government Accountability Office and that intelligence agencies should therefore not cooperate with the GAO.

Although the GAO previously reviewed FBI counterterrorism programs prior to the 2004 intelligence reform legislation, “GAO has been essentially blocked from conducting its current work,” complained Sen. Charles Grassley (R-ID).  “The DoJ Office of Legal Counsel is arguing that GAO does not have the authority to evaluate the majority of FBI counterterrorism positions, as these positions are scored through the National Intelligence Program (NIP) Budget.”

The FBI confirmed that the GAO’s access to some previously auditable programs has been denied.  “With the post-2004 inclusion of FBI counterterrorism positions in the Intelligence Community, aspects of the review GAO proposed in 2009 would have constituted intelligence oversight,” the FBI told Sen. Grassley (at pdf pp. 67-68).  “It is the longstanding position of the Intelligence Community to decline to participate in GAO reviews that evaluate intelligence activities, programs, capabilities, and operational functions.”

I recently discussed the question of GAO oversight of intelligence with colleagues from the Project on Government Oversight, which published the conversation as a podcast here.

The term “overclassification” is used in two distinct senses:  The classification of information that should not be classified at all, and the classification of information at a higher level than is justified.  Both are problematic, though in different ways.  The second form of overclassification, which unnecessarily limits the sharing of information by cleared persons, is addressed in a new Senate Committee report on “The Reducing Over-Classification Act.”

The latest volume of the Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series documents U.S. policy toward Vietnam during January to October 1972, including events surrounding the so-called Easter Offensive of the war in Vietnam.  The 1100-page FRUS volume includes a large collection of transcripts of tapes from the Nixon White House.

The National Security Agency and the UK’s GCHQ have both published declassified documents regarding the 1946 UKUSA Agreement on cooperation between the United States and Great Britain in signals intelligence.

On May 26, two days before his final day as Director of National Intelligence, Dennis C. Blair signed a new Intelligence Community Directive, ICD-705 (pdf), on “Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities” or SCIFs.  It mostly says that all SCIFs must comply with technical security standards that are to be issued in the near future.

The Congressional Research Service has an opening for an analyst with expertise in one or more of the following areas:  presidential powers, emergency powers, information policy, privacy, and/or transparency, among others.

China recently opened to the public a massive underground former nuclear weapons facility known as Project 816 in Chongqing, and video footage of the site was featured in a recent report (pdf) from the DNI Open Source Center.

The Chongqing facility, which began construction in 1967 (some say 1966), was originally intended to house plutonium production reactors.  But construction ceased in 1984, and the site was apparently never operational.  Its existence was declassified by the Chinese government in 2003 (some say 2002), and it was opened to public tours in April of this year.

Two Chinese television news reports on the facility were translated by the Open Source Center.

“Project 816 is a gigantic system hidden in an inconspicuous mountain,” the TV narrator said in the OSC translation.  “According to experts, Project 816 is the world’s biggest artificial cave.”  It consists of a massive chamber “with multiple stories and caves within the caves, making it like a maze.”  There are “over 130 roads, tunnels, and passages, totaling 21 kilometers in length.”

“Nuclear bombs are a great mystery to many,” said Hu Lindan, an official at the site, in one of the news clips.  “The place to make nuclear bombs must be an even bigger mystery.  Plus, ours is an underground one.  It is so immense that we call it the Underground Great Wall.”

A copy of the OSC report with links to the translated video clips was obtained by Secrecy News and posted on the Federation of American Scientists website.  See “Subtitled Clips of China’s Declassified Underground Nuclear Facility in Chongqing,” Open Source Center, April 22-23, 2010.  The facility was also described in “Project 816 – Unfinished plutonium production complex in China” by Hui Zhang in the International Panel on Fissile Materials blog, June 5.

“Visitors can now pay 40 yuan for a tour of this once top-secret facility,” China Daily reported yesterday. “However, staff at the entrance warned that, due to ‘confidential matters’, both foreigners and the use of cameras are prohibited.”

“It is so sad,” said one former worker. “The base was supposed to be the largest nuclear facility in China, not a tourist attraction.”  See “Nuclear Reaction to Tourist Attraction” by Peng Yining, China Daily, June 22, 2010.

“Underground facilities are being used to conceal and protect critical activities that pose a threat to the United States,” according to a 1999 report from the JASON defense advisory panel. “The proliferation of such facilities is a legacy from the [first] Gulf War: a lesson from this war was that almost any above-ground facility is vulnerable to attack and destruction by precision guided weapons.  To counter this vulnerability, many countries have moved their assets underground.”

“Hundreds of underground installations have been constructed worldwide,” the JASONs observed at that time, “and many more are under construction.”  See “Characterization of Underground Facilities” (pdf), April 1999.