“Kazakhstan, which is second only to Australia in uranium reserves and exceptionally appealing to nuclear nations that require uranium, has entered into agreements or joint ventures with many countries and corporations,” a new analysis (pdf) from the DNI Open Source Center observes.

Kazakhstan has embarked on cooperative civilian nuclear projects with countries including the U.S., Russia, China, Brazil, Canada, France, India, and others, possibly including Iran.

“Some serious issues lurk behind the veneer of the government’s political and commercial success,” the OSC analysis says. These include “an unclear line of power succession,… which could facilitate nuclear deals with international partners with mixed proliferation records.”

“The country is corrupt and has corrupt practices,” the OSC declares. “Kazakhstan’s mineral riches have supplied many a thief with wealth.”  See “Kazakhstan — Opening Up for Nuclear Collaboration,” Open Source Center, October 6, 2009.

Kazakhstan relinquished the nuclear weapons that it inherited from the former Soviet Union in  1995.  It has also accepted IAEA safeguards and the Additional Protocol.

Update: A Kazakhstan government official disputed the conclusions of the OSC analysis. He said that “contrary to recent reports, his country is not looking to do nuclear deals with countries that have a mixed record on proliferation,” the Christian Science Monitor reported October 19.

A 1957 scientific paper on astrophysics by the late Alistair G.W. Cameron has the unusual quality of being both historically significant and very hard to obtain.  A scanned copy of the paper has recently been posted online.  Known to specialists as CRL-41 (for Chalk River Laboratory paper number 41), the proper title is “Stellar Evolution, Nuclear Astrophysics and Nucleogenesis” (large pdf).

The paper is a milestone in the field of nuclear astrophysics, explained Daid Kahl, a Ph.D. student at the University of Tokyo.  “This work independently arrived at the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis in the same year as a much more widely cited paper by Burbidge, Burbidge, Fowler, and Hoyle.”

While it is still cited with some frequency (including a 2007 reference in Science magazine), hardly anybody seems to have a copy.  Only around 30 libraries around the world are known to possess the document, Mr. Kahl said, based on a WorldCat search.

“Many people know about the publication, but people also cite it without ever having seen or read it,” he said.  “There was a large conference two years ago at CalTech commemorating 50 years since these works were published.  Even at this conference, older professors were asking if anyone had a copy of CRL-41.”

Now, with the expiration of the copyright on the document 50 years after publication, it has become possible to scan and post the document for anyone who may be interested.  Thanks to Mr. Kahl for sharing his copy.

The Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) recently deleted the publications web page for its Advanced Systems and Concepts Office, inhibiting broad public access to many of the agency’s arms control and proliferation-related studies.  But most of the affected DTRA publications have been recovered and reposted in a new DTRA archive on the Federation of American Scientists website.

DTRA’s public affairs office was unable or unwilling to explain the deletion of the ASCO publications web page, except to indicate that it was a policy decision, not an accident. A 2008 version of the now-deleted DTRA page is available via the Internet Archive.

Not all of the suppressed DTRA studies are of equal or enduring interest.  Some are perfunctory, derivative or dated.  But others provide food for thought, as well as insight into government thinking on various national security topics.  A 2007 DTRA-sponsored report entitled “Terrifying Landscapes” (pdf) presented “a study of scientific research into understanding motivations of non-state actors to acquire and/or use weapons of mass destruction.” A 2003 report (pdf) attempted to quantify the occurrence of biological weapons-related information in certain open source scientific publications.

Whatever DTRA’s motivation may have been, impeding public access to archived public records on government websites is an unwholesome act.  So we have taken steps to reverse it.  See our compilation of selected DTRA reports.

The DNI Open Source Center (OSC) recently issued a brief report (pdf) summarizing international criticism of Guinea’s ruling military junta after Guinean security forces killed more than 100 civilians at a September 28 opposition rally.

Another new OSC report (pdf) described Japanese officials as confident and optimistic about the future of their space program, following a successful rocket launch and the docking of an unmanned Japanese spacecraft with the International Space Station.

While innocuous, neither report has been approved for public release.  Copies were obtained by Secrecy News.

Counterinsurgency refers to “comprehensive civilian and military efforts taken to simultaneously defeat and contain insurgency and address its core grievances,” a new publication from the Joint Chiefs of Staff explains. See Joint Publication 3-24 on “Counterinsurgency Operations” (pdf), 249 pages, October 5, 2009.  (JP 3-24 is not to be confused with the celebrated December 2006 Army Field Manual 3-24 on “Counterinsurgency” [pdf].)

Former Bush White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan wrote a book last year in which he faulted the Bush Administration for a lack of candor in connection with the war in Iraq, mishandling of classified information in the Scooter Libby case, and other defects.  A contentious House Judiciary Committee hearing on the matter was held on June 20, 2008, the record of which has just been published (pdf), with an August 2009 response from Mr. McClellan.

The Czech Republic’s Security Information Service (BIS) has published its 2008 annual report (pdf).

Trinidad and Tobago signed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty last week becoming the 182nd nation to have signed the treaty, which would prohibit all nuclear explosive tests.

“Important aspects of the DOD basic research programs are ‘broken’,” according to an assessment performed by the JASON defense science advisory panel earlier this year, and “throwing more money at the problems will not fix them.”

But that rather significant conclusion was deliberately suppressed by Pentagon officials who withheld it from public disclosure when a copy of the JASON report was requested under the Freedom of Information Act.  Instead, it was made public this week by Congress in the conference report on the FY 2010 defense authorization act, which quoted excerpts from the May 2009 JASON report, “Science and Technology for National Security.”

“Basic research funding is not exploited to seed inventions and discoveries that can shape the future,” the JASONs also determined, as quoted in the congressional report (in discussion of the act’s section 213).  Instead, “investments tend to be technological expenditures at the margin.”

Furthermore, “the portfolio balance of DOD basic research is generally not critically reviewed by independent, technically knowledgeable individuals,” and “civilian career paths in the DOD research labs and program management are not competitive to other opportunities in attracting outstanding young scientists and retaining the best people.”

These dismal findings, and the large bulk of the unclassified 60 page JASON report, were withheld under the Freedom of Information Act by the Office of Director of Defense Research and Engineering.  They constitute “subjective evaluations, opinions and recommendations which are currently being evaluated as to their impact on the planning and decision-making process,” according to the August 31, 2009 FOIA denial letter (pdf).

The few paragraphs of the study that were released (pdf) nevertheless including some interesting observations.  Citing a 2008 report in Science magazine, for example, the JASONs noted that “Peking and Tsinghua Universities have now overtaken Berkeley and Michigan as the largest undergraduate alma maters of PhD recipients in the U.S.”

The DoD research laboratories should be abolished, the late Gen. William Odom suggested some years ago.  “Few of them have invented anything of note in several decades, and many of the things they are striving to develop are already available in the commercial sector,” he wrote.

“Sadly, these laboratories not only waste money on their own activities; they also resist the purchase of available technologies from the commercial sector. Because they are generally so far behind the leading edges in some areas, they cause more than duplication; they also induce retardation and sustain obsolescence,” Odom wrote (“America’s Military Revolution,” American University Press, 1993, p. 159).

But Don J. DeYoung of the National Defense University argued that the decline of the military laboratories should be reversed, not accepted.  “The loss of in-house scientific and engineering expertise impairs good governance, poses risks to national security, and sustains what President Dwight Eisenhower called ‘a disastrous rise of misplaced power’.”  See “Breaking the Yardstick: The Dangers of Market-Based Governance” (pdf), Joint Forces Quarterly, 4th Quarter, 2009.

Updated below

The Pentagon’s Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC) last month announced the creation of a new password-protected portal where authorized users may gain access to restricted scientific and engineering publications.

“DTIC Online Access Controlled… provides a gateway to Department of Defense unclassified, controlled science and technology (S&T) and research and engineering (R&E) information,” according to a September 21, 2009 news release (pdf).  “As defense S&T information advances, so does the unique community to which it belongs,” said DTIC Administrator R. Paul Ryan.

The cultivation of controlled but unclassified scientific research by DTIC seems to represent a departure [see update below] from a longstanding U.S. government position that scientific research should either be classified, if necessary, or else unrestricted.  (There have always been exceptions for export controlled information and for proprietary information.)

“It is the policy of this Administration that, to the maximum extent possible, the products of fundamental research remain unrestricted,” wrote President Reagan in the 1985 National Security Decision Directive 189.  “It is also the policy of this Administration that, where the national security requires control, the mechanism for control of information… is classification.”

“The key to maintaining U.S. technological preeminence is to encourage open and collaborative basic research,” wrote then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice in 2001.  “The linkage between the free exchange of ideas and scientific innovation, prosperity, and U.S. national security is undeniable.”

In response to a request 5 days ago, DTIC was not able to provide a comment on the matter.

Update and Clarification: “Departure” may be the wrong word for this new development. DTIC has long maintained a collection of limited distribution records, both classified and unclassified, that are not publicly available. Nevertheless, the new DTIC Online Access Controlled portal appears to expand and reinforce the barriers blocking access to certain unclassified DTIC holdings.

Newly disclosed Department of Defense annual budget documents reveal the structure and some of the contents of the Military Intelligence Program that supports DoD operations.

The U.S. intelligence enterprise as a whole is funded through two separate budget constructs: the National Intelligence Program (NIP), which supports national policymakers, and the Military Intelligence Program (MIP).  The Director of National Intelligence revealed last month that the combined annual cost of the NIP and the MIP is approximately $75 billion.  Of that amount, around $25 billion goes to the MIP.

Newly declassified budget justification books for the MIP help provide some insight into what all of that money buys.  They present a capsule description of more than a hundred individual MIP programs along with a report on their current status, from the Advanced Remote Ground Unattended Sensor (ARGUS) to the Tactical Exploitation of National Capabilities (TENCAP) program, as well as the space-based Nuclear Detonation Detection System, the ever-green Space Radar program, and many more.

All budget numbers have been painstakingly removed from the newly declassified documents, but otherwise DoD has exercised its secrecy authority relatively sparingly, and probably no more than 20% of the narrative text has been censored (including all discussion of human intelligence).  Some activities, such as the Special Operations Command program known as THORS MACE, are mentioned but were said to be too sensitive to describe even in the original classified budget documents.

The MIP budget justification books define twelve MIP budget “disciplines,” including not just the familiar HUMINT, IMINT, SIGINT, MASINT and Counterintelligence, but also Airborne ISR [Intelligence Surveillance and Reconnaissance], Space ISR, All-Source Intelligence, and others.  See the Military Intelligence Program Congressional Budget Justification Books for Fiscal Years 2007, 2008, and 2009, released to the Federation of American Scientists under the Freedom of Information Act (in three large PDFs).

In practice, the boundaries between the MIP and the NIP are fluid, imprecise and subject to change.  In 2006, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) was funded 70% out of the NIP and 30% out of the MIP, the FY 2007 MIP budget book (pdf) observed.  In 2007, following a budget “realignment,” NGA was to be funded 90% out of the NIP and 10% out of the MIP.

For this reason, the current yearly practice of disclosing the total NIP budget alone is of limited value.  In fact, it may actually mislead, since a rise or fall in the NIP total may or may not signify an increase or decrease in total intelligence spending, as individual programs are shifted to or from the MIP.

An ODNI spokesman told the Washington Independent last September 15 that the MIP budget total is not classified– but that appears to be incorrect, and the DoD invoked the FOIA exemption for classified information to withhold the MIP budget numbers.  In any event, we have asked DoD to reconsider its position on the matter and to release the annual MIP totals.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence last month published a revised “Intelligence Community Legal Reference Book” (pdf), updated through May 2009.

The 950-page document, which is more than 250 pages longer than the 2007 edition, includes basic intelligence-related legal materials such as the text of the National Security Act and various executive orders and procedures for intelligence sharing.

Most of those who have heard of the Jewish Ghetto in Warsaw during World War II probably think of it in connection with the uprising of a small number of Jewish fighters prior to the final liquidation of the Ghetto by German forces.  Dr. Marek Edelman, who led the uprising, died last Friday at age 90.

But before there was death, there was life.

The life of the Ghetto is recalled in fine detail in an astonishing 900-page work of scholarship, “The Warsaw Ghetto: A Guide to the Perished City” by Barbara Engelking and Jacek Leociak, newly translated from the Polish and published by Yale University Press (reviewed here and here).

The book relentlessly documents the horrors, the corruption and the tragic choices imposed by Ghetto life.  But it also brings new light to the ordinary human striving of Ghetto residents, their surprisingly rich life of the mind and the spirit, and their occasional moments of hopeless grace.

“Without reform in [declassification] policy and process, agencies will continue to spend millions of dollars each year perpetuating an ineffective and inefficient declassification system, while the backlog of records waiting to be processed for the open shelves continues to grow,” according to a newly obtained National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) white paper.

The best way to fix the current system, said NARA, is to establish a National Declassification Center that will facilitate and expedite the declassification process.  The failings of the present system as well as the proposed solution were detailed in “A Concept of Operations for a National Declassification Center” (pdf), dated July 8, 2009.  A copy of the draft document was obtained by Secrecy News.

The present declassification system is not a train wreck waiting to happen;  the train wreck has already occurred.  Scarce resources are currently being wasted on a dysfunctional process.  “The Federal Government is paying to protect records that, at 25 or more years after creation and original classification, no longer contain sensitive national security information,” the NARA study stated.

Quality control is poor.  Non-sensitive information is needlessly forwarded for review from agency to agency, “clogging the system with unnecessary referrals.”  Completed record reviews (including mandatory Kyl/Lott reviews to search for nuclear weapons-related information) are “not accurately tracked, and as a result records are sometimes reviewed multiple times.”

In short, “declassified records are not publicly available as intended,” the NARA study reported.

And things are poised to get worse.  “Over the next 25 years Federal agencies are facing a massive volume (1.7 billion pages) of classified textual records that, based on 2008 review statistics, will take over 33 years to complete initial review, and many more to complete referral reviews and process all the records for public access.  These figures will continue to grow each year as more records become 25 years old.”

The solution, says NARA, is not simply a new policy but a new institution and a new facility — a National Declassification Center.

“Based on the volume of classified records, the need to standardize disparate declassification processes and guidelines, the lack of suitable secure space for agency reviewers and NARA Staff, and the need to replace the aging, substandard classified storage at the NARA records center located at Suitland,… a new facility dedicated to declassification should be constructed.”

The proposed new facility, at a location yet to be determined, would have state of the art security that meets military and intelligence specifications.  It would house approximately 240 people and, for security reasons, would have “minimal public interaction.”

“This facility should include storage for classified temporary, pre-archival, and archival records, space for declassification review and processing, staff and resources to perform archival work on the records, and the Information Technology infrastructure necessary to support these functions,” the NDC Concept of Operations stated.

At first glance, the construction of an expensive new building for declassification seems like an Industrial Age solution to an Information Age problem.  At second glance, too.  But NARA argues that this is the best course available for navigating the conflicting security and disclosure imperatives that are already at work.

The Concept of Operations document did not address the potential favorable impact of a proposed 50 year expiration date for all classified records that do not implicate human intelligence sources, though this should help to ease the declassification review burden considerably.  And the Concept specifically excluded the possibility of declassification performed by anyone other than the originating agency, which would have relieved much of the complexity of the declassification process.

A National Declassification Center is a principal element of the pending draft Obama Administration executive order on classified national security information.

The Supreme Court has not yet indicated whether it will review a Freedom of Information Act ruling requiring the Department of Defense to disclose certain photographs of alleged detainee abuse to the American Civil Liberties Union.  If it declines to do so, a federal appeals court order (pdf) that directed release of the photographs will stand.

Though not strictly a legal consideration, there is a potency to photographic images that can make them weapons in the struggle for popular opinion as a foundation and an adjunct to military operations.  In opposing their release, the government contends (pdf) that the photographs sought by the ACLU could be used to incite violence against U.S. forces in Iraq or Afghanistan.

An old 1979 U.S. Army manual on psychological operations (large pdf) observed that images of brutal behavior committed by enemy terrorists can “reverberate against the practitioner, making him repugnant to his own people, and all others who see the results of his heinous savagery.”  Distribution of such images among the population “will give them second thoughts about the decency and honorableness of their cause [and] make them wonder about the righteousness of their ideology.”

“The enemy may try to rationalize and excuse its conduct, but in so doing, it will compound the adverse effect of its actions, because it can never deny the validity of true photographic representations of its acts,” the Army Manual explained (at page I-10, PDF page 252).  “Thus, world opinion will sway to the side of the victimized people.”

This kind of propaganda technique could not be used against the U.S., the now obsolete 1979 Army manual stated, because “The United States is absolutely opposed to the use of terror or terrorist tactics.”  See “Psychological Operations,” U.S. Army Field Manual 33-1, August 31, 1979.

FM 3-05.30, the current U.S. Army Field Manual on Psychological Operations, does not address the tactical use of photographic images.