The “smart grid” refers to an ongoing modernization of the nation’s electrical power system that makes it possible to dynamically allocate power and optimize system operation. It’s a work in progress.

A new report from the Congressional Research Service reviews smart grid technologies, costs and concerns including privacy and cybersecurity. See The Smart Grid: Status and Outlook, April 10, 2018.

Other new and updated reports from the Congressional Research Service this week include the following.

An Overview of Discretionary Reprieves from Removal: Deferred Action, DACA, TPS, and Others, April 10, 2018

Class Action Lawsuits: A Legal Overview for the 115th Congress, April 11, 2018

The Bipartisan Budget Act of 2018 and an FY2019 Budget Resolution, April 10, 2018

Trade Promotion Authority (TPA): Frequently Asked Questions, updated April 10, 2018

Infantry Brigade Combat Team (IBCT) Mobility, Reconnaissance, and Firepower Programs, updated April 10, 2018

Tort and Litigation Reform in the 115th Congress, CRS Legal Sidebar, April 10, 2018

Mississippi Court Halts Enforcement of New Abortion Law, CRS Legal Sidebar, April 10, 2018

OMB and Treasury Disagree over Process for Issuing New Tax Rules, CRS Insight, April 10, 2018

Balanced Budget Amendments, CRS Insight, April 10, 2018

U.S. Foreign Aid to Israel, updated April 10, 2018

Could an airborne network of drone-based interceptors effectively defend against the launch of North Korean ballistic missiles? A recent assessment by physicists Richard L. Garwin and Theodore A. Postol concludes that it could.

“All of the technologies needed to implement the proposed system are proven and no new technologies are needed to realize the system,” they wrote.

Their concept envisions the deployment of a number of Predator B drones loitering outside of North Korean airspace each bearing two boost-phase intercept missiles.

“The baseline system could technically be deployed in 2020, and would be designed to handle up to 5 simultaneous ICBM launches.”

“The potential value of this system could be to quickly create an incentive for North Korea to take diplomatic negotiations seriously and to destroy North Korean ICBMs if they are launched at the continental United States.”

See Airborne Patrol to Destroy DPRK ICBMs in Powered Flight by R.L. Garwin and T.A. Postol, November 26, 2017.

The asserted role of such a system in promoting diplomatic negotiations rests on certain assumptions about how it would be perceived and evaluated by North Korea that are not addressed by the authors here.

The U.S. military is accelerating the development of prompt global strike weapons that are intended to allow the U.S. to hit targets anywhere on Earth on short notice using conventional weapons.

The Department of Defense has requested increased funding in FY 2019 for prompt global strike weapons — $278 million, up from $201 million in FY 2018 — with further increases anticipated for the next five years.

“This shows the growing priority placed on the program in the Pentagon and the growing interest in Congress in moving the program forward toward deployment,” according to a newly updated report on such weapons from the Congressional Research Service.

See Conventional Prompt Global Strike and Long-Range Ballistic Missiles: Background and Issues by Amy F. Woolf, April 6, 2018.

Other new and updated reports from the Congressional Research Service include the following.

Options to Cease Implementing the Iran Nuclear Agreement, updated April 5, 2018

Cameroon’s Anglophone Crisis: Recent Developments and Issues for Congress, CRS Insight, April 6, 2018

When the City Goes Broke: Pensions, Retirees, and Municipal Bankruptcies, CRS Legal Sidebar, April 10, 2018

Sexual Harassment and Title VII: Selected Legal Issues, April 9, 2018

Commerce Department Announces Citizenship Question on 2020 Census and Lawsuits Filed, CRS Legal Sidebar, April 6, 2018

Lame Duck Sessions of Congress, 1935-2016 (74th-114th Congresses), April 6, 2018

Statutory Interpretation: Theories, Tools, and Trends, April 5, 2018

This week China imposed tariffs on imports of various U.S. agricultural products in retaliation for Trump Administration tariffs on Chinese imports. Today the Administration announced that it would consider an additional $100 billion in tariffs on Chinese goods in response.

The impact of the Chinese tariffs on U.S. exports of pork meat, cherries, almonds, and ginseng, among other items, was detailed in a new brief from the Congressional Research Service. See China’s Retaliatory Tariffs on Selected U.S. Agricultural Products, CRS Insight, April 4, 2018.

Other new and updated reports from the Congressional Research Service this week include the following.

U.S. Trade Deficit and the Impact of Changing Oil Prices, updated April 4, 2018

Immigration Consequences of Criminal Activity, April 5, 2018

Federal Research and Development (R&D) Funding: FY2019, April 4, 2018

Title I of the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA): A Summary of the Statute, April 4, 2018

Data, Social Media, and Users: Can We All Get Along?, CRS Insight, April 4, 2018

Abortion and Family Planning-Related Provisions in U.S. Foreign Assistance Law and Policy, updated April 5, 2018

Nuclear Cooperation with Other Countries: A Primer, updated April 3, 2018

What Happens When Five Supreme Court Justices Can’t Agree?, CRS Legal Sidebar, April 5, 2018

Increasing transparency in intelligence may help to build public trust, as Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats said last month. But not all acts of transparency are likely to have that effect to the same degree, if at all.

Some of the most powerful trust-building actions, we suggested, involve “admissions against interest,” or voluntary acknowledgements of error, inadequacy or wrong-doing.

We should have noted that the Intelligence Community has already adopted this approach up to a point in connection with surveillance activity under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

For example, a number of classified reports on (non-)compliance with Section 702 have been declassified and published by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in lightly redacted form.

These and other official disclosures provided sufficient detail, for example, to enable preparation of “A History of FISA Section 702 Compliance Violations” by the Open Technology Institute at the New America Foundation.

Compliance issues are also addressed in opinions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, many of which have now been partially declassified and published. An April 2017 FISC opinion posted by ODNI concerned a case of “significant non-compliance with the NSA’s minimization procedures.”

This uncommon transparency is notably focused on Section 702 which, important as it is, is only a slice of Intelligence Community activity. And some of the disclosures are not entirely voluntary as they follow from Freedom of Information Act litigation. (The IC Inspector General also intermittently publishes summaries of its own investigative work in semiannual reports.)

Nevertheless, the disclosures provide a proof of principle, and suggest how more could be done in other areas. Did these “admissions against interest” also build public trust? There are no known data to support such a conclusion. But at a minimum, they did serve to focus attention on actual, not speculative problem areas.

The revision and reissuance of Intelligence Community Directive 107 should help to institutionalize and expand the role of transparency in supporting intelligence oversight and public accountability.

DNI Coats said yesterday that he would “declassify as much as possible” concerning the controversial professional background of Gina Haspel, who has been nominated to be CIA Director.

As Trump Administration trade policies generate national and global repercussions, the fundamentals of trade are presented in a new report from the Congressional Research Service to help understand what is happening and what is at stake.

The report explains basic economic concepts, such as why countries trade, it provides data on U.S. trade relationships, and it describes how trade policy is formulated. See U.S. Trade Policy Primer: Frequently Asked Questions, April 2, 2018.

Other new and updated CRS reports include the following.

China-U.S. Trade Issues, updated April 2, 2018

Tricks of the Trade: Section 301 Investigation of Chinese Intellectual Property Practices Concludes (Part I), CRS Legal Sidebar, March 29, 2018

Overview of the Federal Tax System in 2018, March 29, 2018

Afghanistan: Background and U.S. Policy In Brief, updated April 3, 2018

Navy Ford (CVN-78) Class Aircraft Carrier Program: Background and Issues for Congress, updated March 30, 2018

Can Aliens in Immigration Proceedings Be Detained Indefinitely? High Court Rules on Statutory, but not Constitutional Authority, CRS Legal Sidebar, April 3, 2018

District Court Decision May Help Pave the Way for Trump Administration’s Border Wall Plans, CRS Legal Sidebar, April 2, 2018

Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats recently revised a 2012 Intelligence Community Directive (ICD) on “Civil Liberties and Privacy” to address transparency policy, and reissued it as “Civil Liberties, Privacy, and Transparency.”

The revised directive ICD 107 states that “the DNI is committed to protecting civil liberties and privacy and promoting greater public transparency, consistent with United States values and founding principles as a democratic society.”

ICD 107 now mandates “external engagements” with the public; it calls for use of “new technologies to make intelligence information. . . accessible to the public. . . with sufficient clarity and context so that it is readily understandable”; and it directs that IC agencies shall describe to the public “why certain information can and cannot be released.”

In a March 22 memorandum to agencies announcing the revised directive, DNI Coats said that “With the reissuance of ICD 107, we have firmly established transparency as a foundational element of securing public trust in our endeavors, alongside the protection of civil liberties and privacy.”

As indicators of recent progress in transparency, the DNI cited the relaunch of the Intelligence.gov website that provides information about IC agencies; a new historical declassification program that will review records concerning the 1968 Tet Offensive; and new details regarding oversight and use of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

But while these are all commendable steps, they do not seem well calculated to achieve the goal of “securing public trust.”

Building trust requires more than public relations or even declassification of historical documents. Remarkably, dozens of breakthroughs in transparency during the Obama Administration did little to generate trust and were largely ignored and unappreciated.

Trust building depends on a willingness to be held accountable, and on responsiveness (not just unilateral gestures) to overseers and the public.

Transparency for trust-building should therefore stress what lawyers call “admissions against interest,” or disclosures that could risk placing the agency in an unfavorable light, at least initially, but that would build credibility over time. Such disclosures might include regular release of compliance reports regarding suspected deviations from law or policy, investigative reports or summaries from intelligence agency Inspectors General, and the like.

Public trust could also be strengthened positively by responsively adding value to public discourse. The intelligence community could help foster a constructive relationship with the public by routine publication of open source intelligence products, and by setting up an orderly process for responding to substantial public interest in topics of current intelligence importance or controversy (beyond Section 702).

A panel discussion on “Building and Sustaining Democratic Legitimacy” in intelligence was held last week as part of a symposium organized by the Intelligence Studies Project at the University of Texas at Austin.

Update: Some follow-on thoughts about steps that the Intelligence Community has already taken to increase transparency are here.

FBI agent Terry J. Albury was charged last week with two violations of the Espionage Act statutes for disclosing classified information to a reporter for the Intercept. The charges, including unauthorized disclosure and unauthorized retention of national defense information, were formally presented by the Justice Department in a March 27 “Information.”

See also “Minneapolis FBI agent charged with leaking classified information to reporter” by Mukhtar M. Ibrahim, MPR News, March 28.

The Albury case is the second criminal prosecution in the Trump Administration arising from a leak of classified information to the news media. The first was the pending case of Reality Winner.

Public transportation systems across the United States are losing riders. Excluding gains in New York City, national ridership decreased by 7% over the past decade. A new report from the Congressional Research Service examines the causes and consequences of this decline. See Trends in Public Transportation Ridership: Implications for Federal Policy, March 26, 2018.

Other new and updated CRS reports issued last week include the following.

U.S.-Mexico Economic Relations: Trends, Issues, and Implications, updated March 27, 2018

Guatemala: Political and Socioeconomic Conditions and U.S. Relations, updated March 27, 2018

House Committee Markups: Manual of Procedures and Procedural Strategies, updated March 27, 2018

Whose Line is it Anyway: Could Congress Give the President a Line-Item Veto?, CRS Legal Sidebar, March 27, 2018

The total number of persons holding security clearances for access to classified information dropped to just over 4 million at the end of FY 2016, according to a long-delayed government report that was partially released on Wednesday. But the backlog of clearances awaiting investigation and adjudication has continued to grow.

See FY 2016 Annual Report on Security Clearance Determinations, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, released March 28, 2018.

The newly disclosed 2016 number is only about 4% lower the year before, but it preserves and extends a much steeper decline in the cleared population which had reached 5.1 million only three years earlier. Reductions in the number of security clearances are generally regarded as desirable since they entail reduced numbers of background investigations, as well as reduced costs and vulnerabilities associated with cleared personnel.

Release of the new report on security clearances was delayed because of internal disagreements about how much information to make public. In the end, the advocates of reduced disclosure won out and much of the specific information that had been contained in the previous years’ reports is excluded from the latest report. Thus, a comparison with the FY 2015 report shows that the breakdown of the number of clearances held by contractors versus government employees was withheld from the new report, as was the timeliness of the clearance process in individual intelligence agencies that were formerly identified by name.

But why was that information withheld?

“The National Counterintelligence and Security Center elected to remove the most sensitive information that might be of value to our adversaries in order to ensure we could share the report publicly,” said Joel Melstad, a spokesman for the Director of National Intelligence. “We believe that this unclassified version provides full transparency into the security clearance volume levels for U.S. government employees and contractors, as well as an appropriate level of public insight into the security clearance determination processing metrics for IC agencies/elements without giving an advantage to our adversaries, who would also be the recipients of this information.”

Still, it is not obvious to a non-security professional that release of the total number of contractors holding security clearances would provide any advantage to US adversaries.

Despite the significant drop-off in the number of clearances, backlogs in the process continued to grow due in part to an inadequate number of qualified investigators.

“Processing times for the longest cases increased in most agencies,” the new ODNI report said. “In addition, there were generally more cases pending over four months than in the previous years.”

In fact, by the first quarter of FY 2018, the average time for processing a Top Secret clearance in the fastest 90% of cases had rocketed up to 380 days, according to another new White House report (at p.13). That was an increase of about 100 days from a year earlier.

But the White House report also said that as of December 2017, seventeen new initiatives had been approved “that will immediately begin to reduce the backlog.”

“Examples include guidance for temporary (interim) authorizations and pre-appointment waiver determinations, expanding the use of video teleconference technology and telephonic reference interviews, clarifying some requirements in the Federal Investigative Standards to improve efficiencies, and expediting the deployment of the newly approved SF-85P.” See Security Clearance, Suitability/Fitness, and Credentialing Reform, 1st Quarter, FY 2018, March 2018.

The National Background Investigations Bureau had 710,000 investigative actions awaiting processing as of earlier this month, said NBIB director Charles S. Phalen Jrat a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing. It can regularly address 160,000-180,000 with its existing workforce, he said, so “only” about 530,000 or so pending investigations would be considered “backlog.”

Earlier this month, the Senate passed new legislation (passed by the House last year) to require expanded reporting on security clearances.

The “Securely Expediting Clearances Through Reporting Transparency (SECRET) Act” of 2017 (HR 3210) would notably require a report on security clearance investigations of White House personnel in the Executive Office of the President.

All non-confidential reports of the Congressional Research Service must be made publicly available online through a Government Publishing Office website within 90 to 270 days under a provision of the 2018 omnibus appropriations act that was passed by Congress and signed by the President last week.

The move is the culmination of more than two decades of efforts to encourage, cajole or coerce Congress into making the reports broadly available to the public. (See “Liberating the Congressional Research Service,” Secrecy & Government Bulletin, March 1997.)

“Congressional Research Service (CRS) reports are the gold standard when it comes to even-handed, non-partisan analysis of the important issues before Congress,” said Daniel Schuman of Demand Progress, who led the most recent campaign for online public access. “For too long, they’ve only been primarily available to the well-connected and the well-heeled. At long last, Congress will make the non-confidential reports available to every American for free,” he said. See “Long-Proprietary Congressional Research Reports Will Now Be Made Public” by Charles S. Clark, Government Executive, March 23, 2018.

In fact, however, the large majority of CRS reports have already been posted online and are easily available to the public, though not through government websites. So the net increase in “transparency” resulting from the new legislation is less than it would have been years ago.

After President Trump claimed on Friday that the omnibus appropriations law will provide the largest military pay increase in over a decade, a New York Times fact-checking column cited a CRS report to demonstrate that the claim was “imprecise” and “slightly exaggerated.” See “Trump’s Objections Require Some Corrections” by Linda Qiu, March 23.

The Times article provided a link to an online copy of the January 2018 CRS report on military pay.

Threats to the U.S. electric power grid in recent years, including actual attacks on transmission substations, have prompted utilities and regulators to adopt various steps to enhance grid security. A new report from the Congressional Research Service reviews the observable changes in security practices to date and discusses the current threat environment. See NERC Standards for Bulk Power Physical Security: Is the Grid More Secure?, March 19, 2018.

Other new and updated reports from the Congressional Research Service include the following.

Bankruptcy Basics: A Primer, March 22, 2018

ATF’s Ability to Regulate “Bump Stocks”, CRS Legal Sidebar, March 22, 2018

Eight Mechanisms to Enact Procedural Change in the U.S. Senate, CRS Insight, March 20, 2018

Net Neutrality: Will the FTC Have Authority Over Broadband Service Providers?, CRS Legal Sidebar, March 20, 2018

Section 232 Steel and Aluminum Tariffs: Potential Economic Implications, CRS Insight, March 19, 2018

Unauthorized Childhood Arrivals: Legislative Activity in the 115th Congress, March 22, 2018

Turkey: Background and U.S. Relations in Brief, updated March 23, 2018

Iran’s Foreign and Defense Policies, updated March 20, 2018

It Belongs in a Museum: Sovereign Immunity Shields Iranian Antiquities Even When It Does Not Protect Iran, CRS Legal Sidebar, March 22, 2018