In response to a request from a public interest group, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) agreed (pdf) to disclose the amounts of highly enriched uranium (HEU) fuel sought for export by two foreign countries. But the NRC said it reserved the right to withhold similar information in the future.

The Nuclear Control Institute (NCI) had argued last February that NRC secrecy regarding HEU exports was impeding public deliberation on the subject, and that such deliberation had in the past contributed to a reduction in international traffic in the weapons-grade material.

NRC chairman Nils J. Diaz agreed in part.

“With respect to the two pending applications for export of HEU, the NRC has decided that the total quantity of material requested in the particular export applications may be released,” he wrote to NCI President Paul Leventhal and analyst Alan Kuperman in a letter dated April 26 and disclosed this week (pdf).

Chairman Diaz revealed that Belgium had applied for export of 85.5 kilograms of HEU reactor fuel, and that Canada was seeking 15.5 kilograms of HEU.

Unfortunately, the utility of the new disclosures for public deliberation over nuclear exports was undercut by the fact that Belgium’s application has already been approved. A copy of the May 3 export license, with the amount of fuel to be sent to Belgium still blacked out, is here (pdf).

“This new NRC policy of considering disclosure of requested export amounts upon request is an improvement over the blanket redaction policy,” said NCI’s Alan Kuperman, who is also an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

“But it will not restore a meaningful opportunity for public comment unless in each case the public promptly requests and the NRC promptly grants disclosure of the amount of the export license request, well in advance of the commission’s decision on that license request,” he told Secrecy News.

Kuperman praised outgoing NRC chairman Diaz for his constructive response, but he said that “we’ll be appealing for the routine release of these numbers.”

The prosecution of two former officials of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) for allegedly mishandling classified information is attracting growing attention as the momentous character of the case and its implications for American civil liberties become clear. (AIPAC itself is not a defendant and is not accused of wrongdoing.)

“When we say that this is an unprecedented case, we’re not saying it hyperbolically the way people use ‘unprecedented’,” said defense attorney Abbe Lowell, according to the newly disclosed transcript of an April 21 court hearing. “We literally mean it’s unprecedented. There is not a case like it.”

Never before has the Espionage Act of 1917 been used to prosecute uncleared, non-governmental persons who are engaged in protected First Amendment activities (not espionage) for receiving and transmitting national defense information.

If these defendants are guilty of a crime, then so are many other people.

“I think Mr. Lowell is absolutely right,” Judge T.S. Ellis, III said at the April 21 hearing. “It is an unprecedented, it’s a novel case.”

Prosecuting attorney Kevin DiGregory argued that the defendants had conspired to improperly gather and disseminate classified information and therefore “they stand in the shoes of a thief.”

But the court rejected that assertion.

“You’re not going to attempt to prove, and it isn’t alleged in the indictment, that these defendants in some way conspired to steal [the information],” said Judge Ellis. “I don’t think you gain much from an analogy that doesn’t fit.”

“I find this a very, very hard problem,” he said. “I’m exquisitely sensitive to the [defendants’] motion to dismiss that I’m continuing to consider,” he said.

Assuming the case is not dismissed, the trial will begin August 7.

A copy of the transcript of the April 21 hearing on the matter was obtained by Secrecy News.

The AIPAC case may be a prelude to the establishment of an American version of the British Official Secrets Act, wrote civil libertarian Nat Hentoff. See “Chilling Free Speech” by Nat Hentoff, Washington Times, May 8.

The case could “change the nature of how news is gathered in Washington and how lobbyists and academics interact with the government,” wrote author David Wise. See “Read the News, Go to Jail,” by David Wise, Los Angeles Times, April 30.

Both articles were entered into the Congressional Record yesterday by Rep. Jim McDermott (D-WA). See “The Big Chill in Washington, DC,” May 9.

** The new Journal of National Security Law & Policy has recently published its second issue featuring several meaty articles on interrogation, torture and the rule of law. The full contents of the issue, along with subscription information, are available online here.

** “Regulatory transparency–mandatory disclosure of information by private or public institutions with a regulatory intent– has become an important frontier of government innovation.” A new journal article assesses when and how such transparency works. See “The Effectiveness of Regulatory Disclosure Policies” by David Weil, et al, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Vol. 25, No. 1 (abstract only).

** The case of Sam Adams, the intelligence analyst who challenged official assessments of the size of Viet Cong forces during the Vietnam War, is revisited in a new book. “It’s the first complete narrative of the intelligence war at the heart of what went wrong in Vietnam, and it also happens to be highly relevant to what’s happening today in Iraq,” suggests the publisher. See “Who the Hell Are We Fighting? The Story of Sam Adams and the Vietnam Intelligence Wars,” by C. Michael Hiam, Steerforth Press, published April 25, 2006.

“We remain concerned that Tehran may have a clandestine nuclear weapons program,” according to a new but rather anticlimactic U.S. intelligence report (pdf) to Congress.

The new report on foreign acquisition of weapons of mass destruction during 2004 was released by the Deputy Director of National Intelligence this week.

Such a report is required by statute to be prepared and delivered every six months. The last report, for the second half of 2003, was released in November 2004.

See “Acquisition of Technology Relating to Weapons of Mass Destruction and Advanced Conventional Munitions, 1 January Through 31 December 2004,” Unclassified DDNI Report to Congress, May 2006.

It is often asserted or assumed that American traditions of open government and civil liberties place the United States at a disadvantage in confronting terrorism. But the opposite may be closer to the truth.

“In an open society like ours… it is impossible to protect against every threat,” said President Bush in an August 24, 2005 speech. “That’s a fact we have to deal with. In a free society it is impossible to protect against every possible threat,” implying that it might be possible in a closed or unfree society.

Similarly, according to February 15 testimony (pdf) by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, “terrorists and criminals… would exploit our open society to do us harm.”

And “precious little can be done to prevent [terrorist attacks on soft targets] in a society like ours that rightly values personal liberty so highly,” wrote Clark Kent Ervin, former Homeland Security Inspector General, in a Washington Post opinion piece on May 7.

But a distinctly different perspective was offered by John C. Gannon, former CIA Deputy Director for Intelligence, in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee last week.

Among the reasons that there has not been another terrorist attack on U.S. soil since September 11, he proposed, are precisely the openness and freedom that some others view with anxiety.

“I believe that the hard-won Constitutional freedoms enjoyed by Americans, along with our unparalleled commitment to civil liberties embedded in law, work against the development of domestic terrorist networks that could be exploited by foreigners,” testified Gannon, who is now a Vice President at BAE Systems Information Technology.

Secrecy News asked Dr. Gannon to elaborate on this point.

“Americans have unparalleled Constitutional and legal protections to express grievances and to openly criticize government at all levels,” he replied in a May 6 email message.

“This doesn’t mean that terrorists wouldn’t try to operate here. It means that the terrorists or other extremists would find less fertile ground to build networks in the US because local support would be harder to come by and because local opposition would be more certain.”

“In this sense, our liberties are a powerful antidote to violent extremism.”

“This is not an academic point for me. It is an observation from a career of watching the domestic consequences of repressive regimes elsewhere in the world–including US-friendly Islamic governments such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt,” Gannon wrote.

The question of whether openness and civil liberties tend to enhance national security or to undermine it is not a theoretical one. Much depends on which one of the two perspectives prevails.

If openness and the rule of law are sources of vulnerability, or viewed as such, then they will be quickly surrendered in the name of security. Torture may be redefined to permit non-lethal abuses, habeas corpus may be suspended, statutes regulating domestic surveillance may be disregarded.

Conversely, if civil liberties and the rule of law are a source of strength, it follows that they should be bolstered and scrupulously upheld even in the conduct of vital security operations.

Secrecy News asked Dr. Gannon whether his views on civil liberties could be reconciled with intelligence programs such as warrantless domestic surveillance.

“The NSA warrantless surveillance program–the details of which are mired in secrecy–should not be seen as a tradeoff between security and civil liberties. But, for this to be true, the program must be bound by law and subject to both judicial review and competent Congressional oversight–the latter now in short supply,” he explained.

“I believe our democracy has the instruments to advance security and protect civil liberties at the same time,” he said.

A paper by Jeffrey R. Cooper on “Curing Analytical Pathologies” (pdf) that was withheld from the CIA web site but posted on the Federation of American Scientists web site last week has now been downloaded tens of thousands of times, suggesting that there is widespread interest in a critical assessment of intelligence analysis.

One of the analytical techniques cited favorably by Cooper (at pp. 48-49) is called “Analysis of Competing Hypotheses” (ACH).

More information about this structured, methodologically rigorous approach to intelligence analysis was presented in a January 2000 paper (pdf) by Air Force MSgt Robert D. Folker, Jr. that was published by the Joint Military Intelligence College. The author compared it with less formal approaches and found that it offered significant advantages.

“At the heart of this controversy is the question of whether intelligence analysis should be accepted as an art (depending largely on subjective, intuitive judgment) or a science (depending largely on structured, systematic analytic methods).”

“Resolving this question is necessary to provide direction and determine an efficient and effective approach to improve analysis,” wrote MSgt. Folker.

“If qualitative intelligence analysis is an art, then efforts to improve it should focus on measuring the accuracy of one’s intuition, selecting those analysts with the best track record, and educating them to become experts in a given field.”

“If, on the other hand, qualitative intelligence analysis is a science, then analysts should be trained to select the appropriate method for a given problem from a variety of scientific methodologies and exploit it to guide them through the analytical process,” he wrote.

Based on empirical tests, the author found reasons to conclude that there is indeed a “scientific” dimension to intelligence analysis that has been neglected, and that intelligence analysis would benefit from more structured approaches.

See “Intelligence Analysis in Theater Joint Intelligence Centers: An Experiment in Applying Structured Methods” by MSgt Robert D. Folker, Jr. (USAF), Joint Military Intelligence College, January 2000.

Some recent reports of the Congressional Research Service obtained by Secrecy News that are not otherwise readily available in the public domain include the following.

“Federal Habeas Corpus: A Brief Legal Overview” (pdf), April 26, 2006.

“Federal Habeas Corpus: An Abridged Sketch” (pdf), April 28, 2006.

“High Altitude Electromagnetic Pulse (HEMP) and High Power Microwave (HPM) Devices: Threat Assessments” (pdf), updated April 14, 2006.

“Direct Assaults Against Presidents, Presidents-Elect, and Candidates” (pdf), updated April 5, 2006.

A new study published by the CIA Center for the Study of Intelligence calls for a fundamental reconceptualization of the process of intelligence analysis in order to overcome the “pathologies” that have rendered it increasingly dysfunctional.

“Curing Analytic Pathologies” (pdf) by Jeffrey R. Cooper has been available up to now in limited circulation in hard copy only. Like several other recent studies critical of U.S. intelligence, it was withheld from the CIA web site. It has now been published on the Federation of American Scientists web site.

Author Cooper provides a thoughtful critique that notes the intrinsic difficulties of intelligence analysis and observes how current organizational practices have exacerbated them.

“The Intelligence Community presently lacks many of the scientific community’s self-correcting features,” he writes.

One major impediment to improving analysis is the hypertrophied secrecy practices that prevail in intelligence organizations.

“Unfortunately, the more that evidence and judgments are restricted in dissemination by compartmentation and distribution limitations, the more likely it is that questionable judgments will pass unchallenged.”

Fundamentally, the whole concept of the “intelligence cycle” — referring to the conventional sequence of collection, processing, analysis and dissemination — is misleading, Cooper argues, and should be jettisoned.

“With its industrial age antecedents, it usually conveys the notion of a self-contained ‘batch’ process rather than a continuous spiral of interactions.”

Taking Cooper’s thesis seriously, one could respectfully say that his new study embodies some of the defects in intelligence analysis that he writes about.

Thus, the study presents what is essentially one moment in an ongoing conversation and freezes it in a nicely produced but static document. This reflects the kind of spurious finality that Cooper dismisses as the “conceit of finished intelligence.”

And then the CIA, by disseminating the document in hardcopy only, sharply limited its audience and effectively precluded a “continuous spiral of interactions” regarding its contents.

That last part, at least, can be corrected.

See “Curing Analytic Pathologies: Pathways to Improved Intelligence Analysis” by Jeffrey R. Cooper, Center for the Study of Intelligence, December 2005 (5 MB PDF).

Author Cooper said he would welcome feedback from interested readers. Comments can be posted here on the Secrecy News blog. Alternatively, Cooper’s contact information can be obtained from Secrecy News.

The latest study by the JASON scientific advisory panel to be approved for public release has the forbidding title “Quantifications of Margins and Uncertainties” (pdf).

The meaning of this term is somewhat elusive, as discussed in the report, but it involves a methodology for assessing the reliability of complex technical systems, and specifically the performance and safety of the U.S. nuclear stockpile in the absence of nuclear explosive testing.

After a lengthy review process, the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration released the March 2005 report in its entirety in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from the Federation of American Scientists.

See “Quantifications of Margins and Uncertainties,” March 23, 2005.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) relied on the JASON report in a recent study on the nuclear weapons stockpile that also included a relatively clear description of QMU.

See “Nuclear Weapons: NNSA Needs to Refine and More Effectively Manage Its New Approach for Assessing and Certifying Nuclear Weapons” (pdf), GAO Report No. GAO-06-261, February 2006.

The somewhat mysterious JASON panel was the subject of Ann Finkbeiner’s well-received new book, “The JASONs: The Secret History of Science’s Postwar Elite.”

Some notable recent reports of the Congressional Research Service include the following:

“Intelligence Issues for Congress” (pdf), updated April 10, 2006.

“Iran: U.S. Concerns and Policy Responses” (pdf), updated April 6, 2006.

“Israel: U.S. Foreign Assistance” (pdf), updated April 26, 2006.

“India-U.S. Relations” (pdf), updated April 6, 2006.

“Indonesia: Domestic Politics, Strategic Dynamics, and American Interests” (pdf), updated April 3, 2006.

Electronic surveillance and physical searches conducted under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) reached a new record high in 2005, according to the latest annual report to Congress on FISA.

“During calendar year 2005, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) approved 2,072 applications for authority to conduct electronic surveillance and physical search,” the new annual report stated.

“The FISC made substantive modifications to the Government’s proposed orders in 61 of those applications. The FISC did not deny, in whole or in part, any application filed by the Government during calendar year 2005.”

In 2004 (pdf), by comparison, there were 1,754 such authorizations.

By definition, these data do not reflect the controversial warrantless surveillance activities that the Bush Administration has conducted outside of the legal framework of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, in what is arguably a criminal violation of the law.

The new annual report to Congress for the first time included data on applications made by the Government for access to business records for foreign intelligence purposes; and on the use of National Security Letters to obtain information concerning United States persons.

See the FISA Annual Report for Calendar Year 2005, dated April 28, 2006.

In the security policy equivalent of shutting down the government, the Defense Security Service announced Friday that it would no longer process applications from industry for new security clearances or reinvestigations of existing clearances.

“Owing to the overwhelming volume of requests for industry personnel security investigations and funding constraints, the Defense Security Service has discontinued accepting industry requests for new personnel security clearances and periodic reinvestigations effective immediately and until further notice,” DSS said in an “urgent notice” sent to cleared contractor organizations on April 28.

“The Defense Industrial Security Clearance Office [DISCO] will reject any requests that are submitted.”

There are an estimated 800,000 defense industry personnel that hold security clearances, and a steadily growing demand for more.

Three thousand new applications for security clearances have already been put on hold, the Washington Post reported on April 29.