Monday, June 30 marks the 100th anniversary of the Tunguska incident in 1908, in which a meteor or comet fragment entered the atmosphere over Tunguska in Siberia producing an enormous explosion.

“We know that a rather massive body flew into the atmosphere of our planet,” said Boris Shustov of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

“It measured 40 to 60 meters in diameter. Clearly, it did not consist of iron, otherwise it would have certainly reached the earth. The body decelerated in the atmosphere, the deceleration being very abrupt, so the whole energy of this body flying with a velocity of more than 20 meters per second [probably should be: kilometers per second] was released, which resulted in a mid-air explosion, very similar to a thermonuclear blast,” he told Tass news agency yesterday.

“The yield of the explosion totaled 10 to 15 megatons, which matches the yields of the largest hydrogen bomb ever tested on the planet [actually, the largest reported test in October 1961 had a yield in excess of 50 megatons]. The explosion felled some 80 million trees [but] it is generally assumed that the blast did not kill any people,” he added.

“The Tunguska phenomenon showed that the asteroid-comet danger is quite real. It happened not in the era of dinosaurs, but in our recent history. Russia was definitely lucky; had the body flown up to the Earth several hours later, it would have hit St.Petersburg. The consequences would have been horrendous,” he said.

“Impacts such as the Tunguska incident are thought to occur about once in one hundred years based on the density of impact craters on the Moon,” according to a White Paper on Planetary Defense attached to the 1994 U.S. Air Force report Spacecast 2020.

A 2007 NASA summary report to Congress on planetary defense is here (pdf). A longer account is here (pdf).

The House of Representatives yesterday passed a bill amending the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA) to strengthen the public disclosure provisions of that open government law. The bill was introduced by Rep. William Lacy Clay (D-MO) and Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) in April.

“In recent years, FACA has been undermined by the practices of the Bush administration,” said Rep. Waxman. “This bill is our response to these abuses.”

“This bill says that White House task forces can no longer operate in total secrecy. They must disclose whom they meet with and what recommendations they receive from special interests,” he said.

In particular, “This bill says that task forces like the Vice President’s energy task force must come out from the shadows,” Rep. Waxman said.

A proposed U.S. missile defense system in Europe that is intended to defend against a postulated Iranian missile threat cannot reasonably proceed without time-consuming testing and validation, according to a newly disclosed internal assessment (pdf) performed for the Department of Defense last year.

The U.S. Missile Defense Agency envisions deployment of Ground-Based Interceptors in Poland and an X-band radar in the Czech Republic, a proposal that has elicited significant political opposition from Russia, and some in Poland and the Czech Republic.

“These European assets are planned to provide defenses against long-range Iranian threats to the United States as well as against intermediate-range Iranian threats to Europe.”

But “the effectiveness of the European [missile defense] assets cannot be assumed,” said the Pentagon’s Director of Operational Test and Evaluation. “A robust test program is necessary to assess the operational effectiveness of these European [missile defense] assets.”

See “European GMD Mission Test Concept,” October 1, 2007.

This unclassified Pentagon report was not readily available to the public until a copy was obtained by the Associated Press. Desmond Butler of AP reported on the Pentagon document as well as the emerging consensus in Congress that system testing will in fact be required. See “Testing Could Delay Missile Defense Plans” by Desmond Butler, Associated Press, June 23, 2008.

Related background may be found in “Long-Range Ballistic Missile Defense in Europe” (pdf) from the Congressional Research Service.

Richard L. Garwin provided a critical assessment of the Iranian missile program and U.S. missile defense capabilities in “Evaluating Iran’s Missile Threat” (pdf), Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, May/June 2008.

A proposed new federal rule would require executive branch agencies to accept the “suitability” determinations made by other agencies in hiring federal employees. This is a longstanding policy goal, known as “reciprocity,” that has been endorsed for decades but never fully implemented.

Suitability refers to a judgment that a potential employee is not disqualified from government service by a criminal record, a pattern of drug abuse, or other factors.

“This proposed rule is one of a number of initiatives the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) has undertaken to simplify and streamline the system of Federal Government investigative and adjudicative processes to make them more efficient and as equitable as possible.”

An interagency working group reported to the President in April on the elusive goal of security clearance reform, another perennial pursuit. See “Security and Suitability Process Reform” (pdf), April 30, 2008.

Recent activity on security clearances was reported in “Back to square one on clearances” by Florence Olsen, Federal Computer Week, June 16, 2008.

In a speech on the Senate floor yesterday, Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-CT) said the current debate over amending the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) is not simply one more dispute over intelligence policy. Rather, he said, it calls into question basic issues of democratic governance and the rule of law.

He presented the case against the pending FISA amendments, particularly the provisions that would immunize telephone companies against lawsuits regarding their participation in domestic surveillance.

“Did the telecoms break the law? I don’t know. I can’t say so. But pass immunity, and we will never know,” Sen. Dodd said.

The President’s warrantless surveillance program, he said, is of a piece with other Administration departures from established legal norms including its policies on coercive interrogation and extraordinary rendition, as well as its pervasive secrecy.

“What is this about? It is about answering the fundamental question: Do we support the rule of law or the rule of men? To me, this is our defining question as a nation and may be the defining question that confronts every generation, as it has throughout our history.”

Sen. Dodd and Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) announced their intention to filibuster the FISA Amendment bill.

Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) spoke in favor of the bill, including the provisions on shielding telephone companies from legal liability for their actions.

“Those who are opposed to the President’s efforts to monitor al-Qaida’s communications after 9/11 should take their argument to the President, not to the private companies that patriotically complied with government requests to help this country,” he said.

A federal appeals court handling the case of two former employees of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) who are charged with unlawful handling of classified information last week granted a defense motion to limit the scope of a pending prosecution appeal.

In March, a lower court had issued a sealed 278-page court order identifying what classified information may be disclosed, summarized or withheld at the forthcoming trial of the AIPAC defendants. The government appealed the order in advance of the trial, as it is entitled to do. But at the same time it also attempted to appeal several other prior court orders that it regarded as unfavorable including two 2006 orders that defined the government’s burden of proof and another court opinion that limited the use of secret, non-public evidence.

Defense attorneys objected to the reopening of prior court rulings, and the appeals court concurred with them in a June 20 decision. A government brief on the surviving portion of the appeal will be due on July 25.

Selected case files from the lower court and the appeals court proceedings can be found here.

The AIPAC case is a subject of broad interest because it is the first time that Americans who are engaged in protected First Amendment activities have been prosecuted for the unauthorized receipt and transmission of classified information, which is a relatively common transaction among national security reporters and advocacy organizations. (Secrecy News has frequently sought access to information on topics or programs that we knew to be classified, and has occasionally gained such access.)

“This is not a typical espionage case,” defense attorneys told the appeals court in an April 29 motion (pdf). “Everyone who spoke with [defendants Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman] did so voluntarily, knew that Rosen and Weissman were not government officials, and knew that they did not have security clearances. Rosen and Weissman did not receive money or material goods from foreign governments or others in exchange for information; they did not speak in code; they did not conduct their meetings in secret; they are not charged with serving as agents of a foreign government, let alone with being spies; they did not receive or pass on classified documents; they did not pay any bribes to or threaten government officials.”

Prosecutors put it differently (pdf): “This is an Espionage Act prosecution involving two defendants who conspired to and did obtain classified information from their government sources and then passed that information to a foreign government, members of the news media, and others not entitled to receive it.”

But if it was a conspiracy, the government has handled it in a peculiar way, the defense said in its April 29 motion:

“Highlighting the curious underpinnings of this prosecution, the high-level government officials with whom Rosen and Weissman regularly met and who, according to the Indictment, illegally disclosed classified NDI [national defense information], have not — with but one exception — been charged criminally. Indeed, one of the disclosing officials has since received, not charges or reprimands, but a series of promotions to one of the highest, most sensitive positions in the government.”

The “one exception” is former Pentagon official Lawrence A. Franklin, who has been sentenced to a 12 year prison term.

The highly promoted official is David Satterfield, who has been elevated in position three times since the AIPAC case became public in August 2004 — first to Principal Deputy in State’s Mideast Bureau, then to Deputy Chief of Mission with the rank of Ambassador in Iraq — among the most sensitive diplomatic assignments in the world– and most recently to Principal Adviser to the Secretary of State on Iraq.

The defense attorneys’ argument is not that Mr. Satterfield did something wrong. Rather, they contend, the government’s response to the facts of the case has been erratic, inconsistent and unpredictable. Which is to say, it has been unjust.

The Federation of American Scientists and other science-related organizations are urging their members and others to ask candidates about science and technology policy in the 2008 congressional elections.

From energy production to climate change and innovation, participants are encouraged to question incumbents and challengers about their agenda for meeting pressing science and technology challenges in fields such as energy production, climate change, science education and health science.

The non-partisan initiative, which does not endorse or oppose individual candidates, is called Innovation 2008.

In a noteworthy contrast with the secrecy that prevails in much of government and often within its own ranks, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is soliciting public comment on revisions to the National Infrastructure Protection Plan (NIPP), which is the framework for defending essential infrastructure, ranging from agriculture to transportation, against attack or natural disaster.

The request for comment places DHS in the rather unfamiliar posture — for a national security agency — of actively seeking to engage public interest and to invite public feedback on a matter of broad public policy.

“We’re hoping to get inputs from across the country,” said Larry L. May of the DHS NIPP Program Management Office in an interview today, “and from everyone concerned with critical infrastructure protection.”

Some of the NIPP policies that are under review are trivial, such as changes in terminology. But others are profound, such as the relative emphasis in the Plan on “protection rather than resiliency.” Where “protection” seeks to anticipate, deter and defend against particular threats that are intrinsically uncertain, “resilience” focuses on capabilities needed for rapid response and recovery from a broad range of hazards. They imply vastly different strategies, including public information disclosure strategies.

Are there significant numbers of Americans who care enough about such issues to express their views to DHS? Apparently so.

Mr. May said that the last time DHS conducted a review of the NIPP in 2006, some 10,000 comments were submitted.

Why does DHS care what the public thinks? Basically, Mr. May said, “all of us are in this together, if you will.”

Additional information on the NIPP, including the most recent 2006 iteration, may be found here.

The cost of implementing the national security classification system in government and industry reached an all-time high of $9.91 billion last year, according to the latest annual report (pdf) from the Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO).

The 2007 classification cost figure, which includes physical security, computer security and other aspects of classified information security, was a 4.6 percent increase over the year before and is the highest amount ever reported by the ISOO.

Is that too much? Not enough? The right amount? The new report doesn’t venture an opinion. Instead, it suggests that “the annual rate of growth for total security costs is declining.” That is not strictly true, since the rate of growth actually increased from 2006 to 2007, though it is now lower than it was in the immediate post-2001 period.

The ISOO annual report each year presents a unique snapshot of classification and declassification activity throughout the executive branch, though the data provided are often of uncertain significance and are cited with exaggerated precision.

The number of new secrets (“original classification decisions”) increased by 1% in 2007 to 233,639, ISOO reported. Meanwhile, “derivative” classification decisions, referring to the restatement of previously classified information in a new form or a new document, increased sharply by 12.5 percent for a combined total of 23,102,257 classification actions (original and derivative) in 2007. Again, no judgment on the quality or propriety of these classifications is offered.

Of 59.7 million pages reviewed for declassification last year, 37.2 million pages were declassified government-wide, a decrease both in the number reviewed and the number declassified but an increase in the rate of declassification. (At the Central Intelligence Agency, the situation was reversed: There was a 138 percent increase in the number of pages reviewed and a slight increase in the number declassified, but “a significant decrease” in the proportion of reviewed pages that were declassified.)

The Department of Transportation reviewed 380,000 pages but declassified none of them because they all had to be referred to other agencies for further processing. The President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (recently renamed the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board) reviewed 130 pages and declassified 40 of them.

ISOO reported uneven compliance with basic classification system rules and regulations at several agencies.

“Disappointingly, we continued to find deficiencies at multiple agencies relating to basic requirements concerning implementing regulations, security education and training, self-inspections, classification, and document markings,” the report stated.

One interesting data point that does not appear in the report is the number of classification challenges filed by authorized holders of particular information who believe that it is improperly classified. (Section 1.8 of Executive Order 12958, as amended, authorizes and encourages such classification challenges.)

In response to an inquiry from Secrecy News, ISOO indicated that there were 275 classification challenges filed by cleared personnel in FY 2007. The number of challenges that were actually accepted or approved by the originating agencies was not available.

The “2007 Report to the President” from the Information Security Oversight Office, which is the first issued by the new ISOO director William J. Bosanko, was transmitted to the White House on May 30 and made public today.

The new report makes no mention of the Office of the Vice President (OVP) and its continuing refusal to cooperate with ISOO’s reporting requirements on classification and declassification activity. That refusal, highlighted by a complaint filed by the Federation of American Scientists in 2006, led to a confrontation between the OVP and ISOO’s former director J. William Leonard last year, and the issue remains technically unresolved.

Wind farms that use spinning blades and turbines to generate electricity have the undesirable side effect of disrupting the operation of radar systems. The JASON defense science advisory group was asked to consider the problem and to propose solutions.

“Wind farms interfere with the radar tracking of airplanes and weather. The velocity of the blade tips can reach 170 mph, causing significant Doppler clutter. This creates problems and issues for several stake holders, including DHS, DOD, FAA and NOAA,” the JASONs said in a report (pdf) to the Department of Homeland Security earlier this year.

“Examples of issues include: a wind farm located close to a border might create a dead zone for detecting intruding aircraft; current weather radar software could misinterpret the high apparent shear between blade tips as a tornado; current air traffic control software could temporarily lose the tracks of aircraft flying over wind farms.”

To address the problem Defense Department officials proposed a strategy of “non-technical mitigation,” by which they mean simply eliminating wind farms that interfere with DoD assets.

But the JASONs suggested several alternative approaches that in many cases would permit continued operation of wind farms in proximity to radar installations.

See “Wind Farms and Radar,” JASON, January 2008.

To reduce unnecessary restrictions on unclassified information, Congress should require agencies to publish more of their unclassified records, we suggested in a letter (pdf) to the House Intelligence Committee this week.

A White House policy announced last month to establish a government-wide standard for “controlled unclassified information” (CUI) may exacerbate existing barriers to public access, even sweeping up embargoed press releases into a formal control category.

Instead of facilitating broad information sharing, as intended, CUI could end up as the equivalent of a fourth level of classification that tends to prohibit public access to information that has not been specifically approved for release.

One way to avoid that outcome is to increase the routine disclosure of unclassified records of public interest.

“In parallel with the CUI process, Congress should mandate affirmative new disclosure requirements that will directly counteract the tendency to control information unnecessarily,” I wrote in a letter to Rep. Anna Eshoo of the House Intelligence Committee.

“Specifically, for example, I would urge legislation requiring the DNI Open Source Center to publish all or most of its unclassified analytical products.”

Rep. Eshoo had invited comments on the new CUI policy. Our June 16 reply is here.

A hearing was held last week on a bill introduced by Rep. Jane Harman to require the Department of Homeland Security by statute to adopt the new CUI policy. Witnesses included Meredith Fuchs of the National Security Archive, Patrice McDermott of OpenTheGovernment.org and Caroline Fredrickson of the ACLU. Their prepared statements are available here.

Newly published hearing records and Pentagon directives concerning intelligence policy include the following.

A House Intelligence Subcommittee examined intelligence community personnel security policy in “Security Clearance Reform,” February 27, 2008.

“National Security Letters: The Need for Greater Accountability and Oversight” was the subject of a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on April 23, 2008.

The Senate Intelligence Committee considered “Modernization of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act” in a May 1, 2007 hearing.

“DoD Implementation of the Joint Intelligence Community Duty Assignment (JDA) Program” is the response to a DNI policy to promote employee rotations throughout the intelligence bureaucracy. See DoD Instruction 1400.36 (pdf), June 2, 2008.

Another new DoD Instruction (3305.16) addresses “DoD Measurement and Signature Intelligence (MASINT) Training” (pdf), June 12, 2008.