When the San Francisco Chronicle reported April 8 that information about the design and layout of the Presidential aircraft Air Force One was available on the world wide web, it generated a spasm of anxiety in some quarters.

The anxiety was magnified by a follow-on story in the Chronicle April 19, reprinted in the Pentagon Early Bird today, which observed ominously that the information “still remain[s] publicly available.”

The reporter, Paul J. Caffera, spoke to several people in and out of government who were prepared to express alarm about the disclosure. He did not quote anyone who questioned its significance or downplayed the potential threat that it might pose.

On closer examination, it appears that the Chronicle exaggerated the entire matter, and not only by mistakenly referring to the information as “classified” (an error that it corrected today).

The notion of a Secret that may lead to fatal vulnerability if exposed has mythological force and deep psychological resonance. But fear untethered by objective scrutiny is a poor guide to government information policymaking.

To begin with, the document that the Chronicle found on the web has never been classified. To the contrary, it was specifically reviewed and cleared for public release years ago.

This was no accident. As Stephen I. Schwartz observed in a cogent critique of the Chronicle story last week, the Air Force document was deliberately made public:

“It’s part of a safety manual, written so firefighters and emergency responders can quickly rescue Air Force One’s pilots and passengers if there’s an accident or mishap,” noted Schwartz, the former publisher of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

It follows that new efforts to suppress the document in response to the Chronicle story may tend to impede accident preparedness.

See Schwartz’s critique on the DefenseTech blog “Air Force One Scare: Real Security Sacrificed,” April 11.

John Pike of GlobalSecurity.org observed that he regularly finds “all kinds of stuff” that is genuinely sensitive, such as new details relating to Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) in Iraq, which his organization refrains from publishing.

But the information in the unclassified Air Force One safety manual that triggered the Chronicle story, he said, “is neither very interesting nor unique.”

The Law Library of Congress, which maintains the world’s largest collection of legal materials, produces a monthly publication called World Law Bulletin that features the highlights of legal developments around the world, as well as occasional essays on specialized topics by some of the Library’s resident experts.

For no good reason, however, the World Law Bulletin is not released to the public. Until such time as Congress authorizes it to do so, the Library cannot make it directly available. Efforts are underway to instigate a change in disclosure policy to permit public release, but that has not happened yet.

In the meantime, Secrecy News has obtained the latest issues from December 2005 through March 2006.

Scanning the March issue (pdf) at random, one learns that “The Government of Botswana has amended the Liquor Act so that as of April 1, 2006, beer may only be sold for five hours a day.”

But a Library analyst astutely observes that “Bars and bottle shops are to open at 5 p.m. and close at 11 p.m. (which would appear to be a six-hour period for legal sales).”

See the latest issues of World Law Bulletin here.

“Security guards at the Department of Homeland Security were forced last month to sign agreements not to disclose information the agency deems sensitive — an attempt, according to several current guards, to silence them after recent high-profile revelations of security breaches at DHS.” See “Guards Say Non-Disclosure Agreements Were Used to Hide Security Flaws at DHS” by Patrick Yoest, CQ Homeland Security, April 19.

“While no one is paying much attention, the Bush administration is promoting a reading of an old and largely moribund law that could radically diminish the openness of U.S. government while criminalizing huge swaths of academic debate and journalism,” the Washington Post editorialized today on the AIPAC case. See “Dangerous Prosecution,” April 20.

The FBI’s attempt to gain access to files of the late Jack Anderson “is one of the more outrageous steps in a campaign by the Bush administration to hide information from the public,” according to the Kansas City Star. See “FBI needs to back off,” April 20.

The U.S. Army last year published a handbook (pdf) for commanders and other U.S. military personnel who are newly deployed to Germany which describes German customs, protocol and etiquette — as understood by the Army.

It includes a wide variety of interesting and peculiar details, including an introduction to German wine and beer.

“German wine categories are more complicated than German beer categories,” the Army guide says. “There are three types of wine and three colors.”

It also includes advice for how to handle delicate interpersonal situations.

For example, if two persons pledge brotherhood (“Brüderschaft”) over drinks and switch from using the formal you (“Sie”) to the informal you (“du”) and one of them later comes to regret the intimacy — what then?

“If an unhesitating ‘Sie’ is used [by one person] at the next encounter following a Brüderschaft drink, the other person should also revert to using ‘Sie’.”

See “Commanders Guide to German Society, Customs, and Protocol,” USAREUR Pamphlet 360-6, 20 September 2005.

The Central Intelligence Agency conducted a review of its “operational files” last year, as it is required to do every ten years under the CIA Information Act of 1984, to see if any such files could have their “operational” designation rescinded, making them subject to Freedom of Information Act requests.

But instead of removing any files from operational status, as contemplated by the 1984 Act, the CIA added nearly two dozen new categories of files that will now be exempt from search and review under the FOIA, according to a newly disclosed report to Congress.

Remarkably, the CIA report to Congress misstated the requirements of the 1984 law. The CIA told Congress that:

“The CIA Information Act… required that not less than once every ten years, the DCI review the operational files exemptions then in force to determine whether such exemptions could be removed from any category of exempted files or portion of those files, and whether any new categories of files should be designated as exempt.”

Only the first half of that sentence is true.

The statute that governs these reviews — 50 U.S.C. 432 — refers only to the removal of the operational file exemption based on “historical value or other public interest.” It says nothing about adding new designations.

Having misstated the law, CIA proceeded to implement its own misrepresentation.

The Agency did not remove any operational file exemptions at all. Instead, it added twenty three new file category exemptions.

The CIA has the legal authority under the 1984 CIA Information Act to create new operational file designations at any time. But that is not the purpose of the decennial reviews, which were established by Congress specifically to correct and curtail prior designations that were no longer necessary or appropriate.

In this case, the corrective mechanism designed by Congress was defeated by CIA.

The Report of the Second Decennial Review of CIA Operational File Exemptions was transmitted to Congress on June 28, 2005. It was publicly released this week in response to a Freedom of Information Act appeal from the Federation of American Scientists.

In the first decennial review in 1995, the operational file exemption was removed from four file categories and they were opened to FOIA requests. See the report of the first decennial review here.

If rigid and arbitrary secrecy were preconditions for a superior intelligence product, then advocates of greater openness would confront a dilemma. But we know that is not the case.

CIA secrecy policy as it exists today is not a sign of vigor but of decay.

In the latest sign of institutional turmoil at the Agency, the editor of the somewhat respected CIA journal Studies in Intelligence has resigned, and so has the chairman of its Editorial Board.

“The most chilling aspect is that there are newly established editorial hurdles at the journal. Merit is no longer the sole criterion governing publication,” wrote Max Holland, a sometime contributor to Studies.

He reported on the resignations in a new article in Washington Spectator, “Lessons Not Learned,” April 15.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation wants to review the files of the late muckraking journalist Jack Anderson and confiscate any documents it believes are classified before they are opened to the public.

This amazing story was first reported yesterday by the Chronicle of Higher Education (see Update below).

There has long been an unwritten agreement the government may do what it must to deter unauthorized disclosures of classified information and to punish leakers but that, once disclosed, the government does not pursue those who receive or publish the information.

Yet the Bush Administration and some on the political right seem intent on disrupting that longstanding convention through subpoenas of reporters, prosecution of recipients of leaks (as in the AIPAC case), threats of prosecution against the press for reporting classified information, and now the FBI pursuit of the Anderson files.

A series of email messages on the FBI matter from Jack Anderson’s son Kevin were posted yesterday by Don Goldberg on his blog here.

Among the abundant news reports of the story are these:

“FBI Rebuffed on Reporter’s Files” by Spencer Hsu, Washington Post, April 19.

“Late Journalist’s Family Resists FBI Request for His Documents” by Nick Timiraos, Los Angeles Times, April 19.

“Dead Journalist’s Archives Sought In U.S. Spy Case” by Eli Lake, New York Sun, April 19.

Update: Progressive Review was actually the first to report this story, on Monday April 17, here.

The Department of Defense is seeking a broad new exemption from the Freedom of Information Act for unclassified information relating to weapons of mass destruction.

According to the proposed legislation, “Examples of such information could include … formulas and design descriptions of lethal and incapacitating materials; maps, designs, security/emergency response plans, and vulnerability assessments for facilities containing weapons of mass destruction materials.”

The proposal is puzzling because most such information, including that which is not classified, is already exempt from the FOIA. Meanwhile, some related categories of information that are not exempt should arguably remain public.

The draft DoD language “is so broad as to potentially sweep everything related to any chemical facility into the exemption,” said Meredith Fuchs, general counsel at the National Security Archive. “There is nothing in here that explicitly protects the public’s need to know some things about these facilities, e.g. violations of the law, lack of required certifications or licenses.”

Furthermore, she said, “the lack of a temporal limit on the withholdability of the information, and the lack of any appeals mechanism, creates a potential black hole.”

She suggested that any such exemption should be more narrowly “focused on what they actually are trying to protect, which I think is vulnerability information DOD learns of regarding private facilities.”

The draft DoD FOIA exemption was first reported in “DOD Asks For New FOIA Exemption Covering WMD-Related Information” by Keith Costa, Inside the Pentagon, April 13.

The challenges posed by the use of “sensitive but unclassified” control markings were examined in a comprehensive new report (pdf) from the Government Accountability Office.

“The agencies that GAO reviewed are using 56 different sensitive but unclassified designations (16 of which belong to one agency) to protect information that they deem critical to their missions — for example, sensitive law or drug enforcement information or controlled nuclear information.”

“For most designations there are no governmentwide policies or procedures that describe the basis on which an agency should assign a given designation and ensure that it will be used consistently from one agency to another. Without such policies, each agency determines what designations and associated policies to apply to the sensitive information it develops or shares. More than half the agencies reported challenges in sharing such information.”

See “Information Sharing: The Federal Government Needs to Establish Policies and Processes for Sharing Terrorism-Related and Sensitive but Unclassified Information,” March 2006 (1.8 MB PDF).

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) is currently coordinating an effort to standardize governmentwide procedures for the handling of “sensitive but unclassified” information.

But the ODNI rather impudently refused to cooperate with the GAO because “the review of intelligence activities is beyond the GAO’s purview,” according to Kathleen Turner of the ODNI Office of Legislative Affairs.

The Project on Government Oversight dissected the matter here. (Also flagged by Cryptome.)

See also “Report criticizes U.S. terror info sharing” by Shaun Waterman, United Press International, April 18.

Attorneys for two former officials of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee accused of mishandling classified information vigorously rebutted the latest prosecution arguments against their clients in an April 6 pleading (pdf).

“In the history of the Espionage Act, the government has never embarked on a prosecution like this one — of private citizens outside government, not accused of espionage, for receiving and transmitting oral information in the context of their jobs as foreign policy advocates protected by the First Amendment,” the defense argued.

The defense brief disputed the prosecution’s new claim that a 1940 case known as Gorin was a pertinent precedent to the current case. In that earlier case, the defendant was a foreign agent who paid his sources for access to restricted information. But unlike Gorin, the present defendants are not accused of being foreign agents, nor of bribing or coercing the disclosure of information.

See “Defendants’ Reply to Government’s Supplemental Response to Motion to Dismiss,” April 6, 2006 (1 MB PDF).

An earlier defense brief on related matters, dated March 31 and initially filed under seal, is now available here (2.2 MB PDF).

Recent news coverage of the case includes “Leak Flap Seen Aiding Lobbyists’ Case” by Marc Perelman, Forward, April 14.

The U.S. Air Force has produced a new doctrinal document (pdf) that articulates its role in “homeland operations.”

“This document describes how our Air Force organizes and employs air and space power in operations in the homeland.”

“It focuses on how we support civilian agencies through the appropriate combatant commander in a variety of operations, such as neutralizing terrorist threats, responding to natural disasters, and supporting the traditional mission of homeland defense.”

See “Homeland Operations,” Air Force Doctrine Document AFDD 2-10, March 21, 2006.

The best way to ensure the perpetuation of democratic institutions in turbulent times, said Abraham Lincoln in an 1838 speech, is to cultivate a sense of reverence for the law.

“Let reverence for the laws be breathed by every American mother to the lisping babe that prattles on her lap — let it be taught in schools, in seminaries, and in colleges; let it be written in Primers, spelling books, and in Almanacs; — let it be preached from the pulpit, proclaimed in legislative halls, and enforced in courts of justice.”

“And, in short, let it become the political religion of the nation,” said the 28 year old Lincoln.

A newly updated report (pdf) from the Congressional Research Service introduces lay readers to the principles of statutory interpretation used by the Supreme Court to interpret the law.

Some of these rules are commonsensical. Thus, ordinarily, “shall” is mandatory and “may” is permissive.

Others are less obvious but no less important. The principle of “constitutional avoidance,” for example, dictates that a statute should be read, “if fairly possible,” so as not to be found unconstitutional.

At Congressional direction, CRS does not make its products directly available to the American public. But a copy of this useful new CRS report was obtained by Secrecy News.

See “Statutory Interpretation: General Principles and Recent Trends,” updated March 30, 2006.

The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) today released a second newly declassified Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on the withdrawal of government records from its public collections.

National Archivist Allen Weinstein said that he discovered the existence of the second MOU (pdf), which was signed by the Central Intelligence Agency and NARA in October 2001, only last Thursday and that he immediately sought its declassification. Another MOU (pdf) on document withdrawal, signed by Air Force and NARA in March 2002, was released in declassified form last week.

Until its recent discovery by researcher Matthew Aid, with the support of the National Security Archive, the document withdrawal activity at the National Archives had been conducted secretly, as if it were some kind of covert action.

“It is in the interests of both the CIA and the National Archives and Records Administration to avoid the kind of public notice and researcher complaints that may arise from removing from the open shelves for extended periods of time records that had been public available,” the 2001 MOU stated.

The resulting firestorm of criticism that has been directed at the National Archives is “absolutely fair,” said Archivist Weinstein in a meeting with historians and public interest groups today.

He took responsibility for the affair (which originated prior to his appointment as Archivist). More significantly, he repudiated the underlying practice.

“There can never be a classified aspect to our mission,” Weinstein said. “Classified agreements are the antithesis of our reason for being.”

“If records must be removed for reasons of national security, the American people will always, at the very least, know when it occurs and how many records are affected.”

An audit of the document withdrawal program by the Information Security Oversight Office is expected to be released on April 26.

See this April 17 NARA news release, with links to the newly release MOU and related background material.

Beyond the unwarranted secrecy of the document withdrawal program, a deeper problem concerns official policy on classification of historical records.

Since many of the withdrawn documents are publicly accessible elsewhere, their withdrawal provides the public a rare opportunity to evaluate current classification policy as practiced by executive branch agencies. It is not a very satisfactory picture.

One publicly available document that was modified by the Central Intelligence Agency in a revealingly obtuse way was featured in a New York Times story yesterday.

See “Why the Secrecy? Only the Bureaucrats Know” by Scott Shane, New York Times, April 16 (free reg. req’d.).