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

Shadow Banking: Background and Policy Issues, December 31, 2013

Energy-Water Nexus: The Water Sector’s Energy Use, January 3, 2014

Energy-Water Nexus: The Energy Sector’s Water Use, August 30, 2013

While others speak of curbing intelligence surveillance activities, the Defense Science Board argues in a new report that the U.S. government should expand and accelerate global monitoring for purposes of detecting nuclear proliferation as “a top national security objective.”

Intelligence techniques and technologies that are used to combat terrorism should also be harnessed to address the threat of proliferation, said the new DSB report, entitled “Assessment of Nuclear Monitoring and Verification Technologies,” January 2014.

“The advances in persistent surveillance, automated tracking, rapid analyses of large and multi-source data sets, and open source analyses to support conventional warfighting and counterterrorism have not yet been exploited by the nuclear monitoring community…. New intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) technologies, demonstrated in recent conflicts, offer significant promise for monitoring undesirable nuclear activity throughout the free world.”

The National Security Agency, among others, has pointed the way, the report suggested. A newly integrated global awareness system for counterproliferation should “build on lessons and experiences of successful national security capabilities, such as… NSA’s counterterrorism capabilities….”

“The ‘big data’ technologies for extracting meaning from vast quantities of data that are being developed commercially in the information technology (IT) industry, and for other purposes in DoD and the IC, need to be extended and applied to nuclear monitoring.”

In particular, “Exploiting the cyber domain should certainly be a big part of any nuclear monitoring effort. Both passive, depending on what is sent voluntarily, and active sources should be considered. Data gathered from the cyber domain establishes a rich and exploitable source for determining activities of individuals, groups and organizations needed to participate in either the procurement or development of a nuclear device…. Many of the new technology advances in data exfiltration, covert implantation, etc., hold promise for successful multi-INT collection and exploitation in non-permissive environments.”

“Monitoring for proliferation should be a top national security objective — and one that the nation is not yet organized or fully equipped to address.”

At the same time, the DSB report emphasized the need for increased openness and transparency, both to strengthen international confidence and stability and to simplify the challenge of global monitoring of proliferation. (As used by the DSB — and the USG — the term transparency in this context seems to mean the exchange of data among interested governments, and does not necessarily imply release of information to the public.)

The DSB authors recommend “a comprehensive, sustained, policy-based diplomatic approach coordinated across the U.S. Government and with other nations devoted expressly to advance the cause of openness and transparency writ large…. This situation should be addressed with the highest priority.”

“The Task Force envisions a multi-year effort, which can pay large dividends in terms of a universal transparency that would improve strategic and tactical stability against nuclear war among all nuclear weapons states, as well as achieve enhanced confidence building for nonproliferation efforts.”

“All parties would benefit from the national security stability that would ensue from having transparent knowledge of the numbers/types of other nations’ nuclear arsenals, while each nation in turn makes the knowledge of their own SNM [special nuclear material] and/or nuclear weapons inventories available to the others.”

(The report does not mention the case of Israel, whose policy of nuclear opacity — not transparency — is supported at least tacitly by the U.S. government.)

“The Task Force does believe that the times are now propitious to move forward on a path to develop universal transparency regimes that can simultaneously fulfill these goals and requirements through an international process for achieving universal knowledge of nuclear weapon inventories and SNM inventories, and that the U.S. should lead in such an effort.”

“Indeed, the U.S. has already declassified the size of its current nuclear arsenal.”

Unfortunately, that last assertion is not correct.  In May 2010, the U.S. government did declassify the size of the U.S. nuclear arsenal as of September 2009.  (At that time, there were 5,113 warheads.) But if you ask how big the arsenal is today, it turns out that the answer is once again classified. The Federation of American Scientists has petitioned the Department of Energy to revise that judgment in favor of public disclosure.

The new DSB report contains several other incidental observations of interest.

*    To date, the U.S. has entered into roughly 25 agreements on nuclear cooperation with other countries (known as 123 Agreements).

*    Of the nearly 1,000 active satellites in earth orbit, there are 200 engaged in earth observation.

*    Some non-governmental analysis of commercial satellite imagery is of poor quality and “may introduce additional noise into U.S. and international monitoring systems. Some experts are concerned that bad data and bad analysis could increasingly tarnish or mask more reliable data…. There have already been major analytical errors made by untrained imagery analysts who have published openly.”

*    The efficient analysis of big data can be undermined by the “transmission latency” (or delayed transfer) of data stored in a cloud-based architecture. Therefore, the DSB says that when it comes to nuclear monitoring, “the analytics need to stay near the data.” Similar concerns concerning prompt access are said to arise in the context of NSA analysis of telephony metadata.

The Government Accountability Office will issue a long-awaited report on intelligence community contractors in the next few weeks, a congressional official said.

The GAO report is an unclassified version of a classified assessment that was completed last year.  According to a statement of work obtained by Secrecy News in 2012, the GAO project was to address the following issues:

“(1) To what extent do civilian intelligence agencies rely on and strategically review their reliance on contractors to perform critical professional and management support services? (2) To what extent do these agencies have policies and guidance that address the use of contractors for these services? (3) What steps have these agencies taken to manage the risks associated with using contractors for these services? (4) To what extent have these agencies addressed challenges with retaining federal personnel?”

The new contractor study is not the only GAO activity related to intelligence; it is one of “several, maybe half a dozen” GAO projects that are underway. By its nature, GAO tends not to deal with intelligence operations, or with sources and methods, the congressional official said. Rather, it is mainly concerned with workforce management, human capital, and similar issues in which it has particular expertise.

The official said that GAO now has a “constructive” relationship with intelligence agencies, particularly after the adoption in 2011 of Intelligence Community Directive 114, which established a common understanding of GAO’s role and authorities.

“We’re on the right path,” the official said. “There are occasional bumps in the road, but you deal with the bumps.”

A new appreciation for the potential utility of GAO audits and investigations of intelligence agency performance seems to be developing.

Multiple bills have been introduced in the current Congress that would employ GAO in congressional oversight of intelligence.

Rep. Rush Holt’s “Surveillance State Repeal Act” (HR 2818) would require the GAO to evaluate government compliance with foreign intelligence law.

The “NSA Accountability Act” (HR 3882) introduced by Rep. John Carney would require GAO to analyze the effectiveness of NSA programs, to report on the conduct of surveillance programs, and to describe any violations of law.

Another bill (HR 3900) introduced just last week by Rep. Michael McCaul is intended to facilitate GAO access to information in the intelligence community.

In a striking new example of secret lawmaking, a classified provision in the consolidated appropriations bill passed by Congress last week prohibited the transfer of CIA drone operations to the Department of Defense.

“This is outrageous,” said Sen. John McCain of the secret legislative move, “and it should not have happened.”

The secret provision was first reported in the Washington Post. “The provision represents an unusually direct intervention by lawmakers into the way covert operations are run, impeding an administration plan aimed at returning the CIA’s focus to traditional intelligence gathering and possibly bringing more transparency to drone strikes,” wrote Greg Miller in the Post. (“Lawmakers seek to stymie plan to shift control of drone campaign from CIA to Pentagon,” January 15.)

The term “secret law” is most often used to refer to executive branch actions that mandate national policy without public notice, or that reinterpret existing statutes in dubious or counterintuitive ways that are not disclosed to the public.  But in this case, an important national policy measure was literally written into law by Congress in secret.

In his January 16 floor statement, Sen. McCain had this to say:

“…Tucked away in the classified portion of this bill is a policy rider that has serious national security implications and is a prime example of the appropriators overstepping their bounds. This provision will halt the transfer of the U.S. drone counterterrorism operations from the CIA to the Department of Defense. In doing so, it summarily changes a very important policy that guides how we do certain counterterrorism operations abroad from a direction that the President has specifically prescribed. And how did most of us become aware of this major policy change? By reading this morning’s Washington Post; that is how.”

“This is outrageous, and it should not have happened. While there may be differing opinions on who should control drone counterterrorism operations, we should be able to debate these differences in the committees of jurisdiction and eventually on the Senate floor. The fact that a major national security policy decision is going to be authorized in this bill without debate or authorization is unacceptable and should not be the way we legislate on such important national security issues.”

But it is the way that this Congress legislates. And though Senator McCain voted against the measure, the full Senate approved it, 72-26, and the President signed it into law on January 17.

For more than three years, author Anthony Shaffer has been challenging the government’s contention that hundreds of passages in his Afghanistan memoir “Operation Dark Heart” are classified and should not be publicly disclosed. Now a judge has ordered the full text of the book to be delivered to her in “complete and unredacted” form.

DC District Judge Rosemary M. Collyer told the Defense Intelligence Agency and its co-defendants DOD and CIA to file under seal “a complete and unredacted copy of the published book, Operation Dark Heart: Spycraft and Special Ops on the Frontline of Afghanistan and the Path to Victory” no later than January 24.

“The 233 passages that remain classified should be unredacted and highlighted in yellow,” she wrote in a January 17 order. “The passages that were initially redacted but subsequently declassified should be highlighted in blue. If the unredacted copy of the book contains both secret and top secret information, Defendant must file a secret and top secret version of the book. That is, one copy should contain all classified information unredacted and highlighted in yellow. The other copy should contain only the secret information unredacted and highlighted and the top secret information redacted.”

The clear implication is that Judge Collyer intends to perform her own assessment of the validity of the government’s classification claims rather than simply rely on the affidavits of government officials attesting to their validity.

Though sensible and straightforward, this is also an unusual step. Most often, courts defer to the presumed expertise of executive branch classification officials, and decline to “second guess” them. This case is now shaping up to be an exception to that rule.

The dispute over “Operation Dark Heart” is complicated by the fact that review copies of the original, uncensored text have circulated in the public domain and portions of the text have been posted online.

Updated below

The White House yesterday issued Presidential Policy Directive 27 on United States Conventional Arms Transfer Policy. The text of the directive was posted on the White House web site.

“The new policy provides greater clarity and transparency with respect to U.S. goals for arms transfers and on the criteria used to make arms transfer decisions,” according to a White House statement.

This is not the first time that the Obama White House has published one of its Presidential Policy Directives, but it has not done so consistently, even when the directives are unclassified.

Last month, DC District Judge Ellen Huvelle scolded the White House for withholding an unclassified directive (PPD-6) and for what she termed its “cavalier attitude” towards public disclosure.  She ordered the document released.  (“Court Rebukes White House Over ‘Secret Law’,” Secrecy News, December 18, 2013.)

President Obama has been issuing presidential directives at a discernibly slower pace than did other recent presidents, for reasons that are unclear.

Compared to President Obama’s 27 directives, President George W. Bush had issued some 44 directives at this point in his second term, while President Clinton had issued 60, and President Reagan had produced over 200.

“We’ve talked about that,” a National Security Staff official said.  But an explanation for the differences was hard to pin down, the official said, except that it evidently reflects a difference in governing style and in the choice of directives as a policy instrument.

Update: On January 17, the White House issued Presidential Policy Directive 28 on Signals Intelligence Activities.

The U.S. intelligence community needs to expand the collection and analysis of open source information, according to a Senate Intelligence Committee report on the 2012 attack on U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Libya.

But that recommendation ironically comes just as the CIA has terminated public and scholarly access to its open source collection of foreign news reports.

“The IC must place a greater emphasis on collecting intelligence and open-source information, including extremist-affiliated social media, to improve its ability to provide tactical warnings, especially in North Africa, the Middle East, and other areas where the U.S. has facilities under high threat,” the new report said (p. 25).

“The IC should expand its capabilities to conduct analysis of open source information including extremist-affiliated social media particularly in areas where it is hard to develop human intelligence or there has been recent political upheaval,” the report said.

In the past, public consumers of CIA open source reporting were able to provide a measure of analytic support as well as area expertise to policy makers.

Such public consumers contributed to “expanded participation in informed analysis of issues significant to U.S. policy interests,” said the CIA’s J. Niles Riddel in 1992.  Back then, intelligence agencies “value[d] the work of private sector scholars and analysts who avail themselves of our material and contribute significantly to the national debate on contemporary issues such as economic competitiveness.”

But today’s CIA decided to cut off public and scholarly access to such material through the World News Connection, to the detriment of the “informed analysis” that public consumers might have contributed to the national debate.

The entire archive of the former World News Connection from 1995-2013 has been acquired by East View Information Services. For a subscription fee, “Researchers will still have access to over 1 million foreign newspaper articles, broadcast transcripts and datelines from Beijing, Beirut, Bogota, Cairo, Jakarta, Iraq, Mogadishu, Qatar, Ramallah, Sarajevo, Vienna, and hundreds of other spots around the world.”

New and updated reports from the Congressional Research Service that Congress has withheld from online public distribution include the following.

Marine Corps Drawdown, Force Structure Initiatives, and Roles and Missions: Background and Issues for Congress, January 9, 2014

Border Security: Immigration Inspections at Port of Entry, January 9, 2014

Oil and Chemical Spills: Federal Emergency Response Framework, January 13, 2014

Aereo and FilmOn X: Internet Television Streaming and Copyright Law, January 13, 2014

Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) and the Role of Congress in Trade Policy, January 13, 2014

Privacy Protection for Customer Financial Information, January 9, 2014

Russian Political, Economic, and Security Issues and U.S. Interests, January 9, 2014

Egypt: Background and U.S. Relations, January 10, 2014

Armed Conflict in Syria: Overview and U.S. Response, January 14, 2014

In a December 2009 memorandum, President Obama directed the newly established National Declassification Center (NDC) to process an estimated 400 million page backlog of historical records at the National Archives “in a manner that will permit public access to all declassified records from this backlog no later than December 31, 2013.”

That December 31 deadline has now come and gone. So what happened? There are conflicting views about that.

The task was successfully completed, NDC Director Sheryl J. Shenberger told her staff in a December 31 email message. “I am delighted to announce your successful retirement of the 352M page backlog [according to the final page count, down from 400 million]…. Your work will be directly responsible for providing access to historical records of all types and topics to the American people,” she wrote.

But one dissenting observer said that any assertion that the backlog has now been declassified is “an elaborate subterfuge to re-brand failure as success. It is a study in mendacity.” The observer noted that a huge chunk of the backlog has not been declassified, and that the majority of it is not accessible to the public in any case.

Beneath these contrasting assessments are disagreements about what the President actually ordered in 2009, what was supposed to be accomplished by the end of 2013, what was accomplished in fact, and what it all means.

The confusion probably stems in part from the wording of the 2009 Presidential memorandum, the relevant section of which was captioned “Declassification of Records of Permanent Historical Value.”

Despite that promising title, the memo did not order declassification of any records at all.

Rather, NARA officials said, the presidential memorandum was intended to respond to a very specific problem, which hardly anyone outside of government recognized or was aware of. The problem was that hundreds of millions of pages of records that had already gone through declassification review were not reaching the public shelves, because agencies kept insisting on additional referrals and re-reviews to search for information that may have been missed on previous occasions.

The purpose of the Obama memo, they said, was to stop this endless merry-go-round of declassification review. The memo specified that any further referrals of records for agency review would be justified only in the case of records that could reveal a confidential human source or key design concepts for weapons of mass destruction. And even in those two cases, the follow-on reviews were to be completed by a date certain– December 31, 2013.

This task appears to have been accomplished by the deadline.

But other things were not done:

Not all of the historical backlog was declassified as a result of the four-year process (especially since no new declassification reviews were performed). As of last June, the NDC was reporting a public release rate of 61% of documents that had completed all processing.

Moreover, not all of the documents in the backlog that were declassified were made accessible to the public. An estimated 128 million pages of records reached the public shelves at the National Archives, though with abbreviated indexing of documents compared to past practice. This was done to expedite the reduction of the backlog, but at a cost to the clarity, coherence and utility of the collections. More than 100 million other pages still require indexing and other archival processing.

This may be disappointing, but it should not be surprising. The notion that all or most of the backlog would be declassified and made available to the public was never a realistic possibility, said William J. Bosanko, Chief Operating Officer at the National Archives.

“That expectation was not aligned with the resources that were brought to bear,” he said.  Declassification does not equate to public release, he noted, and it could take years just to screen the declassified records for personal privacy information and other data that might be exempt from public release. “If someone doesn’t want to see this as a victory, they can find lots of reasons to criticize it.”

But he said that the implementation of the President’s memo was in fact a remarkable achievement. It constituted a breakthrough in declassification policy because it required agencies to adopt an increased tolerance for risk of inadvertent disclosure of classified information.

Since repeated referrals of records for additional review were now blocked by the Obama policy (except in the two permitted cases), “agencies had no choice but to accept some risk” that information they preferred to withhold would be released, he said.

Even in those cases of backlog records suspected of containing WMD or human source information, reviewers only examined a tiny percentage of the relevant collections, not the entire set, and in all likelihood they missed some records that would have been exempt from disclosure.

“This is the first time that the Administration has accepted some finite risk” of inadvertent disclosure, Mr. Bosanko said. It could therefore represent a long-deferred turning point in declassification policy.

To the extent that agencies are willing (or are compelled) to renounce their claims to review records in which they have an interest (or an “equity”), the declassification process can be streamlined and made somewhat more rational.

Last year, the National Security Staff formally waived its equity in various National Security Council and White House records through the first Clinton Administration, according to a June 2013 notice from the Information Security Oversight Office. Refreshingly, the NSC instructed executive branch declassification reviewers not to refer most such records (with some exceptions) back to the White House for additional review.

The National Declassification Center and the CIA hosted a symposium today on Berlin in the Cold War, accompanied by the release of 11,000 pages of newly declassified records many of which are available online.

New and newly updated reports from the Congressional Research Service that Congress has withheld from online public distribution include the following.

National Security Letters in Foreign Intelligence Investigations: Legal Background, January 3, 2014

National Security Letters in Foreign Intelligence Investigations: A Glimpse at the Legal Background, January 3, 2014

Nuclear Power Plant Security and Vulnerabilities, January 3, 2014

Implementation of Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards (CFATS): Issues for Congress, January 6, 2014 (new)

Free Exercise of Religion by Secular Organizations and Their Owners: Implications for the Affordable Care Act (ACA), January 3, 2014 (new)

Monetary Policy and the Federal Reserve: Current Policy and Conditions, January 7, 2014

Tax Rates and Economic Growth, January 2, 2014

International Corporate Tax Rate Comparisons and Policy Implications, January 6, 2014

State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs: FY2014 Budget and Appropriations, January 3, 2014

China and Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction and Missiles: Policy Issues, January 3, 2014

Nonstrategic Nuclear Weapons, January 3, 2014

Next Steps in Nuclear Arms Control with Russia: Issues for Congress, January 6, 2014

The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), January 2, 2014

Threats to U.S. National Security Interests in Space: Orbital Debris Mitigation and Removal, January 8, 2014 (new)

Beginning in 1974, the U.S. intelligence community provided the public with a broad selection of foreign news reports, updated daily.  These were collected and translated by the Central Intelligence Agency’s Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS), which was reconstituted in 2004 as the Open Source Center (OSC).

But the CIA has now terminated public access to those news reports, as of December 31.  The Open Source Center cut off its feed to the National Technical Information Service’s World News Connection, which was the conduit for public access to these materials (through paid subscriptions).

Translation of foreign news reports had been one of the few direct services that U.S. intelligence agencies offered to the American public.  Many journalists, scholars and researchers benefited from it, and citations to old FBIS translations can be found in innumerable journal articles and dissertations.  The utility of this public service was diminished somewhat in recent years by copyright constraints on publication. But it remained a valuable if eclectic source of alternative perspectives on regional and international affairs in a searchable global database that extended across decades.

Now it’s over.

Of course, the CIA will continue to collect and to translate foreign news reports at its Open Source Center. It just won’t permit the public to access them.

CIA spokesman Christopher White explained: “The Open Source Center (OSC) remains committed to its mission of acquiring, analyzing, and disseminating open source information within the U.S. government. As technology evolves rapidly, the open source feed of information to the National Technical Information Service, Department of Commerce, has become outdated and it would be cost prohibitive to update this feed. In addition, publicly available open source information and machine translation capabilities are now readily available to individuals on the Internet.”

The original 1974 decision to allow public access to FBIS products was “a particularly significant event,” said FBIS deputy director J. Niles Riddel, speaking at a 1992 conference organized by Robert Steele’s Open Source Solutions. Public access enabled “expanded participation in informed analysis of issues significant to U.S. policy interests,” he said.

In fact, in the climate that prevailed in the early 1990s, public access to FBIS products was actually promoted by intelligence community officials. Mr. Riddel said then that it was “strongly supported by our customers in both the Intelligence and Policy Communities who value the work of private sector scholars and analysts who avail themselves of our material and contribute significantly to the national debate on contemporary issues such as economic competitiveness.”

But that’s all finished.  Instead of adapting and expanding its open source product line in response to the needs and wants of the interested public, this four-decade CIA experiment in public engagement is concluded. Americans are invited to look elsewhere.

“We are sad to be losing this popular file,” said Sherry Grant of ProQuest, which managed public subscriptions to the NTIS World News Connection. “However, as you can see, it’s beyond our control.”

There are some alternatives. “You can access a similar service from BBC Monitoring,” suggested Rosy Wolfe, head of business development at BBC Monitoring. “I’d be happy to provide you with more information.”  At least someone is happy.

*    *    *

A comparative assessment of foreign news coverage by FBIS and the BBC was presented in “The Scope of FBIS and BBC Open-Source Media Coverage, 1979-2008” by Kalev Leetaru, Studies in Intelligence, vol. 54, no. 1, March 2010.

“Unfortunately, many misconceptions about the application of OSINT [open source intelligence] continue to endure throughout the [intelligence] community,” wrote Lieutenant Colonel Craig D. Morrow in “OSINT: Truths and Misconceptions,” Military Intelligence Professional Bulletin, April-June 2013, pp. 31-34.

“Though the future of FMM [foreign media monitoring] is unclear at this time, current users agree that it fills a capability gap to automatically collect, organize, and translate open source content near real time, making sense of the overwhelming amount of foreign language data available to intelligence analysts today.” See “Foreign Media Monitoring: The Intelligence Analyst Tool for Exploiting Open Source Intelligence,” by Tracy Blocker and Patrick O’Malley, Military Intelligence Professional Bulletin, July-September 2013, pp. 36-38.

Digitally-based virtual worlds and online games such as Second Life and World of Warcraft represent a qualitatively new phenomenon that could have profound impacts on culture, politics and national security, according to a newly disclosed report  (large pdf) prepared in 2008 for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

“This technology has the potential to be an agent for transformational change in our society, our economy, and our efforts to safeguard the homeland,” the report stated. “If virtual world technology enters the mainstream, criminals and US adversaries will find a way to exploit this technology for illegal and errant behavior.”

The study was conducted as part of the 2008 ODNI SHARP (Summer Hard Problem) program and was just released under the Freedom of Information Act in redacted (and partially illegible) form. Though sponsored by ODNI, it was prepared by a mix of governmental and non-governmental authors and does not necessarily represent the views of the U.S. intelligence community. See “3D Cyberspace Spillover: Where Virtual Worlds Get Real,” July 2008.

Around the same time (2007-2009), U.S. intelligence personnel were actually exploring online games and gathering information on their users, according to classified documents released by Edward Snowden and reported in the New York Times last month.  See “Spies Infiltrate a Fantasy Realm of Online Games” by Mark Mazzetti and Justin Elliott, New York Times, December 9, 2013.

The authors of the ODNI-sponsored report acknowledged that the empirical basis for their inquiry was thin.

“Much of the information in the public domain about the alleged terrorist exploitation of virtual worlds has been speculative rather than based upon substantive evidence. Although there is reliable information available concerning extremist and terrorist exploitation of the internet, for example Web 1.0, the same cannot be said of virtual world or Web 2.0.”

“As of this report, there is little evidence that militant Islamist and jihadist groups have begun extensively exploiting the opportunities presented by virtual worlds.”

“However, given that the more sophisticated groups of this type, including al-Qa’ida, have exploited the internet in very refined ways, they will likely soon seek to exploit newer virtual world technologies for recruiting, raising and transferring funds, training new recruits, conducting reconnaissance and surveillance, and planning attacks by using virtual representations of prospective targets.”

Fancifully, the authors envision the creation of a virtual Usama bin Ladin carrying out his mission for centuries to come.

“Imagine that jihadist supporters create a detailed avatar of Usama bin Ladin and use his many voice recordings to animate the avatar for up-close virtual reality experiences that could be used to preach, convert, recruit, and propagate dogma to the media.”

“The Bin Ladin avatar could preach and issue new fatwas for hundreds of years to come, as the fidelity of his likeness would be entirely believable and animated in new ways to keep him current and fresh.” (p. 72)

The report includes various incidental observations of interest. It notes, for example, that “In many ways, South Korea is the world leader in adopting new technologies” including online games.

But it also reaches far afield, including references to Barbie Girls (“a quickly growing virtual world,” though now closed) and Club Penguin (“over 12 million active users,” now over 200 million, but most of whom are probably under ten years old) (p. 82).

“The growing number of global users, in conjunction with ongoing technological changes, will likely increase the difficulty that the Intelligence Community (IC) will encounter in its efforts to monitor the virtual realm,” said the study, which was classified at the Confidential level. “Accordingly, outreach programs that enlist users as educated observers and reporters will be required to survey current and emerging systems more effectively.”