The Obama Administration is giving increased attention to the continuing post-9/11 challenge of information sharing, with a newly appointed White House Senior Director of Information Sharing Policy tasked to lead the effort. But this new activity does not imply any reduction in the volume of security and safety-related information that is withheld from the public.

“Achieving effective information sharing and access throughout the government is a top priority of the Obama Administration,” wrote White House Homeland Security Adviser John O. Brennan in a July 2, 2009 memorandum (pdf) to agency heads.  “To advance the priority to make trusted and resilient information sharing and access a reality, we have established in the Executive Office of the President the position of a Senior Director for Information Sharing Policy and have selected Mike Resnick to serve in this role,” Mr. Brennan wrote (first reported by Jason Miller, Federal News Radio, July 31).

Although information sharing might seem like the antithesis of secrecy, the term has come to be used to refer exclusively to sharing within the government, including state and local officials and certain selected private partners. Unlike “transparency,” which is a different policy portfolio, information sharing does not extend to members of the general public even in principle.  To the contrary, it implies their exclusion– there is no need to “share” information that is generally available to all.  And so “information sharing” is emerging as a modified form of official secrecy.

Up to a point, this is understandable.  Members of the general public do not engage in military and intelligence operations or conduct diplomacy or enforce the law.  It is not hard to imagine circumstances in which disclosure of certain government information would undermine these authorized functions.

On the other hand, members of the public are quite literally on the front lines of potential terrorist attacks, not to mention flu pandemics or economic disasters.  A national security or homeland security information sharing policy that leaves the public out is therefore incomplete.

The 9/11 Commission seemed to understand this quite clearly.  Its recommendations on information policy encompassed not only improved communications among government agencies and partners but also involved increased disclosure to the public. What did declassification and public disclosure of the intelligence budget — one of the Commission’s 41 recommendations — have to do with preventing terrorism?  Part of the answer is that it was a down payment on a much more comprehensive information disclosure policy that envisioned an engaged, empowered citizenry who are the country’s first line of defense.  Such a policy has still not been realized, and the vision itself seems to have been abandoned or neglected even by some leading advocates of information sharing.

In its latest report on the subject (pdf), the influential Markle Foundation Task Force on Information Sharing is silent on the question of improved public access to safety and security-related information.  “The President and Congress must ensure that all government information relevant to national security is discoverable and accessible to authorized users while audited to ensure accountability.”  In this conception, government officials are authorized users, ordinary citizens are not.  Such an approach is likely to make both information sharing and secrecy reform even harder to achieve.

The severe limitations of the current information sharing model will become even more important given the determination by Mr. Brennan that it will now extend “beyond terrorism-related issues, to the sharing of information more broadly to enhance the national security of the United States and the safety of the American people.”

In today’s degraded political climate, one need not be especially cynical to doubt the existence of a widespread public desire for access to safety and security information.  One may further question the capacity of the public to utilize some such information in a meaningful way.  The problem, though, is that treating members of the public as passive, possibly dimwitted spectators of government policy tends to reinforce just that sort of passivity.

One of the ongoing challenges and priorities facing information sharing, said Amb. Thomas E. McNamara (pdf) at a July 30 congressional hearing, is to “reduce improper classification to enhance information sharing.”  We must “eliminate ‘need to know’ requirements and protocols, and eliminate overuse of originator controls that can impede the ability to discover and share information.”

Reducing classification and eliminating “need to know” restrictions sound like a rather bold agenda, until one realizes once again that they apply only within the circle of authorized users, not elsewhere.  What makes this approach particularly vexatious is that it threatens to derail the current momentum for classification reform into a purely internal governmental affair. Classification barriers within the government are to be lowered, it seems, on the condition that such barriers to public disclosure remain intact.

Even within the government, however, information sharing still remains quite imperfect.  The landmark Intelligence Community Directive 501 (pdf) directed in January 2009 that “all intelligence and intelligence-related information… [shall be] discoverable by automated means by ‘authorized IC personnel’….” Despite this categorical instruction regarding “all” intelligence information, newly disclosed guidance (ICPG 501.1) from May 2009 permitted “exemptions from discovery” for certain information. Further guidance (ICPG 501.2) established a rather cumbersome “resolution process” for handling information sharing disputes, which evidently persist.

It must be admitted that there are numerous particular exceptions to this generally grim picture.  To cite one new example, the Department of Justice Office of Community Oriented Policing Services has just published an updated and expanded edition of “Law Enforcement Intelligence: A Guide for State, Local, and Tribal Law Enforcement Agencies” (pdf), which provides a helpful introduction to the field.

In February, the House of Representatives passed a bill (H.R. 553) that would seek to discourage overclassification of homeland security information by requiring preparation of unclassified versions of certain DHS intelligence products that would in principle be available to the public pursuant to the Freedom of Information Act.  The bill awaits action in the Senate.

Nothing less than a 90% reduction in the volume of classification activity government-wide would be needed to restore national security classification to its proper proportions, argued Bill Leonard, the former director of the Information Security Oversight Office, in his blog.

U.S. special operations forces (SOF) are successfully collecting valuable operational intelligence materials in the field, but they lack the capability to quickly process, exploit and disseminate those materials, the House Appropriations Committee said in its recent report on the 2010 defense appropriations bill (excerpts).

“Ongoing SOF operations demonstrate the ability to collect significant amounts of pocket litter, hard copy documents, hard drives, cell phones, and other important hard copy and electronic media with significant intelligence value. However, without specialized expeditionary processing, this information becomes inaccessible and of no value to SOF in immediate urgent operational missions, and over the longer term to the war fighter, the intelligence community and others in need of access.”  The Committee recommended additional resources to remedy this deficiency.

Intelligence policy-related excerpts from the Committee report on the 2010 defense appropriations bill are posted here.

If it wanted to, the Obama Administration could instantly increase oversight of the national security classification system by tasking the Offices of Inspector General (IG) at each of the major classifying agencies to assume some responsibility for secrecy oversight.  In coordination with the Information Security Oversight Office, those IGs could perform periodic audits of classification activity to ensure that agencies are complying with declared policies (the urgent need to revise those policies is a separate issue) and they could flag excessive use of secrecy in the course of their other duties, for further investigation by the ISOO.

In fact, the IGs already do some classification-related oversight, but only on a sporadic, ad hoc basis.  In 1992, the Defense Department IG investigated and confirmed (pdf) an allegation made by the Federation of American Scientists that a secret nuclear rocket program called Timber Wind was improperly classified as an unacknowledged special access program.

But instead of combating wrongful secrecy, it seems that Inspectors General are more often called upon to investigate unauthorized disclosures of controlled information.

Most recently, the IG of the U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) examined (pdf) the unintended publication of a report to the International Atomic Energy Agency listing U.S. civilian nuclear sites and facilities and marked as “sensitive.”  Secrecy News discovered the document  on the GPO web site in late May, and it subsequently made headlines around the world.  (“US Declares Nuclear Sites to the IAEA,” Secrecy News, June 1, 2009.)  After the New York Times and other news organizations picked up the story on June 3, “a torrent of media activity ensued,” the GPO IG report said.

“Our investigation found no wrongdoing on the part of GPO or its employees,” the IG concluded last week (as first reported by Ed O’Keefe of the Washington Post, August 10). Rather, GPO simply acted at the direction of its client, the House of Representatives, which transmitted the report for publication.

The GPO IG did not independently evaluate the actual sensitivity of the document (large pdf), and did not inquire whether it disclosed any information that was not previously in the public domain or, if so, what the consequences were likely to be.  (Our view is that while the report may be diplomatically sensitive, given that such national declarations to the IAEA are not normally published, it does not reveal sensitive technology or security information.)  A separate investigation of the publication of the report on nuclear facilities is still being conducted by the General Accounting Office.

In another recent case, the Inspector General at the Library of Congress (LOC) was asked to investigate the unauthorized publication of thousands of Congressional Research Service (CRS) reports last February by Wikileaks.org, a website which publishes confidential or restricted documents.  Although more, and more recent, CRS reports had previously been disclosed by OpenCRS.com, FAS, and others, the audacity of the Wikileaks move set off alarms at CRS and among some in Congress.

“My question is, have you taken steps necessary to prevent it from happening again and determine how it is that it happened in the first place?” asked Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) at an April 29, 2009 House Appropriations Committee hearing (at p. 285 in a very large pdf file).

“We have left it for the IG to do that and to then report how it happened,” replied CRS director Daniel Mulhollan.

This seems like an exceptionally poor use of the IG, especially since throughout Mr. Mulhollan’s tenure the supposed confidentiality of most CRS reports has been routinely violated, without adverse effect and arguably to the benefit of CRS.  Broad public disclosure of CRS reports has increased the Service’s stature in the press and elsewhere, and has also permitted the correction of published errors in those reports.  (CRS memoranda that are prepared for individual Members are generally protected more effectively than the CRS reports that are intended for general distribution.)  For the past decade and longer, new CRS reports have been published for sale nearly every day by commercial vendors of CRS products such as PennyHill Press, Gallery Watch, and Lexis-Nexis— yet somehow it is only free access for members of the public that triggered official outrage and led to an IG investigation.

The LOC Office of the IG did not respond to an inquiry from Secrecy News this week concerning the status or outcome of its investigation of the disclosure of CRS reports to Wikileaks.

As a rule, we believe IGs could be more productively employed by pursuing unnecessary or inappropriate restrictions on disclosure of government information.  In particular, the forthcoming Obama executive order on national security classification could authorize and direct executive branch agency IGs to help identify cases of needless secrecy, and to help fix them.

The United States provided around $15.4 billion in overt aid to Pakistan between Fiscal Years 2002 and 2009, according to a newly updated Congressional Research Service tabulation.  The U.S. aid included military training, equipment and other forms of assistance.  An additional $3.6 billion is requested for FY 2010.  See “Direct Overt U.S. Aid and Military Reimbursements to Pakistan, FY2002-FY2010” (pdf), updated August 3, 2009.

The Venezuelan government of President Hugo Chavez “is moving forcefully to silence critics by introducing a Media Crimes bill that would give it sweeping authority to jail journalists, media executives, and bloggers who report on anything that the government considers to be harmful to state interests,” said a new assessment (pdf) by the Intelligence Community’s Open Source Center (OSC).

The Chavez government “is simultaneously moving to shut down more than 200 radio stations,” the OSC report said, and may take over the opposition news station Globovision.  “Silencing his critics would allow Chavez to completely control the media message, but it would also deprive him of his long-standing scapegoat of what he describes as the oligarchic media,” the OSC said.

Like most other OSC analyses, the latest report has not been approved for public release, but a copy was obtained by Secrecy News.  See “Venezuela — Chavez Moves to Silence Opposition Media,” Open Source Center, August 3, 2009.

The current Obama Administration review of classification policy will almost certainly produce an incremental adjustment to existing practices– though hopefully with provisions for independent validation (or rejection) of agency classification decisions, strengthened oversight, expedited declassification, and so forth.  But it is unlikely to lead to a wholesale replacement of the basic framework of the Cold War classification system that has lingered now for more than half a century.  The “next generation” of national security information policy is still out of reach.

To hasten the development of more efficient and transparent information security policies, the forthcoming Obama executive order on classification could encourage experimental pilot projects in classification and declassification and related activities.

An agency head could be authorized to establish, with the approval of the director of the Information Security Oversight Office, a limited-scale initiative that departs from the otherwise binding requirements of the executive order in the interests of fostering innovation in classification policy.  (ISOO concurrence would be needed to ensure that the pilot projects were designed to promote appropriate efficiency and transparency, not to provide a new pretext for intensified secrecy.)

What kind of initiatives might these be?  One possibility would be to collapse the multi-tiered classification system into a single level, so that information within the domain of the pilot project would either be “classified” or “unclassified” — other classification levels and compartments would not be permitted. Another possibility would be to undertake ambitious bulk declassification projects that have an elevated risk of disclosure of classified information beyond what is normally tolerated.  This would provide a realistic but small-scale indication of the “damage” that could ensue from forgoing expensive, time-consuming declassification review.  Other initiatives could experiment with discretionary releases of classified information, prohibitions against use of the “need to know” principle, and similar deviations from the norm.

One precedent or model for this kind of approach is the congressionally-mandated program for Science and Technology Reinvention Laboratory (STRL) demonstration projects, which are used to promote innovation in Defense Department personnel management policies.  Those projects have been authorized to waive existing laws and regulations on human resources management.

“The STRL demonstration projects are the vehicles through which the… Department of Defense will determine whether changes in personnel management concepts, policies, or procedures would result in improved laboratory performance and contribute to improved DoD or Federal personnel management,” according to a DoD directive (pdf) issued just last week.

“In the most general terms, a demonstration project provides a means for testing and introducing beneficial change in Government-wide human resources management systems,” according to an earlier Air Force Fact Sheet.  The Air Force identified several successful policy innovations that have been developed in this way, such as the Voluntary Emeritus Corps that permits senior scientists to continue their research into retirement while mentoring younger scientists in Air Force laboratories.  Similar creativity is desperately needed in the stagnant realm of government secrecy policy.

The point is to promote unorthodox approaches to security policy that may involve heightened risk, but that also offer significant potential improvements in operational performance, cost reduction and/or transparency.  Most of these efforts could well fail.  But some might prove fruitful, and worth replicating on a larger scale.  In this way, the Obama executive order could help pave the way for the executive order after next, and for a new, more nimble 21st century information policy.

“Implementation of the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative (CNCI),” the notoriously secretive program “which was established by President Bush in National Security Presidential Directive 54/Homeland Security Presidential Directive 23 in January 2008, continues at this time.”

That interesting reminder was mentioned in passing in newly disclosed answers to questions for the record (pdf) submitted by the Director of National Intelligence to the Senate Intelligence Committee in April 2009 following the DNI’s annual threat briefing last February.

Some other notable observations from the DNI’s forty pages of wide-ranging answers to Senators’ questions include:

“Iran is covertly supplying arms to Afghan insurgents while publicly posing as supportive of the Afghan government.”  “Iran’s policy calculation in Afghanistan currently emphasizes lethal support to the Taliban, even though revelation of this activity could threaten its future relationship with the Afghan government and its historic allies within Afghanistan.”

Based on counterinsurgency principles, the DNI said, it would require “roughly 818,000 security personnel to secure Afghanistan” including 325,000 personnel to secure the Pashtun areas where most insurgents are located.  But there are currently only 83,094 soldiers in the Afghan National Army.  To grow to 325,000 soldiers would require $946 million annually, well above the FY2008 Afghan defense budget of $242 million.

While Iran has made significant progress in uranium enrichment technology, the State Department’s intelligence bureau (INR) “continues to assess it is unlikely that Iran will have the technical capability to produce HEU [highly enriched uranium] before 2013.  INR shares the Intelligence Community’s assessment that Iran probably would use military-run covert facilities, rather than declared nuclear sites, to produce HEU. Outfitting a covert enrichment infrastructure could take years.”

“Some analysts believe that Iraq is more fragile, the ISF [Iraqi Security Forces] less capable, and the impact of a drawdown [of U.S. forces] more destabilizing than the majority of the Intelligence Community.”

“Hizballah remains the most technically capable terrorist group in the world.”  But “Al Qa’ida is the terrorist group that historically has sought the broadest range of CBRN [chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear] attack capabilities, and we assess that it would use any CBRN capability it acquires in an anti-U.S. attack, preferably against the Homeland.”

In March 2009, the Central Intelligence Agency created a new daily intelligence publication called the Economic Intelligence Brief (EIB), which is “the most visible step we have taken to increase reporting and analysis” on the global economic crisis and its impact on U.S. national security.

“Moscow has been in the process of restoring some of the military capabilities it lost after the collapse of the Soviet Union as it downsizes and reorganizes its forces.” “Despite its still considerable capabilities, the Russian military is a shadow of its Soviet predecessor.” “Russia has consistently kept its defense spending at less than three percent of GDP, avoiding the huge defense burden that ultimately choked the Soviet economy.”

Some of the DNI’s statements are surprisingly flimsy.  For example, he declares (question 17) that “In 2003, the Russian military prepared for an exercise that included attacking U.S. satellites to disrupt the NAVSTAR global positioning system, the Keyhole optical-electronic reconnaissance satellites, and the Lacrosse radar reconnaissance system with the intent of ‘blinding’ the Pentagon and denying it the opportunity to use precision weapons against Russia.”

This is an odd assertion, first, because intelligence officials rarely if ever use the old Keyhole or Lacrosse satellite names in unclassified public statements.  And on closer inspection, it turns out that the DNI’s statement was simply lifted, almost word for word, from a news story that appeared in the Russian newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta on May 14, 2003.  (It was also picked up by the online Newsmax.com on May 18, 2003.)  The Russian story lazily attributed its claim regarding the anti-satellite exercise to “certain reports.” The DNI repeated the Nezavisimaya Gazeta item nearly verbatim, presenting it as an established fact, with no attribution at all.

The Senate Intelligence Committee has renewed the valuable tradition of submitting unclassified questions for the record to senior intelligence officials following the annual threat briefing to the Committee.  Unfortunately, the congressional publication schedule is such that the answers to the questions often do not appear for one or even two years after they are prepared.  The latest DNI responses to questions for the record, transmitted in April, were obtained by the Federation of American Scientists this week through the Freedom of Information Act.

In the early 1970s, the Nixon Administration plotted to interfere in Uruguay’s presidential elections in order to block the rise of the leftist Frente Amplio coalition.  But when the State Department published its official history of U.S. relations with Latin America during the Nixon era last month, there was no mention of any such activities.  Instead, the State Department Office of the Historian said that Uruguay-related records could not be posted on the Department website because of “space constraints.”  Following repeated inquiries, however, the Historian’s Office revised its position last week and said it would include Uruguay-related records in its Nixon history after all.

The United States should work “overtly and covertly” to blunt the political appeal of the Frente Amplio and to diminish its chances for victory in the Uruguayan presidential elections, advised one declassified document (pdf) from 1971.  Several important documentary records of that turbulent period were compiled by the National Security Archive in 2002.  See “Nixon: ‘Brazil Helped Rig the Uruguayan Elections,’ 1971” edited by Carlos Osorio.

Meanwhile, urban guerrillas who were violently challenging the governments of several Latin American countries drew the worried attention of U.S. intelligence officials.  In particular, the Uruguayan Marxist revolutionary group known as the Tupamaros, which murdered a U.S. AID official in 1970, “has had a spectacular and rapid rise to prominence during the last few years,” according to a 1971 CIA analysis entitled “The Latin American Guerrilla Today” (pdf).

But none of this concern over Uruguay could be discerned from the State Department’s official history of U.S. policy towards the region.  A July 10, 2009 State Department press release announcing the publication of the latest online volume of the Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) on American Republics, 1969-1972, mentioned almost every Latin American country except for Uruguay.  The original Preface of the new FRUS volume (pdf) made the peculiar assertion that: “Due to space constraints, relations with… Uruguay… are not covered here.”  This assertion is doubly strange since the new FRUS volume was only published online, not in hardcopy, so that “space constraints” are hardly a factor.

By excluding the rather intense U.S. policy focus on Uruguay, the latest FRUS volume was not just practicing bad history, it may also have been committing a violation of the law, which requires that FRUS be “thorough, accurate, and reliable.”

The State Department did not respond to half a dozen inquiries over a two-week period regarding the decision to exclude Uruguay from the official history of the region or the nature of the supposed “space constraints.”  The State Department’s Historical Advisory Committee did reply that it was unfamiliar with the issue.

But in a brief email message on July 30, FRUS Acting General Editor Dr. William B. McAllister wrote:  “We have revised the Preface.  This should clarify the situation.”  The revised Preface to the new FRUS volume now states that a chapter on Uruguay “will be added” following completion of the declassification process.  The newly revised Table of Contents includes a placeholder listing for Uruguay. There is no indication of what records may be declassified, or when they might become available.

Today, the Frente Amplio coalition whose rise alarmed the Nixon Administration leads the government of Uruguay.

In May 2001, CIA officer Franz Boening submitted a memorandum to the Agency Inspector General alleging that the CIA’s relationship with disgraced Peruvian intelligence official Vladimiro Lenin Montesinos may have involved violations of U.S. law.

There is no evidence that the CIA Inspector General ever took any action in response to Mr. Boening’s memorandum, which was presented as a whistleblower complaint. CIA classification officials, however, responded quickly and energetically — to silence him.  Information contained in the Boening whistleblower complaint is classified, declared CIA information review officer Ralph S. DiMaio (pdf), and its disclosure “reasonably could be expected to cause damage to national security.”

Pursuant to the non-disclosure agreement that Mr. Boening had signed upon employment at CIA, Agency officials forbade him from publicly revealing his allegations, though he said they were based on published news reports and other open sources.  And CIA classified most of the substance of his 2001 complaint (pdf), including even (or especially) the name of Montesinos.

With the assistance of attorney Mark S. Zaid, Mr. Boening went to court to challenge the Agency’s censorship of his allegations as an unlawful act of prior restraint.  Eight years after submitting the document, he emerged more or less victorious, as the CIA withdrew most of its objections, and permitted publication (pdf) of the 2001 whistleblower complaint regarding Montesinos with only a few remaining redactions.

Mr. Boening is still obliged to comply with his Agency nondisclosure obligations, advised R. Puhl, the chairman of the CIA Publications Review Board, and he must seek a new Agency review if he wishes to make any changes at all to the newly authorized text, including any deletions of material.

“If you add or delete material to or otherwise change the text the Board has approved for publication, you must submit these additions, deletions, or changes to us before giving them to your publisher or anyone else,” Mr. Puhl wrote (pdf) in a February 13, 2009 letter.

Even though certain information concerning the President’s Daily Brief (PDB) was redacted and declassified for use in the prosecution of former vice presidential aide Scooter Libby in 2006, that same information is nonetheless “currently and properly classified,” the Central Intelligence Agency said (pdf) last week.  The Agency denied release of the material under the Freedom of Information Act.

The existence of the declassified PDB material was disclosed in a January 9, 2006 letter (pdf) from Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald to Mr. Libby’s attorney.  He wrote:  “In response to our requests, we have received [from CIA] a very discrete amount of material relating to PDBs and discussions involving Mr. Libby and/or Vice President Cheney concerning or relating to the PDBs.  We have provided to Mr. Libby and his counsel (or are in the process of providing such documents consistent with the process of a declassification review) copies of any pages in our possession… in the redacted form in which we received them.”

Since declassified PDBs are comparatively rare, we submitted a Freedom of Information Act request in February 2006 for a copy of the PDB-related material that was declassified by CIA for the Libby prosecution.  Last week, the CIA responded that it had located the requested material but that “we determined [it] is currently and properly classified and must be denied in its entirety.”

This is a somewhat puzzling development.  It is a pity that the CIA Inspector General does not investigate violations of the law of non-contradiction. (Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1005b12-20.)

With few exceptions, the CIA has consistently opposed public release of PDBs, reflecting an uncompromising view that PDBs are intrinsically sensitive, irrespective of their age or contents, and should not be disclosed.  (The Agency did reluctantly agree to disclose the August 6, 2001 PDB item entitled “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US” (pdf) at the insistence of the 9/11 Commission.)

When challenged under the Freedom of Information Act, courts have upheld the CIA’s refusal to release specific PDBs.  But a 2007 ruling in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the CIA view that “PDBs are categorically exempt from FOIA.”  In particular, the court denied the CIA assertion that the PDB itself is an intelligence method that is protected by law.  “Although PDBs will typically contain information that reveals intelligence sources and methods, this does not mean that PDBs themselves are intelligence methods.”

“If we were to accept the CIA’s logic,” the court said, “then every written CIA communication — regardless of content — would be a protected ‘intelligence method’ because it is a method that CIA uses in doing its work…. We decline to adopt such a boundless definition, and instead hold that whether or not a particular document used by the CIA in its ordinary course of business is an intelligence method depends upon the content of the document.” (Larry Berman v. Central Intelligence Agency, September 4, 2007).

Although the CIA claimed that the Libby PDB-related material that was declassified in 2006 is now “properly classified,” the Agency did not invoke the FOIA exemption for classified information.  Instead, it denied release of the material on the basis of FOIA exemption (b)(3) which includes statutory protection for intelligence methods.

Update: Marcy Wheeler at Emptywheel has some of the PDB-related exhibits that were introduced at the Libby trial, along with her own insights into this peculiar turn of events.

Some 2.4 million persons currently hold security clearances for authorized access to classified information, according to a recent Government Accountability Office report (pdf) to the House Intelligence Committee, citing an estimate from the security clearance Joint Reform Team.  This figure does not include “some of those with clearances who work in areas of national intelligence,” the GAO noted (at p.1).

An accurate tally of the number of cleared government employees and contractors — as opposed to a round-number estimate — is not currently available anywhere in government.  The House version of the FY2010 intelligence authorization act (sec. 366) would require an annual report that indicates the number of individuals with security clearances.

In 1993, an estimated 3.2 million persons held security clearances, according to a 1995 GAO report (cited by the Moynihan Commission, chapter 4).

Some noteworthy, newly published congressional hearing volumes on intelligence policy and related topics include the following (mostly pdf).

“Attorney General Guidelines for FBI Criminal Investigations, National Security Investigations, and the Collection of Foreign Intelligence,” Senate Intelligence Committee, September 23, 2008.

“Nomination of Michael Leiter to be Director, National Counterterrorism Center,” Senate Intelligence Committee, May 6, 2008.

“U.S. Interrogation Policy and Executive Order 13440,” Senate Intelligence Committee, September 25, 2007.

“Fixing the Homeland Security Information Network: Finding the Way Forward for Better Information Sharing,” House Homeland Security Committee, May 10, 2007.

“Budget Request on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) and Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) Capabilities,” House Armed Services Committee, April 19, 2007.