All employees of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence are required to obtain authorization before disclosing any intelligence-related information to the public.

“All ODNI personnel are required to submit all official and non-official information intended for public release for review,” says ODNI Instruction 80.04 on “Pre-publication Review of Information to be Publicly Released.”  The Instruction was newly updated on April 8.

Like the new Intelligence Community policy on Media Contacts (Intelligence Directive Bars Unauthorized Contacts with News Media, Secrecy News, April 21), the ODNI pre-publication review policy does not distinguish between classified and unclassified information.

“The goal of pre-publication review is to prevent the unauthorized disclosure of information,” the Instruction says, whether the information is classified or not. It applies broadly to any information generated by ODNI “that discusses operations, business practices, or information related to the ODNI, the IC, or national security.”

The Instruction is binding on current and former ODNI employees, as well as contractors.

Since it pertains to “information” and not just documents, the Instruction also requires employees to gain approval prior to participation in “open discussion venues such as forums, panels, round tables, and question and answer sessions.”

“Pre-publication review must be conducted before any uncleared personnel can receive the information,” the Instruction states.

In order to support a request for pre-publication review, requesters are advised to provide unclassified sources for their proposed disclosures. “ODNI personnel must not use sourcing that comes from known leaks, or unauthorized disclosures of sensitive information.”

Official disclosures by ODNI employees must be reviewed by the ODNI Public Affairs Office to ensure that they are “consistent with the official ODNI position or message.” (Unofficial disclosures, such as privately-authored books, op-eds or blogs are exempt from this consistency requirement.)

The pre-publication review requirement is not optional.

“Failure to comply with this Instruction may result in the imposition of civil and administrative penalties, and may result in the loss of security clearances and accesses.”

The newly updated Instruction will no doubt inhibit informal contacts between ODNI employees and members of the general public, as it is intended to do. Whether that is a wise policy, and whether such indiscriminate barriers to the public serve the real interests of ODNI and the U.S. intelligence community, are separate questions.

Update: ODNI recently published a heavily redacted version of Intelligence Community Directive 304 on “Human Intelligence” (ODNI Seeks to Obscure CIA Role in Human Intelligence, Secrecy News, April 28).

Those redactions were a mistake, an ODNI official said yesterday. The full, unredacted text of the Directive was posted this week on the ODNI website.

When government employees believe that classified information in their possession is improperly classified, they “are encouraged and expected” to challenge its classification status, according to President Obama’s executive order 13526 (section 1.8).  And sometimes they do.

In Fiscal Year 2012, there were 402 classification challenges filed by government employees. One third of them were granted in whole or in part, according to statistics published by the Information Security Oversight Office.

Such classification challenges have the potential to serve as a powerful internal check on over-classification. But that potential is not yet being fully realized, either because the procedure is unknown to employees or because its use is implicitly discouraged.

“We found that many DOJ officials were unaware of DOJ’s formal classification challenge process,” according to a 2013 Department of Justice Inspector General report.

At the Department of Defense, “few instances were encountered where interviewees challenged a classification,” a DoD IG report said. Although DoD guidance “provides for classification challenges, it does not reflect the intent of E.O. 13526 which states that such challenges are ‘encouraged’.”

By contrast, at the Department of Homeland Security, “DHS senior management we interviewed believes that challenging the classification status of information is part of an employee’s job.” Furthermore, a DHS IG review found, the Department “honors a challenger’s request for anonymity and serves as his or her agent in processing the challenge. DHS has a secure capability to receive information, allegations, or classification challenges.”

The provision for classification challenges in the executive order can only be invoked by authorized holders of the information. Members of the general public cannot file such challenges. Although a member of the public may request declassification review of a particular document under existing standards, he or she is not empowered to dispute the validity of those standards or to challenge the classification status of an entire topical area.

One partial exception to this rule is a Department of Energy regulation in 10 C.F.R. 1045.20 that invites the public to propose the declassification of particular items of information classified under the Atomic Energy Act.

Last June 30, the Federation of American Scientists filed such a petition seeking declassification of “the total size of the U.S. nuclear stockpile and the number of weapons dismantled annually as of the end of each fiscal year from FY 2010 through FY 2013.”

We filed the petition after the Department of Defense refused to release the requested data. Requests for current stockpile information were denied even though — in a major departure from prior government secrecy policy — the Obama Administration in May 2010 had disclosed annual stockpile figures for previous years up through FY 2009. (See Pentagon Reverts to Nuclear Stockpile Secrecy, Secrecy News, July 1, 2013.)

So invoking DOE regulation 10 CFR 1045.20, we asked for reconsideration of this refusal. It is apparently the first time that the DOE regulation has ever been employed by a public petitioner since the provision was adopted in the 1990s.

On April 29, the requested information was disclosed in a State Department Fact Sheet. It reported a stockpile total of 4,804 warheads in September 2013, down from the last published figure of 5,113 in September 2009.

(Hans Kristensen of FAS expressed disappointment at the slow pace of stockpile reductions in recent years here. The Government Accountability Office noted ambiguities in the counting of dismantled warheads here.)

Although the release matched our request, providing neither more nor less information than we asked for, that was merely “serendipitous,” said a US government official. The FAS petition was “not a major driver” of the declassification process, he said. “The White House wanted to get this done all along.”

That may be so. (Although if the White House wanted it disclosed all along, it’s not clear why this information was actively withheld each year for the past four years.)

In any case, the DOE regulation inviting public proposals for declassification is assuming new importance. It now serves as a designated feeder to a new interagency review process for declassification of so-called Formerly Restricted Data (FRD), which is a category of information classified under the Atomic Energy Act.

At least one new petition for declassification has recently been submitted by the National Security Archive, we have another one in the works, and increased public use of the procedure is anticipated.

The DOE regulation extends the power of classification challenges to members of the public. As such, it represents a “best practice” that could usefully be replicated in other agencies, and in the context of national security information generally (not just nuclear matters).

Of course, the key to a successful classification challenge is that it must be reviewed impartially by someone other than the original classifier.

 

Updated below

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence is attempting to conceal unclassified information about the structure and function of U.S. intelligence agencies, including the leading role of the Central Intelligence Agency in collecting human intelligence.

Last month, ODNI issued a heavily redacted version of its Intelligence Community Directive 304 on “Human Intelligence.” The redacted document was produced in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from Robert Sesek, and posted on ScribD.

The new redactions come as a surprise because most of the censored text had already been published by ODNI itself in an earlier iteration of the same unclassified Directive from 2008. That document has since been removed from the ODNI website but it is preserved on the FAS website here.

Meanwhile, the current version of the Directive — without any redactions — is also available in the public domain, despite the attempt to suppress it. (Thanks to Jeffrey Richelson for the pointer.)

A comparison of the redacted and unredacted versions shows that ODNI is now seeking to withhold the fact that the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency functions as the National HUMINT Manager, among other things.

ODNI also censored the statement that the Central Intelligence Agency “Collects, analyzes, produces, and disseminates foreign intelligence and counterintelligence, including information obtained through clandestine means.”

Among intelligence agencies, in my experience, ODNI is usually the most responsive to Freedom of Information Act requests, while CIA leads the competition to be the least helpful and cooperative. In this case, it appears that CIA’s pattern of defiance overcame ODNI’s better judgment.

Update, May 8, 2014: The redactions to ICD 304 were a mistake, an ODNI official said. The full, unredacted text of the Directive was posted May 6 on the ODNI website.

Last week the Senate Intelligence Committee voted to submit the 480-page executive summary, findings and conclusions of its five-year investigation into the post-9/11 CIA Detention and Interrogation Program for declassification review. But in an obvious conflict of interest, the review is expected to be performed by the CIA itself.

“The report exposes brutality that stands in stark contrast to our values as a nation. It chronicles a stain on our history that must never again be allowed to happen,” said Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the chair the Senate Intelligence Committee, in an April 3 statement. “This is not what Americans do.”

The standard process for declassification therefore puts the CIA in the awkward and untenable position of deciding whether to enable (or to prevent) the release of information that portrays the Agency itself, or some of its personnel, as having engaged in behavior that was brutal, lawless, and unaccountable.

Instead, it is the White House, not the CIA, that should lead the declassification process, said Sen. Feinstein, as reported today by McClatchy Newspapers.

“As this report covers a covert action program under the authority of the President and National Security Council, I respectfully request that the White House take the lead in the declassification process,” Sen. Feinstein wrote. (Feinstein: CIA should not lead declassification review of report about interrogation tactics by Ali Watkins, McClatchy, April 8).

However, it may not be possible to exclude CIA from the declassification process altogether, since it was CIA that generated and classified most or all of the information at issue. While the President certainly has the authority to declassify the report, the White House would be unlikely to possess the detailed knowledge of the underlying records that would be needed to do so independently.

But there are ways to minimize and counteract CIA’s conflict of interest in declassification.

First of all, the Senate Intelligence Committee will be in a position to make its own judgment as to the validity of any CIA redactions of the report. Unlike the typical FOIA requester who pursues a document he has never seen, the Senate Committee knows exactly what is in the report, which it produced. If CIA moves to withhold information in ways that are frivolous, questionable or unfounded in genuine national security concerns, the Committee will recognize that immediately and will be able to elevate those specific disagreements with the CIA to the White House for resolution.

Another possible option would be for the Senate Committee to engage the services of the Public Interest Declassification Board (PIDB).

That Board’s statutory purpose is, among other things, “To review and make recommendations to the President in a timely manner with respect to any congressional request, made by the committee of jurisdiction, to declassify certain records or to reconsider a declination to declassify specific records.”

While the PIDB, which is made up of non-governmental personnel, cannot declassify anything on its own authority, it could serve to backstop the regular declassification process with an independent perspective, and could also provide political cover for the President to overrule an unwarranted refusal to declassify.

In 2006, members of the Senate Intelligence Committee asked the Public Interest Declassification Board to review an Administration decision to classify portions of two Committee reports on prewar intelligence on Iraq. At the time, the Board said it doubted that it could carry out the review without White House authorization.

So Senators Ron Wyden and Russ Feingold introduced legislative language to clarify that the Board is authorized to review declassification proposals — or evaluate agency refusals to declassify — at the initiative of a congressional committee of jurisdiction. Their measure was enacted into law in the FY 2010 Intelligence Authorization Act.

While this function has never yet been performed by the Board, it remains available to Congress at its discretion.

“The classification system exists to protect national security, but its outdated design and implementation often hinders that mission,” wrote PIDB chair Amb. Nancy E. Soderberg in a November 2012 letter to President Obama transmitting a Board report.

“The system is compromised by over-classification and, not coincidentally, by increasing instances of unauthorized disclosures. This undermines the credibility of the classification system, blurs the focus on what truly requires protection, and fails to serve the public interest. Notwithstanding the best efforts of information security professionals, the current system is outmoded and unsustainable; transformation is not simply advisable but imperative,” she wrote.

Secrets and Leaks: The Dilemma of State Secrecy is the title of a new (2013) book by Princeton political scientist Rahul Sagar.

The book has many interesting features and develops some novel arguments on leaks. I reviewed it for the Lawfare blog.

Classified design drawings used in the manufacture of nuclear weapons have not been properly and reliably maintained by nuclear weapons labs managed by the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), the Department of Energy Inspector General said in a report last week.

“NNSA sites could not always locate as-built product definitions or associated drawings for nuclear weapons and components in official records repositories.” At the Pantex Plant, “officials were concerned and surprised at the difficulty in finding as-built product definitions for the nuclear weapons,” the DoE IG report said.

At Los Alamos, the information system “allowed changes to classified nuclear weapons drawings without using an approved change notice. This practice could permit unauthorized changes to weapons drawings.” Questioned about undocumented changes to a particular weapon drawing, “officials were unable to explain why changes were made, but told us that they ‘assumed’ the changes were needed.”

“Over the decades of nuclear weapons development, neither NNSA nor its sites treated the maintenance of original nuclear weapons… information as a priority,” wrote DoE Inspector General Gregory Friedman.

“Not having complete and accurate [weapon production] information can have significant effects on surveillance and safety, and can lead to time-consuming and expensive recovery efforts.” See National Nuclear Security Administration Nuclear Weapons Systems Configuration Management, Audit Report DOE/IG-0902, March 26, 2014.

“NNSA is on a trajectory towards crisis,” said Norman Augustine, the venerable engineer and aerospace executive who serves as co-chair of the Congressional Advisory Panel on the Governance of the Nuclear Security Enterprise.

“The ‘NNSA experiment’ involving creation of a semi-autonomous organization [within the Department of Energy] has failed,” he said.

NNSA “has lost credibility and the trust of the national leadership and customers in DOD that it can deliver needed weapons and critical nuclear facilities on schedule and on budget,” Mr. Augustine said. He spoke at a March 26 briefing for the House Armed Services Committee.

The problems are not entirely attributable to NNSA itself, he said, but are due in part to an eroding consensus concerning the role of nuclear weapons in national security policy.

“At the root of the challenges are complacency and the loss of focus on the nuclear mission by the Nation and its leadership following the end of the Cold War,” Mr. Augustine said.

He cited “the absence of a widely accepted understanding of, and appreciation for, the role of nuclear weapons and nuclear technology in the 21st century, with the resultant well-documented and atrophied conditions of plans for our strategic deterrent’s future– in DOD as well as in DOE.”

The decision by the Central Intelligence Agency to terminate public access to its translations of foreign news reports at the end of 2013 continues to reverberate among frustrated former consumers.

The translations had been performed by the Open Source Center (OSC) at CIA, and marketed to subscribers through the NTIS World News Connection (WNC). Their absence has left a felt void, particularly since the daily products had been continuously available to the public (by paid subscription) since 1974.

“The first three months of 2014 have seen so many crucial international stories that current WNC Daily Report public access could have helped to illuminate,” said one disappointed subscriber. “OSC short-sightedness is mind-boggling.”

An effort to reverse the CIA move and to restore public access is beginning to take shape, but the prospects for success are uncertain.

Besides translations, the Open Source Center also produces original analysis of open sources. Much of this material is unclassified and could be released. Occasionally, some of it leaks.

In a marvelous piece described (but not disclosed) by Michael Rubin in Commentary on March 19, the Open Source Center reportedly performed a critical analysis of the music that was performed at the Sochi Olympics and Paralympics.

“The Open Source Center’s Russia analysts… observed that during the Olympic Games’ closing ceremonies, Russian authorities played an instrumental version of a song that called for Alaska’s return to Russia.”

A Wall Street Journal op-ed by Samantha Ravich and Carol Haave praised the value of open source intelligence and called for new investment in this area (“Nukes and ‘Snowden-Proof’ Intelligence,” March 17).

“Crafting new analytic methods for acquiring and exploiting… open-source scientific literature is crucial for understanding the pace, scale and scope of other countries’ nuclear-weapons aspirations,” they wrote, while open source intelligence “can often give us better insight into foreign leaders’ motivation and intent” than some other modes of collection and analysis.

But today’s CIA has proven to be an unreliable custodian of the open source intelligence enterprise, having deprived the public of access to its products for the first time in four decades. If there is ever to be a resurgence of open source intelligence, it probably ought to be managed and housed far from CIA.

By leaking classified intelligence documents, Edward Snowden transformed public awareness of the scale and scope of U.S. intelligence surveillance programs. But his actions are proving to be no less consequential for national security secrecy policy.

“These leaks have forced the Intelligence Community to rethink our approach to transparency and secrecy,” said Robert S. Litt, General Counsel at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. He spoke at a March 18 Freedom of Information Day program sponsored by the Collaboration on Government Secrecy at American University Washington College of Law.

Mr. Litt made it clear that he did not approve of the Snowden leaks, which he said were unlawful and had “seriously damaged our national security.” Yet he stressed that the leaks have also prompted a reconsideration of previously accepted patterns of secrecy.

“We have had to reassess how we strike the balance between the need to keep secret the sensitive sources, methods and targets of our intelligence activities, and the goal of transparency with the American people about the rules and policies governing those activities.”

“One lesson that I have drawn from the recent events… is that we would likely have suffered less damage from the leaks had we been more forthcoming about some of our activities, and particularly about the policies and decisions behind those activities,” Mr. Litt said.  (Director of National Intelligence James Clapper made the same point to Eli Lake of the Daily Beast last month.)

“Going forward, I believe that the Intelligence Community is going to need to be much more forward-leaning in what we tell the American people about what we do,” Mr. Litt said. “We need to scrutinize more closely what truly needs to be classified in order to protect what needs to be protected. And we need to move beyond the mindset of merely reacting to formal requests that we make information public, to a mindset of proactively making available as much information as we can, consistent with the need to protect sources and methods.”

“Greater disclosure to the public is necessary to restore the American people’s trust that intelligence activities are not only lawful and important to protecting our national security, but that they are appropriate and proportional in light of the privacy interests at stake. In the long run, our ability to protect the public requires that we have the public’s support,” Mr. Litt said.

While Mr. Litt’s remarks conveyed an overall message of beneficence, responsiveness, and good citizenship, they also had some peculiar features.

It is disconcerting to realize that the reassessment of classification policy described by Mr. Litt was not prompted by the diligent exercise of congressional oversight or by judicial review or by ordinary advocacy. Rather it was explicitly inspired by the Snowden leaks, which Mr. Litt described as “criminal.” The upshot is that leaks emerge as a uniquely powerful tool for shaping intelligence classification policy, while conventional checks and balances appear all but irrelevant by comparison.

Moreover, the purpose of the newfound push for greater transparency seems to be instrumental, not principled. In other words, it is driven by tactical considerations, not by statutory requirements or any other objective norm.

“I strongly believe that the best way to prevent the damage that leakers can cause is by increased transparency on our part,” Mr. Litt said. “Transparency can both lessen the incentive for disaffected employees to disclose our activities improperly, and provide the public appropriate context to evaluate leaks when they occur.”

That implies that what is needed is only as much transparency as it takes to achieve these imprecise and transient goals. It is a unilateral move that can be unilaterally reversed.

And then there is the fact that Mr. Litt’s rethinking of classification policy implies no new institutional reforms or externally-imposed constraints. Instead, the very same people who have classified too much up to now are suddenly expected to change course and to disclose more. It is not immediately clear how or why that would happen.

“There is no question that overclassification of information is a genuine problem,” Mr. Litt said. “So how do we deal with the problem of overclassification? I think that there are three principal steps we can take.”

“The first is to change the culture. We need high-level management emphasis on the problem of overclassification,” he said. To his credit, Mr. Litt has helped provide such emphasis.

“Second, we need to continue our efforts at proactive transparency– at reviewing information that we have historically protected to see whether, in fact, the overall public interest would better be served by releasing the information.” Significantly, however, he refrained from providing specific performance goals or benchmarks by which future progress could be measured.

“Finally, I think that those in the agencies who are responsible for responding to FOIA requests, and who are representing the government in FOIA litigation, need to look critically at all potentially responsive documents that are classified,” Mr. Litt said. “We should focus not on whether we can protect information, but whether we should.”

This is an interesting formulation. Most FOIA officers do not have authority to declassify records, and the adversarial nature of the FOIA process is rarely conducive to self-critical analysis of established agency policies even by more senior officials. But sometimes it is.

In 1997, the Federation of American Scientists filed suit against the CIA for release of the intelligence budget total for that year. The CIA ultimately decided that it could not defend its position of classifying the figure, according to an internal draft statement that was prepared for DCI George Tenet and released by the Clinton Library just last week.

“In order to defend this lawsuit,” the Tenet statement read, “I, as head of the Intelligence Community, would have had to sign a declaration to the court that release of the figure in question could cause serious damage to the national security. I found that, in good conscience, I could not attest to that statement.”

But such judgments are fluid and can be fleeting. Two years later, in response to another lawsuit for the 1999 budget figure, Director Tenet had no trouble declaring under oath that “Disclosure of… the total appropriation reasonably could be expected to cause damage to the national security in several ways.”

So spontaneous gestures of openness and transparency, as welcome as they may be, are imperfect substitutes for systemic change and external accountability.

News organizations have now released some 1,300 pages of classified records leaked by Edward Snowden, according to a tally by cryptome.org.  In response, US intelligence agencies have declassified and disclosed approximately twice that many.

“Our commitment to increased transparency will continue,” Mr. Litt said.

Even when the Central Intelligence Agency possesses a releasable document in a softcopy format, the Agency typically refuses to release the softcopy version in response to Freedom of Information Act requests, and insists on providing a hardcopy version of the document instead.

A federal judge said last week that that may be a violation of law.

The issue arose in a FOIA lawsuit seeking electronic copies of 419 articles from the in-house CIA journal Studies in Intelligence. The lawsuit was brought by Jeffrey Scudder, an information technology specialist who has worked in the intelligence community for 23 years.

Mr. Scudder told the court that he has detailed knowledge of CIA information systems and capabilities. In his FOIA requests, he was able to inform the CIA FOIA staff “as to where within the [CIA] computer systems the electronically stored documents [that he is requesting] are located.”

However, CIA refused to release the documents in the requested electronic format. Instead, the Agency proposed to print them out and to release them only in hard copy, ostensibly for security reasons. But this practice may be inconsistent with the requirements of the FOIA.

“Congress anticipated that recalcitrant agencies would resist being responsive to requesters’ format choices,” wrote Judge Beryl A. Howell of the DC District Court last week, and so Congress required agencies to make “reasonable efforts” to accommodate requesters’ preferences.

“Where, as here, an agency asserts nearly twenty years after the passage of the E-FOIA Amendments that it cannot provide any electronic formats because of a lengthy process the agency has created, a court is required by the FOIA to evaluate that process to determine if it meets the statutorily mandated ‘reasonable efforts’ standard.”

“The defendant [CIA] avers that if it were ordered to honor the plaintiff’s [FOIA] request [for soft copy records], it would have to print the existing electronic documents to paper and then rescan them into electronic documents so that they may be reproduced and released on removable media,” Judge Howell summarized.

In fact, she wrote in her March 12 opinion, “Under this Rube-Goldbergian process, the same document, even if unclassified, must be printed from the defendant’s classified system in paper form at least twice…, and rescanned into the same classified system at least twice….”

Not only that, but CIA would charge the requester extra for its trouble. “As a result of this process, the defendant [CIA] asserts that the cost of electronic production to the plaintiff would be higher than that of producing the records in paper format, since the defendant would incur all of the costs associated with the paper production as well as the additional costs of re-scanning the printed responsive records, and the cost of any removable media provided to the plaintiff.”

But all of that is ridiculous, said Mr. Scudder, who contended that CIA is attempting to “frustrate [the] core purpose [of the FOIA] through administrative gimmicks designed to impose unreasonable financial burdens upon requesters.”

“The only reason CIA does not produce electronic versions of documents responsive to FOIA requests is that they choose not to do so,” said attorney Mark S. Zaid, who represents Mr. Scudder. “There is no technical reason to prevent it.”

Crucially, Judge Howell determined that “A FOIA request for records in an existing format should not be frustrated due to the agency’s decision to adopt a production process that nonetheless renders release in that format highly burdensome.”

Judge Howell found that CIA’s understanding of its legal obligations and of the role of the Court was “incorrect” in various respects, and she concluded that several of its factual assertions were materially disputed.

“The plaintiff [Mr. Scudder] has, for example, alleged that he has personally used the defendant’s classified system to create a PDF file, something the defendant has stated is impossible,” Judge Howell noted.

In view of the unresolved factual disputes, and considering that “both parties allege bad faith on the part of the other,” Judge Howell refused to grant summary judgment to either side.

Instead, she granted Mr. Scudder’s motion for discovery, and the case will proceed to trial.

While the substance of the case concerns CIA’s information and FOIA practices, the Department of Justice that made its own independent decision to defend CIA’s handling of the Scudder FOIA request.  The skeptical comments voiced by Judge Howell may be understood as an implicit criticism of that Justice Department decision.

This week is Sunshine Week, an annual celebration of open government values. As it happens, however, the federal government is closed today due to snow.

Last June, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff issued a classified “execute order” to authorize and initiate a military operation.

The nature, scope and duration of the military operation could not immediately be determined — even the title of the order is classified — but it evidently pertains to the conduct of military cyberspace activities.

The existence of the previously undisclosed execute order was revealed last week in a new Air Force Instruction.

“Classified processes governing C2 [command and control] of AF [Air Force] offensive and defensive cyberspace operations conducted by AF Cyber Mission Forces are addressed in a classified CJCS [Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff] Execute Order (title classified) issued on 21 Jun 13,” said Air Force Instruction 10-1701, entitled “Command and Control (C2) for Cyberspace Operations,” dated 5 March 2014.

An execute order goes beyond planning or preparation for conflict, and represents the commencement of a military operation.

The formal definition of an execute order (or EXORD) is “an order issued by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at the direction of the Secretary of Defense, to implement a decision by the President to initiate military operations,” according to the official Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms (JP 1-02).

“Execution begins when the President decides to use a military option to resolve a crisis,” according to Joint Publication 5-0 on Joint Operation Planning. “Only the President or SecDef can authorize the CJCS to issue an execute order (EXORD).

“Execution continues until the operation is terminated or the mission is accomplished.”

“The CJCS-published EXORD defines the unnamed day on which operations commence or are scheduled to commence (D-day) and the specific time an operation begins (H-hour) and directs execution of the OPORD [operation order].”

“The CJCS’s EXORD is a record communication that authorizes execution of the COA [course of action] approved by the President or SecDef and detailed in the supported commander’s OPORD,” explained JP 5-0.

In response to questions from the Senate Armed Services Committee, Vice Adm. Michael S. Rogers, the nominee for Commander, US Cyber Command (and Director, NSA), said that “Geographic combatant commanders already have authority to direct and execute certain Defensive Cyberspace Operations (DCO) within their own networks.”

Judging from the new Air Force Instruction, however, the June 2013 execute order extends to offensive cyberspace operations as well.

All or most execute orders naturally start out as classified documents. But sooner or later, they are declassified.

A March 2011 execute order for Libya Contingency Operations can be seen here.

A January 1991 execute order for Operation Desert Storm, incongruously signed “Warm Regards, Colin Powell,” is here.

A rare reference to another currently classified execute order appeared in a paper published in Joint Force Quarterly (issue 69, April 2013, p. 53): “In compliance with the guidelines outlined in the Global Response Force Execute Order, JCSE [Joint Communications Support Element] maintains an alert-postured force that can deploy and have its communications packages fully operational within hours of notification for an emerging requirement.” That execute order dates from September 2012, and is classified Secret.

The Senate Armed Services Committee asked Adm. Rogers whether there was a need for greater transparency concerning “the nature of cyber warfare, and the balance between offensive and defensive capabilities.”

Adm. Rogers replied: “I believe the recent disclosures of a large portion of our intelligence and military operational history may provide us with [an] opportunity to engage both the American public and our international partners in discussion of the balance of offense and defense, the nature of cyber warfare, norms of accepted and unacceptable behavior in cyberspace, and so forth.”

“As cyberspace matures as a warfighting domain, I believe our classification policies will also evolve to support growing domestic and international partnerships and relationships,” Adm. Rogers wrote.

Now that annual disclosure of the intelligence budget total has become routine, some legislators are seeking more transparency on intelligence spending.

As anticipated, the requested U.S. intelligence budget for Fiscal Year 2015 that was submitted to Congress this week fell below the current year’s level and continued a decline from the post-9/11 high that it reached in FY 2010.

The “base” funding request for the National Intelligence Program (NIP) for FY 2015 was $45.6 billion, while the base funding request for the Military Intelligence Program (MIP) was $13.3 billion. (“Base” funding does not include funding for “overseas contingency operations,” which is to be requested later in the year.)

By comparison, the base funding request for the NIP in FY 2014 was $48.2 billion, and the base funding request for the MIP was $14.6 billion. Additional data on intelligence budget appropriations can be found here.

An unclassified summary of the FY 2015 National Intelligence Program budget request (that was included in the overall budget request) implied that the publication of the request was a voluntary act of transparency.

“Reflecting the Administration’s commitment to transparency and open government, the Budget continues the practice begun in the 2012 Budget of disclosing the President’s aggregate funding request for the NIP,” the summary said.

In fact, however, the publication of the NIP budget request is required by law, since it was included in the FY 2010 Intelligence Authorization Act by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (Public Law 111-259, section 601). An ODNI news release on the budget request correctly cited the legal requirement to publicly disclose the budget request figure.

On the other hand, there is no corresponding legal requirement for the Department of Defense to publish the budget request for the Military Intelligence Program. But DoD has done so voluntarily since 2012, a move that represents a genuine reduction in official secrecy by the Obama Administration.

Even so, dozens of Congressmen say that there is still too much secrecy in intelligence spending. The Intelligence Budget Transparency Act of 2014 (HR 3855), introduced by Rep. Cynthia M. Lummis (R-WY), would require disclosure of the total budget of each of the individual 16 agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community.

“Writing checks without any idea of where the money is going is bad policy,” said Rep. Lummis in a January 14, 2014 release. “Disclosing the top-line budgets of each of our intelligence agencies promotes basic accountability among the agencies charged with protecting Americans without compromising our national security interests.”

“The top-line intelligence budgets for America’s 16 intelligence agencies are unknown to the American taxpayer and largely unknown to the Members of Congress who represent them,” added Rep. Peter Welch (D-VT), a co-sponsor of the bill. “It’s led to dubious policies, wasted money and questionable effectiveness. Requiring the public disclosure of top-line intelligence spending is an essential first step in assuring that our taxpayers and our national security interests are well served.”

Interestingly, the bill’s 59 congressional co-sponsors include a roughly equal number of Republicans and Democrats. Republican legislators have not previously been known to favor disclosure of individual agency intelligence budgets, with the exception of the late Sen. Arlen Specter, a former chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who once advocated release of the NRO budget total.

A February 12 letter to President Obama asking him to release the individual agency budget figures was signed by 62 members of Congress.

Many of the classified portions of the new Department of Defense budget request were tabulated in “Read the Pentagon’s $59 Billion ‘Black Budget'” by Brandy Zadrozny, The Daily Beast, March 6.

Could Congress legally compel the executive branch to disclose classified opinions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court?  Maybe not, a new analysis from the Congressional Research Service concludes.

The CRS report — entitled “Disclosure of FISA Court Opinions: Select Legal Issues” — has little to do with FISA Court opinions in particular. It is an analysis of the overlapping authorities of the three branches of government to classify or disclose national security information.

“The central issue is the extent to which Congress may regulate control over access to national security information, including mandating that the executive branch disclose specific materials — a question not definitively resolved by the courts,” the report says.

This is not a new question, but it is usefully reviewed and summarized by the CRS report.

The issue arises because “The executive branch has argued that the Commander-in-Chief clause bestows the President with independent power to control access to national security information. As such, according to this line of reasoning, Congress’s generally broad ability to require disclosure of agency documents may be constrained when it implicates national security.”

Although no statute regulating classification has ever been ruled unconstitutional, “Congress’s power to compel the release of information held by the executive branch might have limits,” CRS said. “There may be a limited sphere of information that courts will protect from public disclosure,” just as they have exempted properly classified information in FOIA cases, and state secrets in other cases.

The unsurprising bottom line is that “proposals that allow the executive branch to first redact information from FISA opinions before public release appear to be on firm constitutional ground.” However, the CRS report said, “a proposal that mandated all past FISA opinions be released in their entirety — without any redactions by the executive branch — might raise a separation of powers issue.”

All of this may seem academic and politically inapt since there are no active proposals in Congress to compel public release of FISA court opinions that are completely unreviewed or unredacted.

In fact, Congress has arguably been derelict in failing to press more assertively for release of legal rulings of the FISA court, and for disclosure of the general contours of the telephony bulk collection program. Had Congress forcefully required the publication of such information, much of the angst and turmoil of the past nine months that resulted from the Snowden disclosures might have been avoided.

The new CRS report has a couple of other noteworthy omissions.

It does not mention the authority claimed by the congressional intelligence committees to publicly disclose classified information without executive branch approval. (See Section 8 of Senate Resolution 400 of the 94th Congress, 1976.)  Though this authority has never yet been exercised, it remains available in principle.

The report also does not mention some recent instances when Congress has successfully compelled executive branch declassification while also navigating around potential constitutional obstacles.

So, for example, the Senate Intelligence Committee enacted a requirement in the FY 2010 Intelligence Authorization Act (Section 601) that the executive branch must disclose the annual budget request for the National Intelligence Program when the annual budget is submitted. Previously, the intelligence budget request had always been classified information. To save constitutional appearances and assuage the concerns of executive branch lawyers, the Act did include a provision for the President to waive the requirement on national security grounds — but he has never yet done so.

Last week, the Electronic Privacy and Information Center obtained copies of declassified Justice Department reports on the use of pen registers and trap and trace devices under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act from 2000 to 2013.