Judging from appearances, the conduct of congressional oversight of intelligence is usually professional, placid and rather dull. Just beneath the surface, however, the process is sometimes filled with tension, conflict and human foible.

In her day, Diane S. Roark, a Republican staffer on the House Intelligence Committee from 1985 to 2003, elicited an impressive amount of hostility from intelligence agencies. Last year, her name surfaced again in connection with the pending prosecution of former National Security Agency official Thomas Drake, who was charged with unlawful retention of national defense information.

“Regarding Congressional oversight, Members of Congress were supportive” of intelligence, said former NSA deputy director Barbara McNamara in a December 15, 2003 statement (pdf) to the 9/11 Commission. “But while some staffers were good, some staffers were overly intrusive and vindictive.”

Diane Roark fell in the latter category, as far as Ms. McNamara was concerned. “Ms. Rourke [sic] would form alliances with individuals in the IC and have them serve as her spies. These spies were easy to spot — they were people who really believed in their own programs as being the best and needing support from Congress,” Ms. McNamara said.

One of those purported alliances, it later turned out, was with Thomas Drake. According to the April 2010 indictment of Mr. Drake, he “had a self-described ‘close, emotional friendship’ and ‘different and special’
relationship with Person A [i.e., Ms. Roark] that included the unauthorized disclosure of unclassified and classified information to [Ms. Roark] while [Ms. Roark] worked as a congressional staffer and after [Ms. Roark’s] retirement in May 2002.”

Their relationship was based on shared values, her attorney told the Washington Post. “He was very concerned about waste and mismanagement and so was she.” (“Act of honor, or betrayal?” by Ellen Nakashima, Washington Post, July 14, 2010).

Ms. Roark’s concerns and her actions won her a visit from the FBI in July 2007. FBI agents seized “emails and other items” from her residence, according to a recent status report (pdf) in the Drake prosecution. She is not charged with any crime.

House Intelligence Committee chairman (and later DCIA) Porter J. Goss praised Ms. Roark’s career performance in a March 20, 2002 floor statement.

“Diane is known as a very dedicated, tough-minded program monitor who digs into the issues and forces agencies to see and understand what they sometimes miss themselves. She is also known as a very knowledgeable taskmaster, and her arrival at an agency is often anticipated with apprehension,” Mr. Goss said.

“I think that this is the type of oversight capability that the American people are entitled to and should demand. I cannot think of any greater tribute for Diane than knowing that agency leaders throughout the community recognize that her instincts and assessments are sound,” he said.

But from the perspective of Ms. McNamara of the NSA, “There is a fine line between what is professional disagreement and what is personal animosity.”

Some recently published resources on congressional oversight of intelligence include the following.

“Intelligence Issues for Congress” (pdf), Congressional Research Service, updated January 20, 2011.

“Legal Perspectives on Congressional Notification” (pdf), hearing before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, October 22, 2009 (published December 2010).

“Congress’s Right to Counsel in Intelligence Oversight” by Kathleen Clark, University of Illinois Law Review (forthcoming).

The DNI Open Source Center has produced an updated directory of North Korean diplomatic missions (pdf) in Europe and Central Asia.

“The directory includes photos, when available, of overseas diplomatic personnel as well as such standard information as facility addresses, phone and fax numbers, and e-mail addresses. Personnel changes and new ambassadorial appointments also have been noted when relevant.”

A copy was obtained by Secrecy News.  See “North Korea– 2010 Overseas Diplomatic Directory for Europe and Central Asia,” Open Source Center, December 29, 2010.

The new National Declassification Center (NDC) reviewed 83 million pages of classified historical records in 2010, but so far only 12 million of those pages have been declassified and released to the open shelves at the National Archives, according to a new report (pdf) from the NDC.

At a time when currently classified records are being leaked and published online nearly every day, it may seem quaint that government agencies are investing time and money to painstakingly review records that are more than 25 years old for possible declassification.  But the NDC process is more productive than leaks have been to date, yielding millions of newly disclosed pages, not just thousands.

The NDC has been directed by the President to process more than 400 million pages of historical records for declassification and public release before the end of 2013.  The results to date, which leave a large majority of records beyond public reach even after review, call into question the criteria that are being used to process the records for declassification.  The release rate of 14% (i.e., 12 million pages made public thus far out of 83 million reviewed) seems astonishingly low for 25 year old records.  See “Bi-annual Report on Operations of the National Declassification Center,” January 1, 2010 – December 31, 2010.

The NDC report also mentions that “We began to coordinate two government-wide special collection reviews for the declassification and release of material associated with the Pentagon Papers (40th anniversary) and the Berlin Wall construction (50th anniversary).”

Remarkably, the bulk of the Pentagon Papers, which were leaked in 1971 by Daniel Ellsberg, never formally underwent declassification review, as noted recently by historian John Prados.  This means that every public and private library in the country that has a copy of the Papers is technically in possession of currently classified material.

If meaningful international agreements are reached to limit or reduce the emission of greenhouse gases (GHG) such as carbon dioxide that contribute to global warming, then it will be necessary to verify compliance with such agreements.  This turns out to be a challenging problem, involving technical, analytical and political dimensions.  The JASON scientific advisory panel was asked to investigate the options.

“For cooperative countries, the technology currently exists to directly monitor GHG emissions sufficiently well on an annual basis to support U.S. decision-making on international agreements,” the JASONs found (pdf).

On the other hand, “For non-cooperative countries, there is currently no demonstrated capability to estimate country-level emissions using direct measurements of atmospheric CO2 that has sufficient accuracy to support monitoring of compliance with international agreements.”

Measuring devices, including satellite-borne devices, can be used to determine atmospheric concentrations of CO2, a principal greenhouse gas.  But to estimate the original emission based on observed concentrations, it is necessary to model the transport of the gas from the point of emission to the point of measurement, a difficult task which in turn depends on accurate meteorological data and a correct understanding of natural CO2 emission and absorption processes.  “In many cases, modeling uncertainties will dominate measurement uncertainty,” the JASONs noted.  “Modeling errors are the most insidious problem as they will often not give any indication of their presence….”

An alternative (or complement) to direct measurements is to monitor changes in the energy infrastructure of countries of interest, including signs of development of alternative energy sources and indicators of fossil fuel consumption.  “Technical methods currently exist that can be used to monitor energy infrastructure of large GHG emitting countries.  They benefit from, but do not require, the cooperation of the emitting country.”

The JASONs recommended that the U.S. government “acquire and maintain a detailed technical knowledge of the energy infrastructure of countries with large greenhouse gas emissions, and identify and observe the signatures needed to quantify their energy use.”  A new organization may be needed to fulfill this task, they said.

The new JASON report, which was performed under contract to the National Nuclear Security Administration, builds upon a related 2010 study by the National Research Council and an otherwise unidentified “recent study by the MEDEA group,” an intelligence community advisory body.

A copy of the JASON report was obtained by Secrecy News.  See “Methods for Remote Determination of CO2 Emissions,” JASON Report No. JSR-10-300, January 2011.

Economic vitality and national security are now inextricably intertwined, a new report (pdf) from the Congressional Research Service explains.

“There is scarcely an economic policy issue before the Congress that does not affect U.S. national security.  Likewise, there is scarcely a national security policy issue that does not affect the economy.”

“The United States has long been accustomed to pursuing a ‘rich man’s’ approach to national security,” the CRS report said. “The country could field an overwhelming fighting force and combine it with economic power and leadership in global affairs to bring to bear far greater resources than any other country against any threat to the nation’s security…. [In the past,] policies for economic growth and issues such as unemployment have been viewed as domestic problems largely separate from considerations of national security.”

“The world, however, has changed.  Globalization, the rise of China, the prospect of an unsustainable debt burden, unprecedented federal budget deficits, the success of mixed economies with both state-owned and private businesses, huge imbalances in international trade and capital flows, and high unemployment have brought economics more into play in considerations of national security.”

Consequently, “In national security, the economy is both the enabler and the constraint.”

The 77-page CRS report examines the intersection of economics and national security across a range of policies, including trade, education, research and development, and so on.  The text is occasionally prosaic (e.g., “trade represents an exchange of goods or services between two or more willing parties”) but it is also full of detailed and interesting information that may be useful to those who have not already made up their minds on this set of issues.

See “Economics and National Security: Issues and Implications for U.S. Policy,” Congressional Research Service, January 4, 2011.

The Chinese Communist Party employs a growing network of student informants who monitor political expression on university campuses and denounce professors and students for politically subversive or unconventional views, according to a recent report (pdf) from the Central Intelligence Agency.

Established in 1989 after the Tienanmen Square protests, “the principal objective of the Student Informant System [SIS] is to ensure campus stability and to control the debate and discussion of politically sensitive issues,” the CIA report said.  “Students have had their scholarships revoked and their academic records penalized because of information provided by student informants that is sometimes highly subjective, such as facial expressions.”

“The SIS employs traditional political spying and denunciation techniques, seeking to create a ‘white terror’ (bai se kong bu) environment on campus — in which students and teachers fear surveillance more than arrest — to achieve and maintain influence and control.”

The SIS has been met with both scholarly criticism and popular resistance, the CIA report said.  A leading academic journal contended last year that “The information reported by student informants is neither accurate nor objective” and that “promoting a culture of denunciation may become an obstacle to learning.”  Meanwhile, “some Chinese students are resisting government efforts at political spying and rejecting the culture of denunciation.  Netizens are publishing rosters of student informants online, resulting in the student informants being denounced by peers.”  Yet “the government appears determined to continue to use the SIS as a tool to ensure political stability on Chinese campuses.”

A copy of the CIA report was obtained by Secrecy News.  See “China: Student Informant System to Expand, Limiting School Autonomy, Free Expression,” CIA Open Source Works, November 23, 2010.

“Do not visit the WikiLeaks site,” the Office of Senate Security told Senate employees and contractors in a memorandum (pdf) that was circulated to Senate offices this past week.

Senate employees are free to access news reports that may discuss classified material, but they were instructed not to download the “underlying documents that themselves are marked classified (including classified documents publicly available on the WikiLeaks and other websites).”

The “Updated WikiLeaks Guidance” was issued by the Office of Senate Security.  The one-page memo is undated, but a Senate staffer said it was received in Senate offices within the last few days.

It represents an implicit view that respect for executive branch classification procedures should be the Senate’s paramount concern here, trumping open deliberation over the contents of the leaked materials or any other considerations.

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In a paradoxical way, the WikiLeaks project is dependent upon the very secrecy system that it works to disrupt.  Without secrecy, after all, there cannot be leaks.  So why doesn’t the U.S. government try to “disarm” WikiLeaks by pro-actively disclosing the cables that WikiLeaks has already obtained?  Instead of passively enduring months or years of selective disclosures, the government could seize the initiative back from WikiLeaks.  Voluntary disclosure would permit it to present the most sensitive information with whatever explanatory or contextual material it wished to add.

For the moment, at least, that is not a realistic option, replied William J. Bosanko of the Information Security Oversight Office.  Though the leaked records held by WikiLeaks and its media partners are already compromised, he acknowledged, officially releasing them right now would interfere with other objectives that must take precedence.  These include briefing foreign governments whose information has been exposed, correcting security vulnerabilities, and penalizing the unauthorized disclosures.  Mr. Bosanko spoke at a January 20 panel discussion sponsored by the Collaboration on Government Secrecy at American University Washington College of Law.

Department of Defense employees who downloaded classified documents from Wikileaks onto unclassified government computer systems may delete them without further “sanitizing” their systems or taking any other remedial measures, the Pentagon said in a policy memo (pdf) last week.

The release of classified State Department cables and other classified documents by Wikileaks has produced special consternation among security officers, who have tended to respond “by the book” to this unprecedented breach of security procedures.  But “the book,” which is the product of an earlier era, is quickly becoming obsolete.  And in the worst case, some officials say, the government’s unimaginative response to Wikileaks could do more damage than the original disclosures.

But now some tentative signs of flexibility can be detected from Pentagon policy makers.

Under the new guidance, DoD employees and contractors who have downloaded classified documents from the Wikileaks website onto an unclassified government computer or network — which is still prohibited — do not need to take any extreme corrective measures in response, the Pentagon said.  In particular, there is no need to prepare a formal incident report or to “sanitize” their information systems by overwriting or degaussing them.  Instead, the documents can simply be deleted.

“In the case of classified documents inadvertently accessed or downloaded from the WikiLeaks website or other websites posting WikiLeaks-related classified documents, the IAM [information assurance manager] will document each occurrence and delete the affected file(s) by holding down the SHIFT key while pressing the DELETE key for Windows-based systems,” said Acting Under Secretary of Defense Thomas A. Ferguson in a January 11 memo.

Using the shift and delete keys simultaneously is a way of “permanently deleting” a document, so that it is removed from the file directory and does not appear in the Trash or Recycle Bin.  This action does not, however, physically erase or eliminate the document from the computer’s hard drive.  In other cases of inadvertent transfer of classified information to an unclassified system, a more rigorous response is often required.  But this will now be good enough for the purpose of eliminating classified Wikileaks documents.

“No incident report or further sanitization of government IT systems is required,” Under Secretary Ferguson continued.

The new flexibility only extends to Wikileaks-related documents, not to other “spillages” of classified information, he said.  “This guidance pertains only to the accessing or downloading of the classified documents described above because of the extent of the compromise and the prohibitive cost of standard sanitization procedures.  All other classified spillages must be handled in accordance with existing regulations,” according to the Pentagon memo.

See “Notice to DoD Employees and Contractors on Protecting Classified Information and the Integrity of Unclassified Government Information Technology (IT) Systems,” memorandum for senior DoD officials from Acting Under Secretary of Defense Thomas A. Ferguson, January 11, 2011.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence reported a notable increase in its classification activity last year, along with an even greater increase in the ODNI “population.”

The number of ODNI “derivative classification decisions” — referring to the classification of new records under previously issued guidance — increased 7.6% to 1,762,999 from the year before, wrote ODNI Information Management Director John F. Hackett in a November 12 report (pdf).  “The increase in total decisions was largely driven by population growth, which increased by 17% from last year.”

A copy of the ODNI report to the Information Security Oversight Office was obtained by Secrecy News under the Freedom of Information Act.  See Standard Form 311, Agency Security Classification Management Program Data for Fiscal Year 2010, November 12, 2010.

Among other interesting details, the ODNI report states that “There were two discretionary declassification decisions made by the Acting DNI during FY10 (declassification of ‘QUILL’ as a Radar Imager and declassification of the fact of GAMBIT/HEXAGON overhead ISR missions).”

Chinese bloggers “expressed rage and despondence after learning about the plight of 12 mentally retarded men from Sichuan province who were sold into slavery to work at a building materials plant in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region,” according to a CIA review of the Chinese blogosphere (pdf) during the week of December 10-17, 2010.

The CIA survey portrays Chinese bloggers as alert, engaged and influential in shaping government policy.

“The controversy over the mentally retarded workers set off a passionate discussion in the blogosphere on such topics as the treatment of disabled people in society and the role officials play in allowing workers to be exploited in private enterprises.”

“The public reaction resulting from the story’s popularity in the blogosphere as well as in traditional media almost certainly had an effect on the quick government response,” the CIA report said.

A copy of the report was obtained by Secrecy News. See “This Week in the Chinese Blogosphere: Week Ending 17 December 2010,” CIA Open Source Works, December 17, 2010.

Among several other current news stories, the report said, “Many Chinese Netizens continue to follow and comment on the legal case of Wikileaks.org founder Julian Assange.”

The Fundamental Classification Guidance Review is the Obama Administration’s most ambitious effort to confront the problem of overclassification. It requires each agency that classifies information to conduct a detailed review of all of its classification guides in order to identify obsolete classification requirements and to eliminate them.  As spelled out in section 1.9 of executive order 13526, the deadline for completion of the Reviews is June 29, 2012, two years after the effective date of the executive order.

So far, the Review process is off to an uneven start.  A Secrecy News survey of dozens of federal agencies shows that a few agencies are taking the process very seriously, others are ignoring or deferring it, and still others wrongly believe it does not apply to them.

By far the most impressive response comes from the Department of Energy, which has developed a detailed plan (pdf) for implementing the Review.  Over a dozen DOE working groups are set to evaluate more than 2,500 classification topics to assess their continued validity.  DOE has ordered its personnel to conduct a searching inquiry that challenges the status quo, not a perfunctory exercise that accomplishes nothing.

“Each Working Group is expected to review ‘difficult topics’ (i.e. guidance topics that are suspected of inconsistent or incorrect application by classifiers),” according to the November 4, 2010 charter for the DOE Fundamental Classification Guidance Review.  “Even though a prior analysis may have concluded that the balance [of costs and benefits] favored classification, this [Fundamental Review] will ensure consideration of acceptance of a higher level of risk.”

“With a critical and in-depth review of NSI [national security information] classification guidance, the Department will ensure necessary protection is retained and that information that doesn’t require protection will be characterized as unclassified and be made available to the public as appropriate,” wrote Glenn S. Podonsky, a senior DOE security official.

It shouldn’t be necessary to perform “a critical and in-depth review” just to reduce unnecessary classification — but evidently it is necessary, and DOE seems to be on the path to achieving that goal.

In startling contrast, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence doesn’t even mention the Fundamental Classification Guidance Review in its own December 31, 2010 plan (pdf) for implementing the president’s executive order on classification.  The ODNI plan provides all kinds of direction on training, inspection, and what-not — but it is silent on the Fundamental Review.  So it doesn’t explain how ODNI will conduct the Review, by what standards, on what schedule, or anything like that.  How can that be?  An ODNI official did not respond to a query on the subject from Secrecy News.

Several other agencies reported that they had not yet started their own Reviews.  On the other hand, United States European Command said that it had already completed its Review and found “no inefficiencies” that would justify a change in classification policy.  Others were unaware of the requirement in the first place.  The United States Pacific Command (PACOM) said (pdf) that it had no records concerning the Fundamental Review because it mistakenly believed the Review was a Department of Energy program that PACOM was not involved in.  In other words, PACOM confused the Obama Administration’s Fundamental Classification Guidance Review, which does apply to PACOM, with the similarly-named Clinton-era Fundamental Classification Policy Review at DOE, which did not.

The Fundamental Review is not an attempt to compel agencies to disclose classified information (though that is also sometimes necessary, through litigation, congressional mandate or other means).  Rather, the Review seeks to enlist agencies to act boldly in their own self-interest to eliminate unnecessary secrecy.  By stripping away the barnacles of overclassification, agencies stand to reduce costs, optimize mission performance, improve transparency and accountability, bolster information sharing, and promote public confidence in security policy.

“These reviews can be extremely important in changing the habits and the practices of classifiers throughout government,” said William H. Leary of the National Security Council last year.

But that will only be true if agencies actually carry out the Review in a meaningful way.

Towards that end, William J. Bosanko, director of the government’s Information Security Oversight Office which oversees the classification system, said that his organization will issue new instructions to agencies on implementing the Fundamental Classification Guidance Review within “the next week or so.”

The technology for sequencing human DNA is advancing so rapidly and the cost is dropping so quickly that the number of individuals whose DNA has been mapped is expected to grow “from hundreds of people (current) to millions of people (probably within three years),” according to a new report to the Pentagon (pdf) from the JASON defense science advisory panel.  The Defense Department should begin to take advantage of the advances in “personal genomics technology” by collecting genetic information on all military personnel, the panel advised.

The cost of sequencing complete human genomes has been falling by about a factor of 30 per year over the last six years, the JASONs said.  As a result, “it is now possible to order your personal genome sequenced today for a retail cost of under ~$20,000” compared to around $300 million a decade ago.  “This cost will likely fall to less than $1,000 by 2012, and to $100 by 2013.”

“At costs below $1,000 per genome, a number of intriguing applications of DNA sequencing become cost effective.  For example, researchers will have access to thousands or even millions of human genomes to seek correlations between genotypes [i.e. the genetic makeup of individuals] and phenotypes [i.e, the expression of genetic information in observable traits].”

Currently, the understanding of “the linkages between the genotypes of individuals and their phenotypes is limited.”  But “the explosion of available human genome sequence data will provide researchers from academia and industry with the genetic information necessary to conduct large-scale efforts to link genetic markers with human traits.”

For military purposes, it will be up to the Department of Defense “to determine which phenotypes… have special relevance to military performance and medical cost containment” and then presumably to select for those.  “These phenotypes might pertain to short- and long-term medical readiness, physical and medical performance, and response to drugs, vaccines, and various environmental exposures…. More specifically, one might wish to know about phenotypic responses to battlefield stress, including post-traumatic stress disorder, the ability to tolerate conditions of sleep deprivation, dehydration, or prolonged exposure to heat, cold, or high altitude, or the susceptibility to traumatic bone fracture, prolonged bleeding, or slow wound healing.”

“Both offensive and defensive military operations may be impacted by the applications of personal genomics technologies through enhancement of the health, readiness, and performance of military personnel.  It may be beneficial to know the genetic identities of an adversary and, conversely, to prevent an adversary from accessing the genetic identities of U.S. military personnel.”

What could possibly go wrong?  Quite a few things, actually.  Besides the risk of failing to maintain the privacy and security of genetic data, the data could be used in unethical ways or their significance could be misinterpreted.  “Acting on genotype information that is not convincingly linked to specific phenotypes could lead to erroneous and detrimental decision making,” the JASONs said.

In any case, the JASONs advised the Pentagon, “The DoD should establish policies that result in the collection of genotype and phenotype data…. The complete diploid genome sequence for all military personnel should be collected” along with other related information.

A copy of the JASON report was obtained by Secrecy News.  See “The $100 Genome: Implications for the DoD,” JASON Report No. JSR-10-100, December 2010.