Delay and dysfunction in the personnel security clearance system are an old story, and the Government Accountability Office has been describing and updating that story for at least two decades, including new congressional testimony today (pdf) focusing on Department of Defense (DOD) contractors.

“DOD is responsible for about 2.5 million security clearances issued to servicemembers, DOD civilians, and industry personnel who work on contracts for DOD and 23 other federal agencies.”

“GAO’s analysis of timeliness data showed that industry personnel contracted to work for the federal government waited more than 1 year on average to receive top secret clearances, longer than OMB- and OPM-produced statistics would suggest.”

See “DoD Personnel Clearances: Delays and Inadequate Documentation Found for Industry Personnel,” [GAO-07-842T], May 17, 2007.

New guidance on declassification marking (pdf) of documents and materials originating in Department of Defense special access programs was issued by the new Under Secretary of Defense (Intelligence) James R. Clapper, Jr. on April 26.

A Joint Chiefs of Staff publication presents doctrine on “barrier, obstacle, and mine warfare.” The document, newly updated, “greatly expands coverage of improvised explosive devices, mines, and other unexploded explosive ordnance.” See “Barriers, Obstacles, and Mine Warfare for Joint Operations” (pdf), Joint Publication 3-15, 26 April 2007.

A U.S. Army “smart card” (pdf) provides soldiers a summary overview of the threat from Improvised Explosive Devices. The unclassified smart card on “The IED and VBIED [vehicle borne IED] Threat” dated January 2004 — not the latest edition — is available here.

Although it “has stirred significant controversy in recent years,” the Congressional Research Service policy of restricting direct dissemination of its products to members of Congress is well-founded, argued CRS director Daniel P. Mulhollan in a lengthy internal memorandum (pdf) last month.

“The reasons for limiting public distribution of our work can be summarized as follows,” he wrote.

“First, there is a danger that placing CRS in an intermediate position [between Congress and the public] would threaten the dialog on policy issues between Members and their constituents.”

“Second, the current judicial … perception of CRS as ‘adjunct staff’ of the Congress might be altered if CRS were seen as speaking directly to the public, putting at risk Speech or Debate Clause constitutional protections afforded the confidential work performed by this agency.”

“And third, if CRS products were routinely disseminated broadly to the public, over time these products might come to be written with a large public audience in mind and would no longer be focused solely on congressional needs.”

A copy of Director Mulhollan’s seven page memorandum on “Access to CRS Reports,” dated April 18, 2007, was obtained by Secrecy News and is available here.

The arguments detailed by Mr. Mulhollan seem singularly unpersuasive to an outsider. CRS is not being called upon to mediate between Congress and the public or to engage in a public dialog on policy issues. Rather, proponents of broader dissemination are simply asking for the same public access that commercial vendors of CRS reports already enjoy.

For now, the Congressional Research Service still does not make its products directly available to the public. Americans who want online access to CRS reports have to make their own arrangements.

Some noteworthy new CRS reports obtained by Secrecy News include the following (all pdf).

“Defense: FY2008 Authorization and Appropriations,” May 11, 2007.

“Nuclear Weapons: The Reliable Replacement Warhead Program,” updated May 11, 2007.

“International Reaction to the Palestinian Unity Government,” May 9, 2007.

“Coast Guard Deepwater Program: Background, Oversight Issues, and Options for Congress,” updated April 30, 2007.

“Underlying Strains in Taiwan-U.S. Political Relations,” updated April 20, 2007.

“The Speech or Debate Clause: Recent Developments,” updated April 17, 2007.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration earlier this year attempted to block public access to a comprehensive report on planetary defense against asteroids, but the document found its way into the public domain anyway.

NASA undertook the study in response to a 2005 Congressional mandate “to provide an analysis of alternatives to detect, track, catalogue, and characterize” potentially hazardous near-Earth objects (NEOs) and to submit “an analysis of possible alternatives that NASA could employ to divert an object on a likely collision course with Earth.”

An abbreviated version (28 pages, pdf) of the resulting report, which generally recommended against initiation of a new planetary defense program, was provided to Congress and the public in March 2007.

Strangely, however, NASA sought to prevent public disclosure of the full 272-page report that provided the underlying analysis for NASA’s conclusions.

To prevent uncontrolled dissemination, NASA did not distribute a soft copy version of the report. And altogether, no more than around 100 copies of the hard copy document were published.

Public requests for the document were denied, though it is unclassified.

“The document you requested was distributed in hard copy as a ‘thank you’ to [NASA working group] team members and is not an official, distributable NASA publication,” Marcus Shaw, a contractor at the NASA Office of Program Analysis and Evaluation, told Secrecy News.

“Copies beyond those for the study team are not available. An electronic copy will not be distributed or posted by NASA,” he wrote in a March 13 email from NASA headquarters.

In fact, however, the report is clearly marked as a NASA product and is presumptively subject to disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act.

A legal challenge proved unnecessary, however, as the report soon leaked out through unauthorized channels.

It was obtained by the private B612 Foundation, an organization that advocates a more pro-active planetary defense program. (“Our goal is to significantly alter the orbit of an asteroid in a controlled manner by 2015.”)

The full document (in a large 23 MB PDF file) was posted this month, along with the organization’s technical critique of NASA’s analysis, here.

B612 is the asteroid home of Saint-Exupery’s Little Prince.

The identification of deceased military and civilian personnel killed on or around the battlefield is one of the grim functions routinely performed in wartime.

It is so grim, in fact, that the U.S. Army decided it should be shielded from public awareness.

A U.S. Army Field Manual on “Identification of Deceased Personnel” (large pdf) was not supposed to be made publicly available. The manual is not classified, nor does it impinge on personal privacy. It is rather less graphic than a typical medical school anatomy textbook. But to the Army, it is still not suitable for public consumption.

The cover page says it should be destroyed by any method that will “prevent disclosure of contents or reconstruction of the document.”

“This [manual] begins with discussions of basic gross human anatomy, antemortem and perimortem trauma, human osteology, and dental anatomy and morphology. These chapters provide the mortuary affairs specialist with the basic knowledge to proficiently assist human identification experts (such as the forensic pathologist, medical examiner, forensic odontologist, and forensic anthropologist) with identifying human remains.”

A copy of the proscribed manual was obtained by Secrecy News. Thanks to Entropic Memes.

See “Identification of Deceased Personnel,” U.S. Army Field Manual 4-20.65, July 2005 (220 pages in a very large 32 MB PDF file).

The presiding judge in the closely-watched prosecution of two former officials of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) charged with unlawfully receiving national defense information has denied a defense motion to dismiss the case on grounds of alleged constitutional violations by the government.

The defense had argued that the case should be dismissed because the government pressured AIPAC, the defendants’ former employer, not to pay their legal fees and thereby violated their constitutional rights to due process and the right to counsel.

The alleged interference occurred in 2004 and 2005, when “the government was actively investigating defendants and AIPAC,” Judge T.S. Ellis III explained in a new memorandum opinion (pdf).

According to the defendants’ account, “prosecutors implicitly or explicitly threatened AIPAC with criminal charges, and/or threatened further intense scrutiny of AIPAC in the event the government perceived AIPAC’s cooperation as unsatisfactory.” To demonstrate its “cooperation,” AIPAC subsequently fired the defendants and ceased to pay their legal fees. The organization was not charged in the indictment.

The court essentially validated the defense account. “Defendants have adequately shown a wrongful [government] interference with their contractual relations with AIPAC” (p. 16).

The government’s policy (under the so-called “Thompson Memorandum”) of pressuring employers to withhold legal fees to support their employees “is unquestionably obnoxious and is fraught with the risk of constitutional harm in specific cases,” Judge Ellis wrote (p. 26).

But in this case, the practice did not prejudice the defendants, he said, since they nevertheless managed to assemble an extremely capable defense team.

“A mountain of evidence convincingly demonstrates that defense counsel’s zealous, thorough, and effective representation of defendants has not been adversely affected by the loss of AIPAC’s fee payments,” he wrote in his May 8 opinion.

The motion to dismiss was therefore denied.

The AIPAC trial, previously scheduled for June 4, has been postponed. A closed hearing is scheduled for June 7.

One new feature of the intelligence budgeting process is the mandatory public disclosure of “earmarks” — funds that are specifically requested by an individual member of Congress and designated for a particular program.

The disclosures shed at least a few photons worth of new light on the deliberately obscure intelligence budget.

More than two dozen earmarks, from the $500,000 for a “Behavior Pattern Training Recognition Program” requested by Rep. Ed Pastor (D-AZ) to the $23 million for the National Drug Intelligence Center requested by Rep. John Murtha (D-PA), are itemized in the printed (or PDF) version of the House Intelligence Committee report on the FY 2008 Intelligence Authorization Act (pdf) (at pp. 50-51).

“Arms Control and Nonproliferation Technologies” (ACNT) was the name of a now-defunct Department of Energy journal that sought to inform policy makers about the capacities and limitations of arms control-related technologies.

At its best, ACNT provided a foundation for clear thinking about arms control and an intelligible introduction to the technologies involved.

It has been referenced in various studies performed by the National Academy of Sciences and others, but has become hard to find. The journal ceased publication in 2001, when its budget became a casualty of post-9/11 spending priorities and “suddenly arms control wasn’t fashionable any more,” a DOE official told Secrecy News.

It was deleted from the website of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (where it was produced) in 2005.

Secrecy News has recovered all extant issues of Arms Control and Nonproliferation Technologies from multiple sources and assembled them in an online archive on the Federation of American Scientists web site.

In reporting on our unauthorized reproduction of Army publications, as noted yesterday, Gabriel Schoenfeld wrote an article entitled “Put Steven Aftergood in the Brig.”

He was way out of line, wrote Robert S. Norris of the Natural Resources Defense Council.

“Let’s get our prisons straight. A Brig is a ship’s or Navy/Marine prison and to my knowledge Aftergood has not angered the Navy to that point yet.”

“As for the Army, the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas is a more logical place. But since Aftergood is a civilian he is not eligible for incarceration there either.”

“As he has done nothing wrong it looks as though he must remain free.”

U.S. intelligence recently undertook a “significant” covert action without notifying Congress, as required by law, the House Intelligence Committee disclosed in a new report on the 2008 intelligence authorization bill.

“The Committee was dismayed at a recent incident wherein the Intelligence Community failed to inform the Congress of a significant covert action activity. This failure to notify Congress constitutes a violation of the National Security Act of 1947.”

“Despite agency explanations that the failure was inadvertent, the Committee is deeply troubled over the fact that such an oversight could occur, whether intentionally or inadvertently.”

“The Committee firmly believes that scrupulous transparency between the Intelligence Community and this Committee is an absolute necessity on matters related to covert action.”

In response to this lapse, the Committee adopted a provision in its authorization bill that would require the CIA Inspector General to audit each covert action program at least once every three years.

The pending bill is “the single largest intelligence authorization bill ever written by the Committee,” according to a May 2 news release (pdf).

The new intelligence authorization report describes new reporting requirements on the role of contractors in U.S. intelligence, Member concerns regarding intelligence policy in Iraq and domestic surveillance, defects in intelligence acquisition programs, and the evolution of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

“The recent 100-day agenda released by the DNI contained a great deal of bureaucratic verbiage but failed to articulate a clear and compelling plan for addressing chronic problems plaguing the Intelligence Community, such as deficiencies in foreign language capability, lack of diversity, information-sharing impediments, overclassification, and the lack of common security clearance practices,” the report said.

The bill does not include changes to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act sought by the Administration.

“Before the Committee will support any change to existing law, it is essential that the President provide some measure of assurance that were he to sign a bill modifying FISA into law, he would agree to be bound by it,” the report stated.

In minority views appended to the report, Republican members criticized the Committee endorsement of an intelligence role in assessing the impact of global warming, and other Committee judgments.

See Report on the Intelligence Authorization Act for FY 2008, House Report 110-131, May 7.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence is sponsoring a public conference on open source intelligence in Washington, DC on July 16-17.

“The conference will raise awareness about open source and encourage information sharing among the Intelligence Community and its partners in academia, think tanks, private industry, and with federal, state, local and tribal entities and international partners.”

“The two-day conference will host participants from local, national, and international organizations from both the public and private sector.”

“The conference is free and open to the public.”

“There will be free food,” added organizer Theresa Sciacchetano seductively.