The White House should undertake a focused effort to reduce national security secrecy, some 30 public interest organizations urged President Obama in a letter today.

The groups called upon the President to adopt a recommendation of the Public Interest Declassification Board to set up a White House-led Security Classification Reform Steering Committee.

“A presidentially appointed Steering Committee would provide a mechanism for identifying and coordinating needed changes and for overcoming internal agency obstacles to change,” the group letter said. “It would also reflect the urgency of reining in a classification system that is largely unchecked.”

To be effective, though, the proposed Steering Committee would need to be something more than just a deliberative, coordinating body, such as the ill-fated Security Policy Board of the 1990s.

Specifically, it would require “a clear mandate to reduce the size and scope of the national security classification system,” the group letter said, as well as active White House participation to ensure agency cooperation and compliance.

In principle, reductions in national security secrecy can actually benefit government agencies by diminishing the significant financial and operational costs they incur for classification. But in practice, such reductions have been hard to accomplish and agencies have resisted any externally imposed limits on their presumed autonomy to classify as they see fit.

Of all the potential ways to reduce secrecy that could be envisioned, the proposal for a White House-led Steering Committee is currently the most salient.  That’s because it was recommended by the Public Interest Declassification Board, who developed it in response to a request from President Obama himself.

“I also look forward to reviewing recommendations from the study that the National Security Advisor will undertake in cooperation with the Public Interest Declassification Board to design a more fundamental transformation of the security classification system,” the President wrote in a December 29, 2009 memorandum.

Now the recommendations that the President looked forward to are in hand, and it will be up to the White House to act.

An enormous volume of photographic imagery from the KH-9 HEXAGON intelligence satellites was quietly declassified in January and will be transferred to the National Archives later this year for subsequent public release.

The KH-9 satellites operated between 1971 and 1984. The imagery they generated should be of historical interest with respect to a wide range of late Cold War intelligence targets but is also expected to support current scientific research on climate change and related fields of inquiry.

The film-based KH-9 satellites were officially declared “obsolete” by the Director of National Intelligence in 2011.  The KH-9 imagery was nominally approved for declassification in February 2012, and then it was finally declassified in fact this year.

ODNI spokesman Michael Birmingham said that approximately 97 percent of the satellite imagery that was collected from the 19 successful KH-9 missions was formally declassified by DNI James R. Clapper on January 11, 2013.

“The small amount of imagery exempted from this declassification decision will be removed prior to its accession to the National Archives (NARA) and will remain classified pursuant to statute and national security interests, and reviewed periodically to determine if additional declassification is warranted,” Mr. Birmingham said last week.

The imagery is being transferred to NARA in stages, with final delivery scheduled for September 2013, he said.

The transfer is being implemented pursuant to a November 2012 Memorandum of Agreement between the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and the National Archives, under which the Archives is “responsible for providing public access to the declassified imagery.”

Reishia R. Kelsey of NGA public affairs confirmed that the imagery “will be made available to the public following its accession to NARA” later this year.

The National Archives was not prepared last week to set a precise date for public release.  But an Archives official said that “NARA intends to make these records available to the public at our research room in College Park, MD as soon as possible following transfer.”

If successfully executed, the release of the KH-9 imagery will constitute a breakthrough in the declassification and disclosure of national security information. It will be one of several discrete but momentous shifts in secrecy policy during the Obama Administration that have often gone unrecognized or unappreciated. Though these declassification actions took years or decades to accomplish, they have been downplayed by the White House itself, which has seemed curiously ambivalent about them.  They include the public disclosure of the size of the U.S. nuclear weapons arsenal, the routine publication of the annual intelligence budget request, the release of the Office of Legal Counsel “torture memos,” the declassification of the KH-9 satellite itself, and others.

The KH-9 imagery is being processed for public release pursuant to the 1995 Executive Order 12951 on “Release of Imagery Acquired by Space-based National Intelligence Reconnaissance Systems.”  That order had been effectively dormant since the Clinton Administration, when the last major release of intelligence satellite imagery (from the CORONA, ARGON and LANYARD missions) took place.

The declassification of the KH-9 imagery is a massive undertaking, Mr. Birmingham of ODNI said last year.

“For context, and to grasp the scope of the project, the KH-9/HEXAGON system provided coverage over hundreds of millions of square miles of territory during its 19 successful missions spanning 1971-1984,” he said.  “It is a daunting issue to address declassification of the program specifics associated with an obsolete system such as the KH-9, which involves the declassification of huge volumes of intelligence information gathered on thousands of targets worldwide during a 13 year time period.”

The Invention Secrecy Act of 1951 has been used for more than half a century to restrict disclosure of patent applications that could be “detrimental to national security.” At the end of the last fiscal year, no fewer than 5,321 secrecy orders were in effect.

These secrecy orders have been difficult to penetrate and the stories behind them have usually been left untold.  But several inventors whose work prompted imposition of a secrecy order were interviewed by G.W. Schulz of the Center for Investigative Reporting.  See his new account in Government secrecy orders on patents keep lid on inventions, April 16, 2013.

The number of people who are cleared for access to classified information continued to rise in 2012 to more than 4.9 million, according to a new annual report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.  This is only the third official tally of government-wide security clearance activity ever prepared, and it is the largest reported to date.

The total number of cleared personnel as of October 1, 2012 was 4,917,751.  Although the number of contractors who held a clearance declined in 2012, the number of eligible government employees grew at a faster rate, yielding a net increase of 54,199 clearances, or 1.1 percent, from the year before.

It is possible that there were more security-cleared Americans at some points during the Cold War, when there was a larger standing military with more cleared military personnel than there are today.  But until 2010, no comprehensive account of the size of the security clearance system had ever been produced.  So the new 4.9 million figure is the largest official figure ever published.

A 2009 report from the Government Accountability Office had estimated that 2.4 million people held clearances, excluding some intelligence agency employees.  But even allowing for one or two hundred thousand cleared intelligence personnel, this turned out to underestimate the case by nearly 50%.  A 1995 GAO report presented an estimate of 3.2 million persons as of 1993.

(Strictly speaking, the new ODNI report does not present data on the number of clearances but rather on the number of people who have been investigated and deemed “eligible” for a clearance, regardless of whether or not they have been granted access to classified information in fact. In addition to a security clearance, an individual is also supposed to have a “need to know” particular classified information in order to gain access to it.)

During 2012, the CIA denied 4.9% of the clearance applications that it reviewed, the report indicated, while NRO denied 5.9% and NSA denied 5.7%.  Several of the intelligence agencies reported that they had individual security clearance investigations that had remained open in excess of one year.

“The IC faces challenges in clearing individuals with unique or critical skills — such as highly desirable language abilities — who often have significant foreign associations that may take additional time to investigate and adjudicate,” the new report said.

The report notes that it was prepared in fulfillment of a requirement in the 2010 intelligence authorization act.  It does not mention the fact that the DNI asked Congress to cancel that requirement last year.

The DNI’s request to eliminate the report was initially approved by the Senate Intelligence Committee (as first noted by Marcy Wheeler of the Emptywheel blog). But then several public interest groups wrote to ask the House and Senate Intelligence Committees to preserve the annual reporting requirement, arguing that it provided unique public insight into the size and operation of the security clearance system. The Committees concurred, and the reporting requirement was retained.

In the absence of similar public attention and intervention, another intelligence community report to Congress on proliferation of weapons of mass destruction was discontinued at the DNI’s request, to the dismay of students of arms control.

A pending change to the security clearance process is intended to encourage mental health counseling, but some say it may generate new confusion, reported Josh Gerstein in Politico today.

Some $4 billion is being cut from the National Intelligence Program this year as a result of sequestration, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told the House Intelligence Committee at a hearing today. He said that the consequences will be severe. Acquisition programs will be “wounded,” ongoing programs will have to be curtailed, and the ensuing degradation of intelligence capabilities will be “insidious” with unforeseeable effects, he said.

Meanwhile, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence disclosed yesterday that the FY 2014 budget request for the National Intelligence Program (NIP) is $48.2 billion.  However, this figure excludes the pending funding request for Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO), so it cannot be directly compared to previous budget allocations, such as the $53.9 billion that was appropriated in FY 2012, or the $52.6 billion that was requested for FY 2013. A summary of the FY 2014 budget request is here.

The Secretary of Defense also disclosed the FY 2014 budget request for the Military Intelligence Program (MIP) yesterday, which was $14.6 billion. It also did not include the funding request for Overseas Contingency Operations.  This is a slight decline from the $14.7 billion base request for the MIP last year.  (An additional $4.5 billion was known to have been requested for OCO in the past fiscal year.)

Total intelligence spending (NIP plus MIP) peaked in Fiscal Year 2010, and has been on a downward slope since then. Intelligence budget disclosures from the last several years are tabulated here.

The NIP intelligence budget request was publicly disclosed for the first time in February 2011, in response to a requirement enacted by Congress in the FY 2010 intelligence authorization act. The MIP intelligence budget request was disclosed for the first time in February 2012, even though there was no specific statutory requirement to do so.

The Department of Defense is not particularly concerned with “openness” in the abstract, but it is strongly motivated to conserve resources and reduce discretionary expenditures.  That imperative dictates the discriminating use of national security secrecy — at least in theory — because of the costs incurred by classification.

“Precise classification guidance is prerequisite to effective and efficient information security and assures that security resources are expended to protect only that which truly warrants protection in the interests of national security,” according to a newly reissued Department of Defense manual that provides Instructions for Developing Security Classification Guides (DoD Manual 5200.45, April 2, 2013).

The Manual presents a framework for classifying information, beginning with a series of questions for determining whether information is eligible for classification in the first place.  (“Can the unauthorized disclosure of the information reasonably be expected to cause identifiable or describable damage to the national security? If the answer is no, the information cannot be classified.”)

Then it details the considerations that may arise in the classification of information concerning military hardware, military operations, intelligence and foreign relations.  Exactly which aspects of a hardware system provide the U.S. with a technological advantage?  Precisely which operational information requires protection in order for the operation to succeed?

The Manual discourages broad, sweeping classification of information.  Through an extended questionnaire for classifiers, it seeks “to systematically bound and refine the scope of the analysis needed to determine which items warrant protection through security classification.”

As detailed and helpful as this guidance is, it cannot decisively resolve all classification questions in advance.  “The outcomes specified in the flow chart are not absolute; judgment must be applied in all cases,” the Manual says.

Some decisions regarding what to classify are easy.  Information about “a foreign official speaking in a highly critical manner of his own government’s policy” or “suggesting how pressure might effectively be brought to bear on another part of his own government” would typically be classified.  Likewise, the fact of ongoing intelligence cooperation between the United States and a country “with which the United States is not allied should always be classified.” Also, “intelligence identifying a sensitive source or method should always be classified.”

On the other hand, the Manual says, classification can be dispensed with in certain areas.  “Intelligence that reveals the identity of a conventional source or method [i.e., one that is not “sensitive”] normally does not require classification.”

And “in general, [intelligence budget] resource information should not be classified unless it reveals some aspect of the intelligence mission, and its revelation would jeopardize the effectiveness of a particular function. An example of classifiable resource information is the intelligence contingency fund.”

At this point, the realization will dawn on some readers that this Manual, which was originally issued in 1999, does not accurately describe — or effectively regulate — DoD classification policy.

It is simply not the case that “in general, resource information [is] not classified unless it reveals some aspect of the intelligence mission.”  To the contrary, the Department’s default position is that intelligence resource information is classified.  That is why the individual budget total of each DoD intelligence agency — and not simply intelligence contingency funds — is not disclosed.  And beyond the total budget for the Military Intelligence Program (MIP), “no other MIP budget figures… will be released,” DoD said last October, “as they remain classified for national security reasons.”

Nor does the Pentagon clearly distinguish between sensitive intelligence sources and methods, which are classified, and “conventional” intelligence sources and methods, which are not.  Doing so sounds like a good idea, but it is hard to detect any sign of it in Pentagon practice.

The Manual notes that all classification guidance should be reviewed at least every five years by the original classification authority that issued it.  But it fails to mention that all guidance is also subject to a broader periodic assessment known as the Fundamental Classification Guidance Review.  It is through such a broader review that changes in classification policy are more likely to come about.

Last month, attorneys for Navy linguist James Hitselberger, who was charged under the Espionage Act with unlawful retention of classified documents, filed a motion arguing that the Espionage Act is unconstitutionally vague and unenforceable.  Last week, prosecutors replied and said that’s not so.

“Prosecuting Mr. Hitselberger under this statute violates the fair notice requirements of the Due Process clause because multiple terms contained in [the statute] are so vague that they fail to provide him with notice of what conduct is criminal and what conduct is not,” Hitselberger’s public defenders wrote in their March 1 motion.

Last Friday, prosecutors rebutted the defense motion, which they said was without merit.  “Every court that has considered similar challenges to [the Espionage Act statutes] has rejected them and found the provisions to pass constitutional muster,” they wrote.

The prosecutors cited rulings from past and present prosecutions involving charges under the espionage statutes to bolster their argument  — including those of State Department contractor Stephen Kim, former NSA official Thomas Drake, former CIA officer John Kiriakou, and former naval intelligence analyst Samuel L. Morison.  Like Hitselberger, none of those individuals was accused or suspected of espionage on behalf of a foreign power, but rather of unlawfully retaining or disclosing national defense information.

“Recently, the defendant in Drake made the same faulty argument as Hitselberger makes here,” prosecutors wrote. “The district court rejected the defendant’s claim that the term willfulness is unconstitutionally vague.”

“Although Hitselberger admittedly was not a career intelligence professional, he has more in common with defendants such as Morison, Kiriakou, and Kim than he lets on,” the prosecutors asserted.  It was not meant as a compliment.

Prosecutors filed additional responses to several other pre-trial defense motions to suppress evidence, to require a bill of particulars, to eliminate “multiplicious” charges, and to find sections of the Classified Information Procedures Act unconstitutional.

“Reconnaissance assets, like artillery assets, are never kept in reserve,” according to U.S. Army doctrine.

In other words, whatever means you may have to gather information about the activities and capabilities of an adversary should be fully deployed, not held back.

“Reconnaissance units report exactly what they see and, if appropriate, what they do not see…. Reports of no enemy activity are as important as reports of enemy activity. Failing to report tells the commander nothing.”

That bit of practical wisdom, which may indeed be relevant beyond the battlefield, is contained in a new Army field manual on the subject. See Reconnaissance, Security, and Tactical Enabling Tasks, Volume 2, Field Manual 3-90.2, March 2013. It is a companion to Offense and Defense, Volume 1, Field Manual 3-90.1, March 2013.

The vast corpus of U.S. military doctrine offers a point of entry into military thought that may be of interest even — or especially — to a reader who is not a member of “the profession of arms.” Some noteworthy doctrinal publications that have recently been published or updated are cited below.  While they have a tendency to be jargon heavy and pedestrian, they are never frivolous or less than professional. Occasionally they offer impressive subtlety and sophistication or unexpected literary merit.

The distinctive vocabulary of military affairs is presented with authoritative definitions in a 500-page Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms, Joint Publication 1-02, updated March 15, 2013.

The conceptual framework of the U.S. military is outlined in Joint Publication 1, Doctrine for the Armed Forces of the United States, reissued on March 25.  It “provides overarching guidance and fundamental principles” for the employment of the U.S. military. “War is socially sanctioned violence to achieve a political purpose,” it explains. “The basic nature of war is immutable, although warfare evolves constantly.”

The various functions of the military in humanitarian assistance are elaborated in Multi-Service Techniques for Civil Affairs Support to Foreign Humanitarian Assistance, ATP 3-57.20, February 2013.

A reference guide for initial assessment and response to an accidental or deliberate release of biological pathogens, radioactive material or other hazardous substances is given in Multi-Service Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures for Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear Reconnaissance and Surveillance, ATP 3-11.37, March 2013.

The potential use of biological agents in war and the diagnosis and treatment of the resulting casualties are described in Multi-Service Tactics, Techniques and Procedures for Treatment of Biological Warfare Casualties, ATP 4-02.84, March 2013.

The intersection of law and Army operations is delineated in Legal Support to the Operational Army, Field Manual 1-04, updated March 2013.

Senate Republicans are the most prolific users of Twitter in Congress, tweeting an average of 1.53 Tweets per day, according to a new report from the Congressional Research Service.  They were followed by Senate Democrats (1.49 Tweets on average), House Republicans (1.23), and House Democrats (1.09).

Senate Republicans were also the most frequent posters on Facebook, with an average of 0.84 posts per day.

“In 2012, 56% of Twitter-registered Members were Republican and 44% were Democrats,” reported the CRS study, which was performed with the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas in Austin.

Twitter and Facebook “allow Members to communicate directly with constituents (and others) in a potentially interactive way that is not possible through mail or e-mail. For Members and their staff, the ability to collect and transmit real time information to and from constituents could be influential for issue prioritization, policy decisions, or voting behavior,” CRS said.

However, the new study does not present any data to show that Twitter or Facebook are actually being used interactively, i.e. that Members are consistently reading or responding to incoming messages from constituents or others.  See Social Networking and Constituent Communications: Members’ Use of Twitter and Facebook During a Two-Month Period in the 112th Congress, March 22, 2013.

Some other new reports from the Congressional Research Service include the following.

Argentina’s Post-Crisis Economic Reform: Challenges for U.S. Policy, March 26, 2013

Proposed Cuts to Air Traffic Control Towers Under Budget Sequestration: Background and Considerations for Congress, March 26, 2013

Administrative Agencies and Claims of Unreasonable Delay: Analysis of Court Treatment, March 21, 2013

U.S. and World Coal Production, Federal Taxes, and Incentives, March 14, 2013

Several nuggets of interest are presented in the latest biennial report from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, summarizing the Committee’s oversight activities in the 112th Congress:

*    The Director of National Intelligence abruptly cancelled a multi-year effort to establish a single consolidated data center for the entire Intelligence Community a year or so ago, in favor of a migration to cloud computing.

*    Under criticism that the number of intelligence contractor personnel has grown too high, too fast, intelligence agencies have been cutting the number of contractors they employ or converting contractors to government employees.  But some of those agencies have continued to hire additional contractors at the same time, resulting in net growth in the size of the intelligence contractor workforce.

*    A written report on each covert action that is being carried out under a presidential finding is provided to the congressional committees every quarter.

The March 22 report also provides some fresh details of the long-awaited and still unreleased Committee study on CIA’s detention and interrogation program.  That 6,000 page study, which was completed in July 2012 and approved by the Committee in December 2012, is divided into three volumes, as described in the report:

“I. History and Operation of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program. This volume is divided chronologically into sections addressing the establishment, development, and evolution of the CIA detention and interrogation program.”

“II. Intelligence Acquired and CIA Representations on the Effectiveness of the CIA’s Enhanced Interrogation Techniques. This volume addresses the intelligence attributed to CIA detainees and the use of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques, specifically focusing on CIA representations on how the CIA detention and interrogation program was operated and managed, as well as the effectiveness of the interrogation program. It includes sections on CIA representations to the Congress, the Department of Justice, and the media.”

“III. Detention and Interrogation of Detainees. This volume addresses the detention and interrogation of all known CIA detainees, from the program’s inception to its official end, on January 22, 2009, to include information on their capture, detention, interrogation, and conditions of confinement. It also includes extensive information on the CIA’s management, oversight, and day-to-day operation of the CIA’s detention and interrogation program,” according to the report’s description.

“I have read the first volume, which is 300 pages,” said CIA Director John O. Brennan at his February 7 confirmation hearing.  “There clearly were a number of things, many things, that I read in that report that were very concerning and disturbing to me, and ones that I would want to look into immediately, if I were to be confirmed as CIA Director.”

“It talked about mismanagement of the program, misrepresentations of the information, providing inaccurate information,” Mr. Brennan said then. “And it was rather damning in a lot of its language, as far as the nature of these activities that were carried out.”

[Clarification: Mr. Brennan’s reference to “the first volume” does not correspond to “Volume I” as described in the new Committee report. He was referring to the executive summary, findings, and conclusions of the report, which are bound separately from the body of the report.]

The Committee said it is awaiting comments on the study from the White House, the CIA and other executive branch agencies, and that it will then “discuss the public release of the Study.”

On February 15, 2013, Republicans who were members of the Committee in the last Congress formally filed dissenting comments opposing the study and its conclusions, the report said.

For its first couple of decades, the Senate Intelligence Committee held that “even secret activities must be as accountable to the public as possible,” as Sen. Daniel Inouye stated in the Committee’s first biennial report in 1977, and that “as much information as possible about intelligence activities should be made available to the public,” as Senators Richard Shelby and Bob Kerrey wrote in the 1999 version of the report.

But in the past decade, the Committee seems to have reconceptualized its relationship with the public.  It no longer promises to make “as much information as possible about intelligence activities” available to the public.  The notion that “secret activities” could be “accountable to the public” is now evidently considered a contradiction in terms (although release of the report on CIA interrogation practices, if it ever came to pass, would nullify and transcend that contradiction).

Today, as the latest report states, the Committee aims merely “to provide as much information as possible to the American public about its intelligence oversight activities.”  (Intelligence Oversight Steps Back from Public Accountability, Secrecy News, January 2, 2013).

Even within the narrowed horizons to which it has limited itself, however, the report presents a rather attenuated, “skim milk” account of the Committee’s work. Judging from the new report, intelligence oversight consists of frequent briefings, followed by numerous “evaluations” and “reviews.”

The report provides no indication of any conflict between the Committee and the intelligence agencies. Consequently, there are no significant victories (though the successful passage of four consecutive intelligence authorization bills is a notable achievement), and no meaningful defeats.

At the Brennan confirmation hearing on February 7, Committee chair Sen. Dianne Feinstein said: “I have been calling, and others have been calling–the Vice Chairman and I–for increased transparency on the use of targeted force for over a year, including the circumstances in which such force is directed against U.S. citizens and noncitizens alike.”  And to its credit, the Committee conscientiously posed a pre-hearing question on classification reform to Mr. Brennan (which he deflected).

But the new report does not identify any such effort by Committee leadership to promote increased transparency on targeted killing during the past Congress.  It does not reference the failure to accomplish the declassification of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court opinions, as the Committee had been promised in 2011.  Nor does the report address the abuse of classification authority or cite what the President called “the problem of overclassification” at all.

A Department of Defense instruction issued on Friday reinforces the policy that the DoD Office of Inspector General (OIG) is to have full access to all records, including classified records, that it needs to perform its function, and that no DoD official other than the Secretary himself may block such access.

“The OIG must have expeditious and unrestricted access to all records…, regardless of classification, medium (e.g. paper, electronic) or format (e.g., digitized images, data) and information available to or within any DoD Component, and be able to obtain copies of all records and information as required for its official use once appropriate security clearances and access are substantiated for the OIG DoD personnel involved,” the instruction states. See “Office of the Inspector General of the Department of Defense Access to Records and Information,” DoD Instruction 7050.03, March 22, 2013.

By stressing that the Inspector General’s access is independent of a record’s classification, medium or format, this language elaborates and bolsters the text of a previous version of the instruction, which did not make those distinctions.

Furthermore, the new instruction specifies, “No officer, employee, contractor, or Service member of any DoD Component may deny the OIG DoD access to records.”  Only the Secretary of Defense may invoke a statutory exemption to limit IG access to certain intelligence, counterintelligence, or other sensitive matters, which he must then justify in a report to Congress.

As a result of these robust access provisions, the DoD Inspector General is well-positioned to conduct internal oversight not only of the Pentagon’s extensive classified programs, but also of the classification system itself, particularly since the Department of Defense is the most prolific classifier in the U.S. government.

In fact, the Inspector General of each executive branch agency that classifies national security information is now required by the Reducing Over-Classification Act of 2010 to evaluate the agency’s classification program.  Each Inspector General was directed “to identify policies, procedures, rules, regulations, or management practices that may be contributing to persistent misclassification of material.”

The first evaluation is due to be completed by September 30, 2013.  Vexingly, the Act did not provide a functional definition of “over-classification” or “misclassification.”  Therefore, the first hurdle that the IG evaluations must overcome is to determine the nature and the parameters of the problem of over-classification.

This week NASA abruptly took the massive NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS) offline.  Though no explanation for the removal was offered, it appeared to be in response to concerns that export controlled information was contained in the collection.

“Until further notice, the NTRS system will be unavailable for public access. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you and anticipate that this site will return to service in the near future,” the NTRS homepage now states.

NASA Public Affairs did not respond yesterday to an inquiry about the status of the site, the reason for its suspension, or the timeline for its return.

NASA Watch and The Unwanted Blog linked the move to a statement from Rep. Frank Wolf on Monday concerning alleged security violations at NASA Langley Research Center.

“NASA should immediately take down all publicly available technical data sources until all documents that have not been subjected to export control review have received such a review and all controlled documents are removed from the system,” Rep. Wolf said.

In other words, all NASA technical documents, no matter how voluminous and valuable they are, should cease to be publicly available in order to prevent the continued disclosure of any restricted documents, no matter how limited or insignificant they may be.

“There is a HUGE amount of material on NTRS,” said space policy analyst Dwayne Day. “If NASA is forced to review it all, it will never go back online.”

Essentially, the mindset represented by Rep. Wolf and embraced by NASA fears the consequences of unauthorized disclosure more than it values the benefits of openness.  It is a familiar outlook that has wreaked havoc with the nation’s historical declassification program, and has periodically disrupted routine access to record collections at the National Archives, as well as online collections at the CIA, the Los Alamos technical report library, and elsewhere.

“I’d also note that a large amount of historical Mercury/Gemini/Apollo documents that were previously available at NARA Fort Worth is now apparently withdrawn due to ITAR [export controls],” said Dr. Day.

The upshot is that the government is not an altogether reliable repository of official records. Members of the public who depend on access to such records should endeavor to make and preserve their own copies whenever possible.