The population of Yemen has quadrupled over the last 30 years, the Congressional Research Service noted in a newly updated report, exacerbating that nation’s widespread poverty and contributing to the upheaval that is now unfolding. See Yemen: Background and U.S. Relations, January 21, 2015.

The United States currently provides refuge to over 300,000 foreign nationals from 11 countries facing civil rest or natural disasters, according to another CRS report. See Temporary Protected Status: Current Immigration Policy and Issues, January 12, 2015.

The major policy provisions of the last two intelligence authorization bills were itemized and described by CRS in Intelligence Authorization Legislation for FY2014 and FY2015: Provisions, Status, Intelligence Community Framework, January 14, 2015.

The losses to the U.S. treasury due to tax evasion may reach as high as $100 billion per year. CRS looked at how it happens and how it might be fixed in Tax Havens: International Tax Avoidance and Evasion, January 15, 2015.

Other noteworthy new or newly updated CRS reports that Congress has withheld from public distribution include the following.

Changes in the Purposes and Frequency of Authorizations of Appropriations, January 16, 2015

Qualifications of Members of Congress, January 15, 2015

The Federal Minimum Wage: In Brief, January 13, 2015

Iraqi and Afghan Special Immigrant Visa Programs, January 20, 2015

Abortion: Judicial History and Legislative Response, January 15, 2015

Military Pay: Key Questions and Answers, January 20, 2015

The Federal Communications Commission: Current Structure and Its Role in the Changing Telecommunications Landscape, January 9, 2015

Japan-U.S. Relations: Issues for Congress, January 13, 2015

North Korea: Back on the State Sponsors of Terrorism Lists?, January 21, 2015

China’s Mineral Industry and U.S. Access to Strategic and Critical Minerals: Issues for Congress, January 9, 2015

In an unusual gesture, the U.S. Government last week apologized to Abdullah al-Kidd, a U.S. citizen who was arrested in 2003 and detained as a material witness in connection with a terrorism-related case.

Mr. Al-Kidd, represented by American Civil Liberties Union attorney Lee Gelernt, challenged his detention as unconstitutional and inhumane. Now the case has been settled, with an official apology and a payment of $385,000.

“The government acknowledges that your arrest and detention as a witness was a difficult experience for you and regrets any hardship or disruption to your life that may have resulted from your arrest and detention,” wrote U.S. Attorney Wendy J. Olson in a January 15 letter.

This sort of admission of regret is rare. The government apologizes much less frequently than it perpetrates injuries that are inappropriate or unwarranted. So, for example, the recent Senate report on post-9/11 CIA interrogation practices noted that at least 26 individuals had been “wrongfully detained.” But legal attempts to recover damages are typically foreclosed by courts based on “separation of powers, national security, and the risk of interfering with military decisions.”

Why not apologize and compensate those who have been abused and mistreated, starting with those individuals who by all accounts are innocent of any wrongdoing? It would be the just and honorable thing to do, both for the intelligence community and for the country. And it would be most powerful (and most “therapeutic”) if the IC undertook this step at its own initiative, rather than waiting to be compelled by others.

“Personally I agree,” a senior U.S. intelligence community legal official said privately, “for the reasons you say and some others. [But] getting it done is a lot harder.”

And so it is. Even as it apologized to Abdullah al-Kidd, the U.S. Government insisted on a stipulation that the settlement of the case “is not, is in no way intended to be, and should not be construed as, an admission of liability or fault on the part of the United States.”

Updated below

There is a new sheriff in town. Is that the message that Senator Richard Burr, the new chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, is trying to send?

Senator Burr reportedly wrote to President Obama last week to ask that all copies of the classified 6,700 page Committee report on CIA interrogation practices be returned immediately to the Committee. While the redacted summary of the report has been publicly released and is even something of a bestseller for the Government Printing Office as well as a commercial publisher, the full report has not been made public. And Senator Burr seems determined to keep it that way.

Senator Burr’s letter was reported in C.I.A. Report Found Value of Brutal Interrogation Was Inflated by Mark Mazzetti, New York Times, January 20. (More: Washington Post, Huffington Post.)

Senator Dianne Feinstein, who chaired the Committee while the report was produced, scorned the request for its return.

“I strongly disagree that the administration should relinquish copies of the full committee study, which contains far more detailed records than the public executive summary. Doing so would limit the ability to learn lessons from this sad chapter in America’s history and omit from the record two years of work, including changes made to the committee’s 2012 report following extensive discussion with the CIA,” she said in a statement.

Among other things, the proposed return of the full report may be intended to prevent its potential future accessibility through the Freedom of Information Act, which does not apply to records in congressional custody.

But if so, this seems short-sighted and probably futile, given that all of the evidentiary material on which the report is based originated in the executive branch anyway. Moreover, the Committee report has spawned an entire literature of agency evaluations and responses (such as the so-called Panetta Review). That literature belongs to the agencies, and sooner or later it should be subject to public disclosure regardless of the fate of the SSCI report.

Update 1/22/15: Jason Leopold of VICE News has a thorough account of this episode to date here, including a copy of the letter from Senator Burr and a letter from Senator Feinstein in response.

National security secrecy, which remains a source of conflict and consternation, inspires a steady flow of books and journal articles. As in other policy-related fields, much of this literature is tendentious, derivative or dull. Some of it is insightful, original or usefully provocative.

Most works naturally occupy a middle ground including both virtues and defects. Two highly original works on secrecy in recent years — Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s Secrecy: The American Experience and Garry Wills’ Bomb Power — also have significant conceptual flaws and factual errors. That is to say, it is hard to write a good book about secrecy.

With that in mind, here are some notable recent additions to the literature.

**     Secrecy in the Sunshine Era: The Promise and Failure of U.S. Open Government Laws by Jason Ross Arnold (University Press of Kansas, 542 pages, 2014).

This is a study of the impact of laws such as the Freedom of Information Act and the Federal Advisory Committee Act. It presents a survey of how these open government laws were implemented through successive administrations and how they were sometimes circumvented.

“The sunshine laws of the 1970s substantially revised the way information flowed through the American political system,” writes Arnold. “It is hard to deny that the new legal framework placed serious constraints on executive branch officials.”

Nevertheless, “excessive secrecy still reigned in the sunshine era,” he concludes. “All administrations did what they could… to twist around the statutes when they deemed it necessary. All diverged from their own pro-transparency rhetoric and rules.”

**     A Proposal to Reduce Government Overclassification of Information Related to National Security by Herbert Lin, Journal of National Security Law & Policy, Vol. 7, No. 3, 2014.

This article focuses on the perennial problem of overclassification and proposes a solution. It would seek to alter the incentives that currently favor (over)classification by establishing new incentives to reduce classification.

“Classification should not be a free good,” Lin writes. He defines a classification cost metric that would reflect the relative importance of different classified documents, and that would make it possible to “budget” for classification.

Through the application of appropriate incentives, “Those who actually make decisions about classification should benefit from reductions in the amount of classified information produced.”

The author anticipates several objections to his idea, and offers responses to them.

**     Lords of Secrecy: The National Security Elite and America’s Stealth Warfare by Scott Horton (Nation Books, 272 pages, 2015).

Sometimes secrecy is not simply an annoying artifact of national security bureaucracy, but is itself a weapon in the struggle for power. The use of secrecy in this way is corrosive and has now become disabling to American democracy, according to author Scott Horton.

While most national security attention is focused on threats from abroad, Horton says “the more serious threats to American democracy are internal. They stem from a steady transfer of democratic decision making and authority away from the people and to unelected elites. This has occurred both with respect to the disproportionate grasp of power by wealthy super elites, and by the rise of national security elites who increasingly take the key decisions about national security matters without involving the people in any meaningfully democratic process.”

“More effectively than before, they use secrecy not only to cover up their past mistakes but also to wrest from the public decisions about the future that properly belong to the people.”

The Federation of American Scientists this week petitioned the Department of Energy to declassify the annual rate at which the United States built new nuclear weapons throughout the cold war.

“The proposed declassification would enrich public understanding of the historical development of the U.S. stockpile. Disclosure of the actual build rate per year would add a dimension to the cold war historical narrative and bolster transparency in nuclear policy,” the FAS request said.

Total annual build rates have previously been declassified for the years 1945 through 1961.

The last completely new nuclear weapon in the U.S. arsenal was assembled on July 31, 1990, according to Stephen I. Schwartz of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.

New or newly updated reports from the Congressional Research Service include the following.

China and Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction and Missiles: Policy Issues, January 5, 2015

China Naval Modernization: Implications for U.S. Navy Capabilities — Background and Issues for Congress, December 23, 2014

Marine Corps Amphibious Combat Vehicle (ACV) and Marine Personnel Carrier (MPC): Background and Issues for Congress, January 6, 2015

Coast Guard Cutter Procurement: Background and Issues for Congress, January 5, 2015

Terrorism Risk Insurance Legislation in the 114th Congress: Issue Summary and Side-by-Side Analysis, January 7, 2015

Keystone XL Pipeline: Overview and Recent Developments, January 5, 2015

U.S. Crude Oil Export Policy: Background and Considerations, December 31, 2014

The government-wide effort to contain the threat to classified information and sensitive facilities from trusted insiders is falling behind schedule.

Currently, the anticipated achievement of an Initial Operating Capability for insider threat detection by January 2017 is “at risk,” according to a new quarterly progress report. Meanwhile, the date for achieving a Full Operating Capability cannot even be projected. See “Insider Threat and Security Clearance Reform, FY2014, Quarter 4.”

One aspect of the insider threat program is “continuous evaluation” (CE), which refers to the ongoing review of background information concerning cleared persons in order to ensure that they remain eligible for access to classified information and to provide prompt notice of any anomalous behavior.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence was supposed to achieve “an initial CE capability for the most sensitive TS [Top Secret] and TS/SCI population” by December 2014.  The latest quarterly report on the Insider Threat program noted that this milestone is “at risk.” In fact, it was missed.

“We did not meet” the December 2014 milestone for an initial CE capability, confirmed ODNI spokesman Eugene Barlow, though he said that “we’ve made considerable progress” in the Insider Threat program overall.

Nor has a revised milestone date for the initial CE capability been set, he added. But “we continue to aggressively push forward” and the desired function will be rolled out over the next few years, he said.

The Department of Defense is “on track” to provide continuous evaluation of 225,000 agency personnel by the end of 2015, and to expand that number to 1 million employees by 2017, according to the quarterly report. Actual achievements in individual agencies are classified.

As a general matter, the Insider Threat program faces both technological and “cultural” obstacles.

The information technology structures that are in place at most executive branch agencies are not optimized to support continuous evaluation or related security policies. Adapting them to address the insider threat issue is challenging and resource-intensive. Nor are agency policies and practices consistent across the government or equally hospitable to security concerns.

But it’s worth noting that the uneven performance described in the quarterly report reflects a degree of public candor that is unusual in security policy.  Instead of presenting assurances that everything is fine in the Insider Threat program, the report acknowledges that some things are not fine and will not be fine for an unspecified time. That is refreshing and even, in its straightforward approach to the issue, somewhat encouraging.

“We do overclassify,” Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper, admitted at his 2010 confirmation hearing. It’s a theme he has reiterated on a number of occasions on which he has spoken of the need for increased transparency in intelligence.

So it comes as a surprise and a disappointment that a new study of the subject from the Intelligence Community Inspector General failed to identify a single case of unnecessary or inappropriate classification.

“IC IG found no instances where classification was used to conceal violation of law, inefficiency, or administrative error; prevent embarrassment to a person, organization, or agency; restrain competition; or prevent or delay the release of information not requiring protection in the interest of national security,” the December 2014 report said.

When it comes to overclassification, ODNI is far from the worst offender. But the IC IG report purports to address classification trends across the intelligence community. And its conclusions are hard to reconcile with the public record, to say the least.

Thus, at the same time that the Inspector General was finding no use of classification to prevent or delay the release of information not requiring protection, the release of the Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA interrogation practices was being hamstrung and delayed for months or years by dubious, inconsistent classification claims.

“Members of the Committee have found the declassification process to be slow and disjointed, even for information that Congress has identified as being of high public interest,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein wrote to the President last month.

Today the New York Times reported on a 2012 report on intelligence surveillance practices that had been withheld in its entirety until it was partially released in response to a lawsuit brought by the Times. Numerous other examples of the misapplication of classification authority could be cited. Yet all of them were somehow missed or ignored by the IC Inspector General.

Meanwhile, some senior officials in the intelligence community are rethinking current classification practices and policies because they have concluded, contrary to the thrust of the new IG report, that the status quo is unsatisfactory.

“Going forward, I believe that the Intelligence Community is going to need to be much more forward-leaning in what we tell the American people about what we do,” said ODNI General Counsel Robert S. Litt in a public speech last year. “We need to scrutinize more closely what truly needs to be classified in order to protect what needs to be protected.”

A new report from the Congressional Research Service presents an introduction to U.S. military operations in cyberspace and the thorny policy issues that arise from them.

“This report presents an overview of the threat landscape in cyberspace, including the types of offensive weapons available, the targets they are designed to attack, and the types of actors carrying out the attacks. It presents a picture of what kinds of offensive and defensive tools exist and a brief overview of recent attacks. The report then describes the current status of U.S. capabilities, and the national and international authorities under which the U.S. Department of Defense carries out cyber operations.”

The Department of Defense requested $5.1 billion for “cybersecurity” in 2015, the CRS report noted. Cybersecurity here includes funding for cyberspace operations, information assurance, U.S. Cyber Command, the National Cybersecurity Initiative, and related functions. See Cyber Operations in DoD Policy and Plans: Issues for Congress, January 5, 2015.

(The CRS report includes only a capsule summary description of the Stuxnet episode.  A fuller account is presented in Kim Zetter’s gripping book Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World’s First Digital Weapon.)

Other noteworthy new and updated CRS reports that Congress has withheld from online public distribution include the following.

State Sponsors of Acts of International Terrorism–Legislative Parameters: In Brief, December 24, 2014

The President’s Immigration Accountability Executive Action of November 20, 2014: Overview and Issues, January 8, 2015

Proposed Retirement of A-10 Aircraft: Background in Brief, January 5, 2015

American War and Military Operations Casualties: Lists and Statistics, January 2, 2015

A Shift in the International Security Environment: Potential Implications for Defense–Issues for Congress, December 31, 2014

Secret Sessions of the House and Senate: Authority, Confidentiality, and Frequency, December 30, 2014

Navy Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) Program: Background and Issues for Congress, December 24, 2014

Navy Shipboard Lasers for Surface, Air and Missile Defense: Background and Issues for Congress, December 23, 2014

Definitions of “Inherently Governmental Function” in Federal Procurement Law and Guidance, December 23, 2014

Congressional Careers: Service Tenure and Patterns of Member Service, 1789-2015, January 3, 2015

The Congressional Research Service has never been more frequently cited or more influential in informing public discourse than it is today, as its publications are increasingly shared with the public in violation of official policy.

But budget cuts and congressional dysfunction seem to have bred discontent among some staff members, judging from an article by former CRS analyst Kevin R. Kosar.

“Thanks to growing pressure from a hyper-partisan Congress, my ability to write clearly and forthrightly about the problems of government–and possible solutions–was limited. And even when we did find time and space to do serious research, lawmakers ignored our work or trashed us if our findings ran contrary to their beliefs. When no legislation is likely to move through the system, there’s simply not much market for the work the CRS, at its best, can do,” he wrote. See “Why I Quit the Congressional Research Service,” Washington Monthly, January/February 2015.

The Congressional Research Service has updated its Congressional Oversight Manual. The 150-page document describes the tools and procedures that Congress has at its disposal to perform the oversight function.

Other noteworthy new CRS reports that Congress has withheld from online public distribution include the following:

The Political Question Doctrine: Justiciability and the Separation of Powers, December 23, 2014

Human-Induced Earthquakes from Deep-Well Injection: A Brief Overview, December 22, 2014

What can anyone do in response to the horrific murders of twelve persons associated with the French weekly Charlie Hebdo?

One way of expressing solidarity with the victims, and opposition to the killers, would be to purchase a subscription to the satirical (often deliberately offensive) publication, whether for yourself or for a local library.

In the U.S., subscriptions to Charlie Hebdo are conveniently available through Amazon.com (h/t Jack Shafer).

The surviving staff said that next week’s issue will be published on schedule.

The U.S. has spent $1.6 trillion on post-9/11 military operations, including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and other counterterrorism activities, according to a new report from the Congressional Research Service.

“Based on funding enacted from the 9/11 attacks through FY2014, CRS estimates a total of $1.6 trillion has been provided to the Department of Defense, the State Department and the Department of Veterans Administration for war operations, diplomatic operations and foreign aid, and medical care for Iraq and Afghan war veterans over the past 13 years of war,” the report said. See “The Cost of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Other Global War on Terror Operations Since 9/11,” December 8, 2014.

The CRS report provides detailed tabulations of funding by agency, operation and fiscal year, along with appropriation source and functional breakdown. An appendix provides a monthly listing of U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan and Iraq, among other hard-to-find data assembled by CRS.

Ideally, the record compiled in the 100-page CRS report would serve as the basis for a comprehensive assessment of U.S. military spending since 9/11: To what extent was the expenditure of $1.6 trillion in this way justified? How much of it actually achieved its intended purpose? How much could have been better spent in other ways?

There is little sign of a systematic inquiry along these lines, but the CRS report identifies various “questions that Congress may wish to raise about future war costs,” as well as legislative options that could be considered.

The findings of the CRS report were reported on December 19 by Bloomberg News.

*    *    *

Other noteworthy new reports from the Congressional Research Service that Congress has withheld from online public distribution include the following.

Russian Compliance with the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty: Background and Issues for Congress, December 16, 2014

Economic Crisis in Russia, CRS Insights, December 17, 2014

Overview of Selected Federal Criminal Civil Rights Statutes, December 16, 2014

Ebola: Selected Legal Issues, December 16, 2014

Cybersecurity Issues and Challenges: In Brief, December 16, 2014

The 2013 Cybersecurity Executive Order: Overview and Considerations for Congress, December 15, 2014

Federal Research and Development Funding: FY2015, December 17, 2014

Border Security: Immigration Enforcement Between Ports of Entry, December 18, 2014

Radio Broadcasting Chips for Smartphones: A Status Report, December 15, 2014

Mexico: Background and U.S. Relations, December 16, 2014

The Islamic State in Egypt: Implications for U.S.-Egyptian Relations, CRS Insights, December 18, 2014