New reports from the Congressional Research Service include the following (pdf):

“Al Qaeda and Affiliates: Historical Perspective, Global Presence, and Implications for U.S. Policy,” February 5, 2010.

“The Rum Excise Tax Cover-Over: Legislative History and Current Issues,” January 20, 2010.

In testimony this week before the Senate Intelligence Committee, Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair declared unequivocally that Al Qaeda would attempt to attack the United States within the next six months.  “The priority is certain, I would say,” he told the Committee.

This recalls nothing so much as the startling August 6, 2001 item in the President’s Daily Brief (PDB) that was entitled “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US” (pdf).

But the 2001 warning to President Bush was classified at the highest possible level and remained secret for years thereafter, until it was finally dislodged at the insistence of the 9/11 Commission.  In contrast, DNI Blair’s comparable statement was openly presented and was about as public as it could be.

Why should that be so?  Clearly the political circumstances for the two warnings are different, as are the venues in which they were delivered.  But it is also true that the parameters of official secrecy are subject to change.  Yesterday’s top secret might not even qualify as today’s front-page news.

The boundaries of official secrecy will be examined at a conference at the New School in New York City on February 24-26 on “Limiting Knowledge in a Democracy.”

“There is no question that the free access to knowledge and information are the bedrock of all democratic societies, yet no democratic society can function without limits on what can be known, what ought to be kept confidential and what must remain secret,” according to the conference overview. “The tension among these competing ends is ever present and continuously raises questions about the legitimacy of limits. What limits are necessary to safeguard and protect a democratic polity? What limits undermine it?”

I will be speaking on February 26 on “National Security Secrecy: How the Limits Change.”

Some new reports from the Congressional Research Service that have not previously been made available to the public include the following (all pdf).

“Social Networking and Constituent Communications: Member Use of Twitter During a Two-Month Period in the 111th Congress,” February 3, 2010.

“Metropolitan Transportation Planning,” February 3, 2010.

“Veterans Health Care: Project HERO Implementation,” February 3, 2010.

Several noteworthy new hearing volumes on national security policy have recently appeared (all pdf).  In most cases, the published volumes include valuable new supplementary material for the record.

“Examining the State Secrets Privilege: Protecting National Security While Preserving Accountability,” Senate Judiciary Committee, February 13, 2008 (published December 2009) (large pdf).

“Coercive Interrogation Techniques: Do They Work, Are They Reliable, and What Did the FBI Know About Them?”, Senate Judiciary Committee, June 10, 2008 (published December 2009) (large pdf).

“Protecting National Security and Civil Liberties: Strategies for Terrorism Information Sharing,” Senate Judiciary Committee, April 21, 2009 (published January 2010).

“Chinese Interrogation vs. Congressional Oversight: The Uighurs at Guantanamo,” House Foreign Affairs Committee, July 16, 2009 (published December 2009).

Websites and blogs dealing with military issues in Taiwan were surveyed in a recent report from the DNI Open Source Center that has not been publicly released.  See “Taiwan: Unofficial Military Websites” (pdf), Open Source Center Media Aid, January 12, 2010.

Members of Congress are urging the Obama Administration to activate the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, an independent agency that is supposed to monitor and defend civil liberties in the development and implementation of counterterrorism policies.

Last week, Rep. Bennie Thompson and Rep. Jane Harman wrote to the President and asked him to appoint members to the vacant Board, which has a budget for the current fiscal year that remains unexpended.

“Given the recent events of December 25, 2009, and the prospective policy changes that will be made subsequent to this incident, including potential expansion of watch lists and widespread use of body-scanning technology, we believe that the Board will give an anxious public confidence that appropriate rights are respected,” they wrote.

Their letter was reported by Eli Lake in the Washington Times today.  See “Liberties oversight panel gets short shrift,” February 2.

The White House expects to name the Board leadership “soon,” a spokesman told the Times.

First proposed by the 9/11 Commission, the Board was originally set up within the Executive Office of the President.  But after concerns about its independence and freedom of action arose, Congress enacted legislation in 2007 to establish it as an independent agency.

For further background see “Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board: New Independent Agency Status” (pdf), Congressional Research Service.

Senator George V. Voinovich (R-OH) wanted to know:  What is the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) doing to improve the status of women in the Muslim world, and to better engage women around the world on counterterrorism issues?

“The response to this question is classified,” replied NCTC Director Michael Leiter in a written response that has recently been published.

See the last page of “The Roots of Violent Islamist Extremism and Efforts to Counter It” (pdf), hearing before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, July 10, 2008 (published December 2009).

At a 2008 Senate hearing, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III was effusively praised for standing by the ailing Attorney General John Ashcroft in his hospital bed in 2004 and helping him to resist White House pressure to reauthorize the Bush Administration’s domestic surveillance program.

“It is hard to imagine in America circumstances in which the Director of the FBI has to order agents standing guard over a stricken Attorney General not to leave him alone with the White House counsel and the President’s Chief of Staff to make sure that Deputy Attorney General James Comey stayed with him,” said Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse in the newly published hearing volume.

“But it is not hard to understand the feeling of pressure, isolation, and consequence that bore down on all of you through that episode. I will disagree with all of you on many things, but I wanted to take this opportunity today to say thank you. Against intense and hostile pressure from the highest offices in the land, you stood for the principle that all public offices have public duties and responsibilities and that honoring those duties and responsibilities, at least as God gives us each of us the light to see them, is a higher public virtue than mere obedience. That is an important lesson in democracy. I hope it is a lasting one, and I thank you for showing us it,” Sen. Whitehouse said. (page 30)

At the same hearing, Sen. Arlen Specter scolded Director Mueller for failing to inform the Judiciary Committee of the secret Bush Administration warrantless surveillance program in the first place.  The Committee had to learn about it from the New York Times, Sen. Specter complained.  “Why didn’t you inform me as Chairman and Senator Leahy as Ranking Member about the existence of this program?” (page 14)

See “Oversight of the Federal Bureau of Investigation” (pdf), Senate Judiciary Committee, September 17, 2008 (published December 2009).

Other noteworthy new hearing volumes include these:

“Exercising Congress’s Constitutional Power to End a War” (pdf), Senate Judiciary Committee, January 30, 2007 (published November 2009).

“The Report of the Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States,” Senate Armed Services Committee, May 7, 2009 (published January 2010).

In his provocative new book “Bomb Power” (Penguin Press, 2010) historian Garry Wills argues that the rise of the National Security State and the ongoing expansion of presidential authority, including the spread of government secrecy, are rooted in the development of the atomic bomb in World War II.

“At the bottom of it all has been the Bomb,” writes Prof. Wills.  “All this grew out of the Manhattan Project, out of its product, and even more out of its process.  The project’s secret work, secretly funded at the behest of the President, was a model for the covert activities and overt authority of the government we now experience.”

The thesis of the book is not always clear or consistent.  Most often, the author refers to the secret creation of the bomb as a “model” or a precedent that would later be exploited in other contexts.  But sometimes the bomb project is seen as an integral part of other seemingly unrelated expressions of presidential authority and “the seed of all the growing powers that followed.”  And sometimes, for Prof. Wills, there is nothing else besides the bomb:  “Executive power has basically been, since World II, Bomb Power” (p. 4).

The failure to clearly distinguish or demonstrate the bomb’s asserted role — whether it is the model, the origin or the driving influence behind the growth of executive power — limits the force of the book’s argument.  If the bomb project was merely a model for organizing government activity (“the Manhattan Project showed modern Presidents the way”), then it should in principle be subject to replacement by other models.  But if it is now inextricably intertwined with the whole machinery of government, then government might be beyond the possibility of reform unless and until the bomb itself can be eliminated.

Prof. Wills, the author of many award-winning books, writes fluently and engagingly on a wide range of topics.  But in “Bomb Power,” his history is occasionally garbled.

In a chronology of the development of the National Security State, he says that covert action was authorized and defined in 1947 in the National Security Act, “despite misgivings expressed by Dean Acheson and others,” and that the 1947 Act also required regular notification to congressional intelligence committees (pp. 82-84).  But the original National Security Act was famously silent on covert action, only assigning to CIA “such other functions and duties… as the President… may direct.”  The statutory definition of covert action that Prof. Wills quotes was not enacted into law until 1991.  Likewise, notification to Congress of intelligence operations abroad was not required by law until the Hughes-Ryan Act in 1974.

But what is most disturbing of all is the author’s casual, world-weary dismissal of the possibility of change, and especially of efforts to rein in government secrecy.  “The hope of decreasing the mountains of secrecy is vanishing or gone,” he declares flatly (p. 138).  “Consider all of the classified material [now in existence],” he told National Public Radio earlier this week.  “To declassify that is immensely time consuming and expensive.  So, it’s not going to happen.”

This is a lazy and destructive message and, I think, a false one.

Though it is hard to reconcile with Prof. Wills’ theory of inexorably expanding executive power, the President of the United States last month issued an order imposing significant new limits on national security secrecy.  Stating that “No information may remain classified indefinitely,” President Obama set maximum classification lifetimes for all records, including intelligence records.  He directed that a backlog of 400 million pages of records awaiting declassification will not only be declassified but will also be made publicly available within four years.  He established a new internal review process, with public reporting requirements, to eliminate obsolete classification practices in every classifying agency at the front end of the process.  Perhaps these and numerous other related steps will all fail. But nothing in Prof. Wills’ argument dictates that outcome, and “Bomb Power” does no one any favors by fostering public cynicism and declaring defeat before the battle is over.

The American Physical Society will feature a session of “physics and secrecy” at its annual meeting in Washington DC on February 13.  I will be one of the three presenters.

In one sense, the whole enterprise of physics is a contest with secrecy and an attempt to discern the order that is hidden in natural phenomena.  But next month’s session is devoted to the more mundane form of national security secrecy and its impact on physicists and other scientists.

The search for signs of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe should not only focus on detection of electromagnetic signals, but should also seek evidence of the physical artifacts that an intelligence life form might produce, a scientist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory suggested in a paper (pdf) last month.

“Searching for signatures of cosmic-scale archaeological artifacts such as Dyson spheres or Kardashev civilizations is an interesting alternative to conventional SETI [Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, which searches for radio waves]. Uncovering such an artifact does not require the intentional transmission of a signal on the part of the original civilization. This type of search is called interstellar archaeology or sometimes cosmic archaeology.”

All of this of course is quite speculative, not to say whimsical.  “With few exceptions interstellar archaeological signatures are clouded and beyond current technological capabilities,” the author notes.

But the concept and the logic behind it are explained with pleasant clarity in “Starry Messages: Searching for Signatures of Interstellar Archaeology” by Richard A. Carrigan, Jr., Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, December 1, 2009.

Last year, the Palestinian National Liberation Movement (Fatah in the Arabic acronym) led by Palestinian National Authority president Mahmoud Abbas gathered in Bethlehem and approved a revision of its charter for the first time since the 1960s.  That revised charter (pdf) has recently been translated into English by the DNI Open Source Center.

The document is not particularly conciliatory in tone or content.  It is a call to revolution, confrontation with the enemy, and the liberation of Palestine, “free and Arab.”  Interestingly, it stresses the role of women in the movement.  “The leading bodies will work to arrive at 20 percent participation for women, provided this does not conflict with organizational standards or the Internal Charter.”  And it insists repeatedly on the need to safeguard the movement’s “secrets.”

But what is perhaps most significant is what is not in the document.  The original Fatah charter (or constitution) from the 1960s embraced “the world-wide struggle against Zionism,” denied Jewish historical or religious ties to the land, and called for the “eradication of Zionist economic, political, military and cultural existence.”  None of that language is carried over into the new charter, which manages not to mention Israel, Zionism, or Jews at all.

The English translation of the new Charter, which does not seem to be available elsewhere, has not been approved for public release by the DNI Open Source Center.  A copy was obtained by Secrecy News.