The number of people in the Department of Defense holding security clearances for access to classified information declined by 100,000 in the first six months of FY2015.

There are now 3.8 million DoD employees and contractors with security clearances, down from 3.9 million earlier in the year, and a steep 17.4% drop from 4.6 million two years ago.

Moreover, only 2.2 million of the 3.8 million cleared DoD personnel are actually “in access,” meaning that they have current access to classified information. So further significant reductions in clearances would seem to be readily achievable by shedding those who are not “in access.”

The total number of security-cleared persons government-wide is roughly 0.5 million higher than the number of DoD clearances, putting it at around 4.3 million, down from 5.1 million in 2013.

The new DoD security clearance numbers were presented in the latest quarterly report on Insider Threat and Security Clearance Reform, FY2015 Quarter 3, September 2015.

The reduction in security clearances is not simply a reflection of programmatic or budgetary changes. Rather, it has been defined as a policy goal in its own right. A bloated security bureaucracy is harder to manage, more expensive, and more susceptible to catastrophic security failures than a properly streamlined system would be.

So the Administration’s Insider Threat Program states that one of the objectives of the program is to “Reduce total population of […] Secret and TS/SCI clearance holders to minimize risk of access to sensitive information and reduce cost.”

Reducing security clearances would also go hand in hand with, and help to reinforce, a long-term reduction in national security classification. (Although not widely recognized, original classification activity — the creation of new secrets — across the government has dropped each year for the past four years to a historically low level, according to the Information Security Oversight Office.)

The current insider threat program was initiated in 2012 — after the major WikiLeaks releases but before the Snowden disclosures. Its purpose was “to counter the threat of those insiders who may use their authorized access to compromise classified information.” See National Insider Threat Policy, The White House, November 21, 2012.

Implementation of the program has been slow, however.

A December 2014 milestone to provide “continuous evaluation” of the most sensitive Top Secret-cleared population was missed, the latest quarterly report notes. (Continuous evaluation refers to the automated screening of relevant information streams from multiple sources and databases including law enforcement, counterintelligence, credit reporting, and perhaps others.) Continuous evaluation of all TS and TS/SCI cleared personnel is said to be on track for December 2016.

Last year, the Department of Defense demonstrated continuous evaluation on approximately 100,000 cleared personnel. DoD will expand this capability to 225,000 persons this year, to 500,000 next year, and to 1 million in 2017, the quarterly report said.

Last week, the U.S. Navy issued updated guidance on implementation of its own Insider Threat Program.

Among other things, the guidance calls for a “reduction of Navy privileged users” who have unusually broad access to IT systems and data “and, therefore, could pose a higher risk of insider threat.” See Navy Insider Threat Program, Opnavinst 5510.165A, October 1, 2015.

If protesters are arrested for disrupting the proceedings of the U.S. Supreme Court through angry speech, is that a violation of their First Amendment rights? The question was analyzed by the Congressional Research Service. See Haranguing in the Court, CRS Legal Sidebar, October 6, 2015.

Other new and updated products of the Congressional Research Service issued in the past week include the following.

FinCEN’s Money Laudering Death Penalty Temporarily Blocked, CRS Legal Sidebar, October 6, 2015

The Internet Tax Freedom Act: In Brief, updated October 5, 2015

Emergency Relief for Disaster-Damaged Roads and Transit Systems: In Brief, updated October 2, 2015

Changes in the Arctic: Background and Issues for Congress, updated October 2, 2015

2015 Leaders’ Summit on U.N. Peacekeeping, CRS Insight, October 5, 2015

Pope Francis in Cuba, CRS Insight, October 2, 2015

Turkey: Background and U.S. Relations, updated October 5, 2015

Fact Sheet: Selected Highlights of the FY2016 National Defense Authorization Act (H.R. 1735 and S. 1376), updated October 2, 2015

Conventional Prompt Global Strike and Long-Range Ballistic Missiles: Background and Issues, updated October 2, 2015

The Internet in Russia is a battleground between activists who would use it as a tool of political and cultural freedom and government officials who see it as a powerful instrument of political control, write investigative journalists Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan in their new book The Red Web. For now, the government appears to be winning the battle.

Soldatov and Borogan trace the underlying conflict back to official anxiety in the Soviet era about the hazards of freedom of information. In the 1950s, the first Soviet photocopy machine was physically destroyed at the direction of the government “because it threatened to spread information beyond the control of those who ruled.”

With the introduction of imported personal computers in the 1980s and a connection to the Internet in 1990, new possibilities for free expression and political organizing in Russia seemed to arise. But as described in The Red Web, each private initiative was met by a government response seeking to disable or limit it. Internet service providers were required to install “black boxes” (known by the acronym SORM) giving Russia’s security services access to Internet traffic. Independent websites, such as the authors’ own agentura.ru site on intelligence matters, were subject to blocking and attack. Journalists’ computers were seized.

But the struggle continued. Protesters used new social media tools to organize demonstrations. The government countered with new facial recognition technology and cell phone tracking to identify them. Large teams of “trolls” were hired to disrupt social networks. A nationwide system of online filtering and censorship was put in place by 2012, and has been refined since then.

To some extent, the government actions constituted an implied threat rather than a fully implemented one, according to Soldatov and Borogan.

“The Russian secret services have had a long tradition of using spying techniques not merely to spy on people but to intimidate them. The KGB had a method of ‘overt surveillance’ in which they followed a target without concealing themselves. It was used against dissidents.”

And in practice, much of the new surveillance infrastructure fell short of stifling independent activity, as the authors’ own work testifies.

“The Internet filtering in Russia turned out to be unsophisticated; thousands of sites were blocked by mistake, and users could easily find ways to make an end-run around it,” they write. Moreover, “very few people in Russia were actually sent to jail for posting criticism of the government online.”

Nevertheless, “Russian Internet freedom has been deeply curtailed.”

In a chapter devoted to the case of Edward Snowden, the authors express disappointment in Snowden’s unwillingness to comment on Russian surveillance or to engage with Russian journalists. “To us, the silence seemed odd and unpleasant.”

More important, they say that Snowden actually made matters in Russia worse.

“Snowden may not have known or realized it, but his disclosures emboldened those in Russia who wanted more control over the Internet,” they write.

Because the Snowden disclosures were framed not as a categorical challenge to surveillance, but exclusively as an exposure of U.S. and allied practices, they were exploited by the Russian government to legitimize its own preference for “digital sovereignty.”

Snowden provided “cover for something the Kremlin wanted all along– to force Facebook, Twitter, and Google’s services, Gmail and YouTube, to be subject to Russian legislation, which meant providing backdoor access to the Russian security services.”

“Snowden could have done good things globally, but for Russia he was a disaster,” said Stas Kozlovsky of Moscow State University, a leading Wikipedia contributor in Russia, as quoted in The Red Web.

(Recently, Snowden has spoken out more clearly against Russian surveillance practices. “I’ve been quite critical of [it] in the past and I’ll continue to be in the future, because this drive that we see in the Russian government to control more and more the internet, to control more and more what people are seeing, even parts of personal lives, deciding what is the appropriate or inappropriate way for people to express their love for one another … [is] fundamentally wrong,” he said in a recent presentation. See “Snowden criticises Russia for approach to internet and homosexuality,” The Guardian, September 5, 2015).

The Red Web provides a salutary reminder for Western readers that the so-called U.S. “surveillance state” has hardly begun to exercise the possibilities of political control implied in that contemptuous term. For all of its massive collection of private data, the National Security Agency — unlike its Russian counterparts — has not yet interfered in domestic elections, censored private websites, disrupted public gatherings, or gained unrestricted access to domestic communications.

Soldatov and Borogan conclude on an optimistic note. After all, they write, things are even worse in China. See The Red Web: The Struggle Between Russia’s Digital Dictators and the New Online Revolutionaries by Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan, Public Affairs, 2015.

If President Obama vetoes the pending FY2016 defense authorization bill, “it would mark the fifth time since 1961, when Congress enacted the first annual defense authorization bill, that a president has vetoed that measure,” according to the Congressional Research Service. See Presidential Vetoes of Annual Defense Authorization Bills, CRS Insight, October 1, 2015.

New and updated publications from the Congressional Research Service that were issued in the past week include the following.

Overview of the FY2016 Continuing Resolution (H.R. 719), October 1, 2015

Public Health Service Agencies: Overview and Funding (FY2010-FY2016), updated October 2, 2015

DHS Appropriations FY2016: Security, Enforcement and Investigations, October 2, 2015

Poland and Its Relations with the United States: In Brief, September 30, 2015

State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs: FY2016 Budget and Appropriations, updated October 1, 2015

U.S. Agricultural Trade with Cuba: Current Limitations and Future Prospects, updated October 1, 2015

How Treasury Issues Debt, updated October 1, 2015

Disconnected Youth: A Look at 16 to 24 Year Olds Who Are Not Working or In School, updated October 1, 2015

Kuwait: Governance, Security, and U.S. Policy, updated October 1, 2015

Yemen: Civil War and Regional Intervention, updated October 2, 2015

The U.S. government blocked dozens of life science experiments over the past decade because they were deemed to pose undue risks to public health and safety.

Between 2006 and 2013, researchers submitted 618 potentially restricted experiment proposals for review by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Division of Select Agents and Toxins (DSAT), according to a new study published in the journal Health Security.

Fifteen percent of those (91) were found to meet the regulatory definition of a “restricted experiment.” 31 of those experiments were nevertheless approved because they included appropriate safety measures.

But “DSAT did not approve 60 restricted experiment requests due to potentially serious biosafety risks to public health and safety,” researchers found. “All 60 denied restricted experiments proposed inserting drug resistance traits into select agents that could compromise the control of disease.”

See Review of Restricted Experiment Requests, Division of Select Agents and Toxins, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2006-2013 (abstract only) by Jacinta Smith, Denise Gangadharan, and Robbin Weyant, Health Security, Vol. 13, No. 5, September 2015: 307-316.

Regulatory restrictions on research can infringe on academic freedom and may have the unintended consequence of foreclosing important — and beneficial — avenues of scientific investigation.

But the risks involved in genetic manipulation of biological agents are so profound that almost everyone agrees that some limits are necessary and appropriate.

“A product resulting from a restricted experiment has the potential to be directly misapplied by others to pose a threat to public health and safety, agricultural crops and other plants, animals and/or the environment,” the authors wrote. “In addition, the accidental release of a product of a restricted experiment may compromise the control or treatment of the disease agent in humans, animals, and/or plants.”

There have been four reported cases involving violations of restricted experiment regulations in recent years, the authors noted. Two of the restricted experiment violations resulted in civil penalties ranging from $40,000 to $1 million.

Some say the existing regulatory regime does not go far enough to restrict hazardous research.

“In the current Wild West of otherwise completely unregulated, and otherwise nearly completely unmonitored, US pathogens research, the requirement for review of ‘restricted experiments’ under the select agent rule is the one small bright spot,” said Richard H. Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University.

He noted that current regulations specify only two categories of potentially restricted experiments, which leaves much research on pathogens beyond regulatory control or oversight.

“The most effective avenue for the [US government] to implement a requirement for review of other pathogen research projects–for example, to implement a requirement for review of pathogen research projects that create new potential pandemic pathogens–would be to add additional ‘restricted experiments’ to the select agent rule,” Dr. Ebright said.

The Congressional Research Service has produced a bibliography on domestic surveillance to support this year’s national high school debate program which is devoted to that subject.

“Resolved: The United States Federal Government Should Substantially Curtail Its Domestic Surveillance” is the topic that was selected for the 2015-2016 high school debate by representatives of the National Federation of State High School Associations.

The Librarian of Congress is directed by law (44 USC 1333) to “prepare compilations of pertinent excerpts, bibliographical references, and other appropriate materials” relating to the annual high school and college debates. So CRS (a component of the Library of Congress) has fulfilled that requirement, providing citations to contrasting perspectives on surveillance in news stories, books, law review articles, websites, and non-governmental organizations.

“The conflict between national security objectives and privacy became a popular topic for debate when it was disclosed in June 2013, by former defense contractor Edward Snowden, that the National Security Agency was engaging in extensive surveillance inside the United States in order to fight crime and to reduce the threat of terrorism,” according to the CRS introduction to the document.

“The magnitude of the disclosure shocked many people, including Members of Congress, who were unaware of the extent of the surveillance. Many civil rights advocates viewed the surveillance as an assault on liberty, while law enforcement and national security officials saw the programs as essential weapons in the war on terror, the fight against nuclear weapons proliferation, and the general protection of U.S. national security.”

“In selecting items for inclusion in this bibliography, CRS has sampled a wide spectrum of opinions reflected in the current literature on this issue,” CRS director Mary B. Mazanec wrote in a Foreword.

“No preference for any policy is indicated by the selection or positioning of articles, books, or websites cited, nor is CRS disapproval of any policy, position or article to be inferred from its omission,” she wrote.

See Compilation of References on Domestic Surveillance for National High School Debate, 2015-2016, Congressional Research Service, August 2015.

The CRS document is unobjectionable, but it has some peculiarities.

A prominent typographical error on the title pages repeatedly misstates the debate topic to read “The United States federal government should substantially curtain [sic] its domestic surveillance.”

The bibliography includes the titles of six surveillance-related reports that were produced by the Congressional Research Service itself. CRS does not acknowledge that each of these reports has been posted online and may be easily obtained. Instead, the bibliography disingenuously advises that they “are available by way of a request to your Member of Congress.” The notion that hundreds or thousands of high school students are actually going to contact their congressional offices for copies of CRS reports that can be instantly located by an online search, or that the offices would promptly and reliably provide them, is hard to credit.

The subject of domestic surveillance was chosen for the annual national high school debate program over other proposed topics including income inequality, criminal justice reform, and government authority over Indian country.

*    *    *

New and updated CRS reports that were issued over the past week include the following.

Poverty in the United States in 2014: In Brief, September 30, 2015

EPA’s New Ozone Standards: A Few Thoughts, CRS Insight, September 29, 2015

Emerging Markets: Is Slower Growth Temporary?, CRS Insight, September 29, 2015

Zivotofsky v. Kerry: The Jerusalem Passport Case and Its Potential Implications for Congress’s Foreign Affairs Powers, updated September 28, 2015

Abortion, Hospital Admitting Privileges, and Whole Woman’s Health v. Cole, September 25, 2015

The Pregnancy Discrimination Act and the Supreme Court: A Legal Analysis of Young v. United Parcel Service, September 25, 2015

The Lord’s Resistance Army: The U.S. Response, updated September 28, 2015

Mexico’s Oil and Gas Sector: Background, Reform Efforts, and Implications for the United States, updated September 28, 2015

Direct Overt U.S. Aid Appropriations for and Military Reimbursements to Pakistan, FY2002-FY2016, updated September 30, 2015

Puerto Rico’s Current Fiscal Challenges, updated September 25, 2015

Can Creditors Enforce Terrorism Judgments Against Cuba?, CRS Legal Sidebar, September 29, 2015

Iran’s Foreign Policy, updated September 25, 2015

Navy Irregular Warfare and Counterterrorism Operations: Background and Issues for Congress, updated September 25, 2015

Before the Department of Defense can use an unmanned aerial system within the United States for domestic operations such as search and rescue missions or disaster response, specific authorization from the Secretary of Defense is necessary.

However, if DoD wants to use a UAS to help control domestic civil disturbances (such as a riot or insurrection), then further authorization from the President of the United State is required.

The patchwork of legal authorities and requirements for domestic military missions is presented in a newly updated DoD manual on Defense Support of Civil Authorities (DSCA).

Military support to civil authorities may be prompted by a variety of natural disasters and emergencies, including wildfires, earthquakes, floods, chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear accidents or attacks, and — a new addition — cyber incidents. But such domestic missions have their own peculiar characteristics.

“Operations conducted by the US military in the homeland and US territories are very different from operations conducted overseas,” the DoD manual says, particularly since they are executed “under the authority and within the limitations of federal, state, and local laws.”

In particular, “For fear of military encroachment on civil authority and domestic governance, the PCA [Posse Comitatus Act] and policy limit DOD support to LEA [Law Enforcement Agencies],” the manual says.

More specifically, “DOD directives prohibit interdicting vehicles, searches and seizures, arrest, and similar activities (e.g., apprehension, stop, and frisk). Furthermore, engaging in questioning potential witnesses; using force or threats to do so, except in self-defense or defense of others; collecting evidence; forensic testing; and surveillance or pursuit of individuals or vehicles is prohibited.”

On the other hand, “the Insurrection Act permits the POTUS [President of the United States] to use armed forces under a limited set of specific circumstances and subject to certain limitations.”

(The President has used the authority under the Insurrection Act twice in recent history. In September 1989 the President ordered federal troops to the US Virgin Islands to restore order in the aftermath of Hurricane Hugo. In April 1992 the President ordered federal troops to restore order in Los Angeles during riots following the Rodney King verdict.)

The updated manual includes a new appendix presenting a matrix of domestic military missions along with the relevant approval authority and policy guidance.

For the first time, the manual includes “cyberspace-related incidents” among the circumstances that may trigger military involvement in domestic matters.

“Large-scale cyber incidents may overwhelm government and private-sector resources by disrupting the internet and taxing critical infrastructure information systems. Complications from disruptions of this magnitude may threaten lives, property, the economy, and national security…. State and local networks operating in a disrupted or degraded environment may require DOD assistance.”

See Multi-Service Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures for Defense Support of Civil Authorities (DSCA), Army, Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force, September 2015.

The authorized use of DoD unmanned aerial systems in domestic operations is described in Guidance for the Domestic Use of Unmanned Aircraft Systems, Policy Memorandum 15-002, February 17, 2015.

When government contractors fail to fulfill a contract or engage in some form of misconduct, there are various ways to hold them legally accountable, a new reportfrom the Congressional Research Service explains.

“This report provides an overview of selected legal mechanisms that the federal government could rely upon in holding contractors accountable for deficiencies in their performance under the contract, or for other misconduct. Not all of these mechanisms involve ‘penalties’ as that term is generally understood. In some cases, the controlling legal authority expressly provides that the government may take certain actions only to protect the government’s interest, and ‘not for purposes of punishment.’ However, in all cases, the government’s action represents a consequence of and response to the contractor’s delinquencies, and could be perceived as punitive by the contractor or other parties.”

“The report does not address prosecution of government contractors, although it is important to note that contractors could be subject to criminal penalties for misconduct related to contract performance or otherwise.”

“Also, the discussion of the government’s potential mechanisms for holding contractors accountable in this report should not be taken to mean that contractors and contractor employees are more likely to fail to perform or engage in misconduct than government employees. That is a separate debate, outside the scope of this report,” CRS said. See Legal Mechanisms Whereby the Government Can Hold Contractors Accountable, September 23, 2015.

Other new and updated reports from the Congressional Research Service that were published last week — but not publicly released — include the following.

The FY2016 Continuing Resolution (H.J. Res 61), CRS Insight, September 23, 2015

Economic Effects of the FY2014 Shutdown, CRS Insight, September 24, 2015

Federal Support for Reproductive Health Services: Frequently Asked Questions, updated September 25, 2015

Congressional Redistricting: Legal and Constitutional Issues, September 22, 2015

DOT’s Federal Pipeline Safety Program: Background and Key Issues for Congress, September 22, 2015

Copyright Licensing in Music Distribution, Reproduction, and Public Performance, updated September 22, 2015

The Help America Vote Act and Election Administration: Overview and Issues, updated September 22, 2015

Legal Issues with Federal Labeling of Genetically Engineered Food: In Brief, updated September 22, 2015

U.S. Trade in Services: Trends and Policy Issues, updated September 22, 2015

A Framework for Understanding Health Insurance Consolidations, CRS Insight, September 22, 2015

Navy Littoral Combat Ship (LCS)/Frigate Program: Background and Issues for Congress, updated September 23, 2015

Navy Virginia (SSN-774) Class Attack Submarine Procurement: Background and Issues for Congress, updated September 23, 2015

Navy Ohio Replacement (SSBN[X]) Ballistic Missile Submarine Program: Background and Issues for Congress, updated September 23, 2015

Navy Ford (CVN-78) Class Aircraft Carrier Program: Background and Issues for Congress, updated September 22, 2015

Navy DDG-51 and DDG-1000 Destroyer Programs: Background and Issues for Congress, updated September 22, 2015

Navy LX(R) Amphibious Ship Program: Background and Issues for Congress, updated September 22, 2015

Navy Force Structure and Shipbuilding Plans: Background and Issues for Congress, updated September 21, 2015

A Shift in the International Security Environment: Potential Implications for Defense — Issues for Congress, updated September 24, 2015

The Central Intelligence Agency has improperly classified and withheld from release at least five categories of information related to its post-9/11 rendition, detention and interrogation program, according to a detailed complaint filed by Openthegovernment.org with the Information Security Oversight Office.

Classification of this information has impeded government accountability for the controversial CIA programs and derailed a full public reckoning over abuses that occurred, the complaint said.

“Secrecy regarding ‘black sites’ and torture has played a major role in ensuring that no CIA personnel could be prosecuted for torture, war crimes, destruction of evidence, or other relevant federal crimes. It has ensured that civil courts were closed to victims of torture, indefinitely delayed trials of the accused perpetrators of the September 11 attacks, and put the United States in breach of its obligations under the Convention Against Torture,” wrote Katherine Hawkins, National Security Fellow at Openthegovernment.org, who authored the complaint.

She specified five categories of information that she said had been classified in violation of the executive order governing classification policy and redacted from the summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee report on interrogation:

*     The pseudonyms and titles, and in some cases the names, of CIA officials and contractors implicated in the torture program.

*     The names of countries that hosted black sites (i.e. unacknowledged locations of CIA detention centers abroad).

*     Former CIA detainees’ descriptions of the details of their own torture.

*     The CIA’s involvement in the torture of prisoners in Iraq.

*     The CIA’s rendition of prisoners to torture in foreign custody.

The 38-page complaint presents extensive arguments that certain particular information in each of these categories was improperly classified by the CIA.

“There is strong evidence that classification of evidence regarding the torture program violated the Executive Order, in some cases willfully so,” Ms. Hawkins wrote. “It is important that there be consequences for this abuse of the classification power to deter similar violations in the future. But it is even more important that the cover-up end, and that ISOO act to oversee ongoing CIA classification decisions regarding the rendition, detention and interrogation program.”

John P. Fitzpatrick, the director of the Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO), which oversees the classification system, said his office has already begun “digging into the complaint in detail…. I don’t yet know what level of effort this will require.”

Under Executive Order 13526 (section 5.2(6)), the ISOO director is authorized and required to “consider and take action on complaints and suggestions from persons within or outside the Government with respect to the administration of the [classification] program established under this order.”

As a practical matter, ISOO’s capacity to investigate classification errors is limited by the Office’s size and budget.

Nevertheless, Mr. Fitzpatrick said, “handling complaints like this is part of our mission, so we will have to see what can be done.”

The immediate next steps, he said, include identifying the specific claims advanced by the complaint and the parts of the executive order they may relate to; gathering relevant facts that would support or refute the claims; and performing analysis to reach a conclusion. Considering the length and detail of the complaint, reviewing it “will take time.”

*    *    *

If there is a systemic solution to the problem of overclassification, it is likely to involve the kind of independent review that has been urged on ISOO by Openthegovernment.org in this case.

Government agencies that are left to their own devices will almost always classify more information than is necessary or appropriate. Without assuming any malign intent on their part, it is simply the path of least resistance.

However, when an agency is required to justify its classification activity to an impartial reviewer, even on a non-adversarial basis, a reduction in the scope of classification results more often than not. This has been confirmed repeatedly.

*    Between 1996 and 2014, the Interagency Security Classification Appeals Panel directed the declassification of information in 71 percent of the documents presented to it by members of the public whose direct requests to agencies had been denied, ISOO reported in 2014.

*    Documents concerning covert actions that the CIA had refused to acknowledge on its own were approved for declassification and publication in the Foreign Relations of the United States series after deliberation by the so-called High-Level Panel composed of representatives of the National Security Council, State Department and CIA.

*    CIA classification of many records related to the JFK assassination could not withstand review by the independent Assassination Records Review Board. The Board ordered declassification of tens of thousands of assassination-related records including millions of pages.

*    Even within individual agencies, the process of challenging classification decisions has borne fruit to a surprising extent. Government employees challenged the classification status of various items of information in 813 cases in FY2014, the Information Security Oversight Office reported. Their classification was overturned in whole or in part in 453 of those cases.

It follows that new venues and new procedures for independently evaluating disputed classification decisions would help to reduce or eliminate spurious classification.

New and updated publications from the Congressional Research Service obtained by Secrecy News include the following.

The Chinese Military: Overview and Issues for Congress, September 18, 2015

Maritime Territorial and Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) Disputes Involving China: Issues for Congress, updated September 18, 2015

China Naval Modernization: Implications for U.S. Navy Capabilities — Background and Issues for Congress, updated September 15, 2015

Guatemala: President Pérez Resigns; Runoff Presidential Election on October 25, CRS Insight, September 17, 2015

Russian Deployments in Syria Complicate U.S. Policy, CRS Insight, September 18, 2015

Extreme Weather Events and Government Compensation, CRS Legal Sidebar, September 22, 2015

Third Circuit Affirms the FTC’s Authority to Regulate Data Security as an Unfair Trade Practice, CRS Legal Sidebar, September 21, 2015

Credit Union’s Plan to Serve the Marijuana Industry Goes Up in Smoke, CRS Legal Sidebar, September 21, 2015

Is There a Gap in Insider Trading Coverage for Hacking?, CRS Legal Sidebar, September 18, 2015

Vulnerable Youth: Employment and Job Training Programs, September 16, 2015

Insurance Regulation: Background, Overview, and Legislation in the 114th Congress, September 16, 2015

Copyright Law Restrictions on a Consumer’s Right to Repair Cars and Tractors, CRS Legal Sidebar, September 18, 2015

China’s military research and development program is organized around 16 “national megaprojects” that are intended to advance and transform that country’s capabilities in core technology areas including electronics, aerospace, clean energy, and so on. Three of the 16 national projects are classified and have not been officially acknowledged.

But in a recently published US Army War College volume, China specialists Richard A. Bitzinger and Michael Raska identified “three prime candidates” for the classified Chinese programs: 1) a laser fusion program; 2) a navigational satellite system; and 3) a hypersonic vehicle technology project.

The Shenguang (Divine Light) laser is an experiment in inertial confinement fusion. The project reportedly aims to achieve ignition and plasma burning by 2020. “Shenguang has two strategic implications: it may accelerate China’s next-generation thermonuclear weapons development, and advance China’s directed-energy laser weapons programs,” wrote Bitzinger and Raska, who are based at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore.

The Beidou 2 satellite system is a network of hardened navigational satellites, which potentially “eliminates China’s dependency on the U.S. GPS and Russia’s GLONASS satellite navigation systems that could be deactivated in select areas in times of conflict,” they wrote.

Finally, “there are signs that China is developing conceptual and experimental hypersonic flight vehicle technologies such as hypersonic cruise vehicles (HCV) capable of maneuvering at Mach 5.”

See Capacity for Innovation: Technological Drivers of China’s Future Military Modernization by Ricard A. Bitzinger and Michael Raska, in The Chinese People’s Liberation Army in 2025 (Roy Kamphausen and David Lai, eds.), published July 2015 by the Strategic Studies Institute and the US Army War College Press.

“Although China’s military innovation lagged behind that of Western powers, China’s ‘latecomer advantage’ has enabled it to skip various phases of development,” the volume editors wrote. “As a latecomer, the PLA has been able to identify and absorb key foreign civil and military technologies.”

A recently updated report from the Congressional Research Service discusses China’s Economic Rise: History, Trends, Challenges, and Implications for the United States, September 11, 2015.

How should a congressional committee respond when a witness before the Committee asserts his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination, and refuses to provide the testimony or documents sought by investigators?

The options available to the Committee were discussed by the Congressional Research Service in a new memorandum. See The Fifth Amendment in Congressional Investigations, CRS Legal Sidebar, September 11, 2015.

Other new and updated CRS publications include the following.

Election in Greece, CRS Insight, September 14, 2015

OSHA Proposed Rule Contradicts D.C. Circuit Decision, CRS Legal Sidebar, September 14, 2015

Confederate License Plates are Government Speech, Rules Supreme Court, CRS Legal Sidebar, September 14, 2015

“Just Mayo” Just Isn’t, Warns FDA, CRS Legal Sidebar, September 14, 2015

District Court Holds House has Standing to Pursue Portions of ACA Lawsuit, CRS Legal Sidebar, September 11, 2015

Jim Thorpe’s Tribe and Sons Continue Fight against the Borough of Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, CRS Legal Sidebar, September 11, 2015

The FY2014 Government Shutdown: Economic Effects, updated September 11, 2015

The Debt Limit Since 2011, updated September 11, 2015

Surface Transportation Program Reauthorization Issues for Congress, updated September 11, 2015

Procedures for Congressional Action in Relation to a Nuclear Agreement with Iran: In Brief, updated September 11, 2015

, updated September 11, 2015

The United Arab Emirates (UAE): Issues for U.S. Policy, updated September 14, 2015