From the point of view of an al Qaida military leader, Western intelligence agents are now ubiquitous in the lands of Islam, and their operations have been extraordinarily effective.  The Western spies are unfailingly lethal, leaving a trail of dead Islamist fighters behind them.  Worst of all, they have managed to recruit innumerable Muslims to assist their war efforts.

“The spies… were sent to penetrate the ranks of the Muslims generally, and the mujahidin specifically, and [they] spread all over the lands like locusts,” wrote Abu Yahya al-Libi, an al Qaida field commander in Afghanistan, in a new book called “Guidance on the Ruling of the Muslim Spy” (pdf).

“The spies are busy day and night carrying out their duties in an organized and secret manner… How many heroic leaders have been kidnapped at their hands? How many major mujahidin were surprised to be imprisoned or traced?  Even the military and financial supply roads of the mujahidin, which are far from the enemy’s surveillance, were found by the spies.”

Al Qaida operations have been severely impeded by the intelligence war against them, al-Libi said.  “As soon as the mujahidin get secretly into an area on a dark night, they are confronted by the Cross forces and their helpers.  Many are killed or captured.”

Western spies are found under every conceivable cover, al-Libi wrote.  “They have among them old hunchbacked men who cannot even walk, strong young men, weak women inside their house, young girls, and even children who did not reach puberty yet.  The spy might be a doctor, nurse, engineer, student, preacher, scholar, runner, or a taxi driver.  The spy can be anyone….”

“The occupation armies completely rely on recruiting spies and informants from the Muslim lands they usurped and conquered… The spy lives among Muslims, being one of them: living their life, wearing their dress, eating what they eat… Therefore, he can access what the armed soldiers of the occupation cannot put hands on.”

In the new book, published in Arabic (pdf) on jihadist websites on June 30, al-Libi ruminated at length on the religious and legal problem of the Muslim spy.  Can there be a Muslim who spies against other Muslims or, since such a person would by definition be an apostate, is a Muslim spy a contradiction in terms?  May such a person be killed?  (It depends.)  To convict a spy nowadays is it necessary to rely on the traditional two witnesses?  (Again, it depends.)  What about a person who is mistakenly executed as a spy?  (God will reward him.)

Pervading the book is a sense of the overwhelming impact of U.S. and Allied intelligence operations on jihadist forces, and the willingness of indigenous Muslims to act with Western intelligence against those forces.

“Everyone who lives in the jihad battlegrounds… knows well that the occupation forces could not do one-tenth of what they do now if they did not recruit spies and informants….  Most of the mujahidin and their soldiers were killed or captured because of the intelligence information that the infidel forces have obtained from the secret soldiers whom they recruit, like swarms of locusts, from the native citizens who talk our language and pretend they are Muslims.”

“Guidance on the Ruling of the Muslim Spy” by Abu Yahya al-Libi was translated, rather clumsily, by the DNI Open Source Center.  A copy was obtained by Secrecy News.

The book cited the use of electronic homing devices to guide air-launched missiles to their targets and images of several such devices were included in the original Arabic version of the book (at page 146).  The purported use of the devices was discussed in “CIA Drone Targeting Tech Revealed, Qaeda Claims” by Adam Rawnsley, Wired Danger Room, July 8, 2009.  Memri.org also prepared a proprietary translation of the new Al-Libi book, which was reported by Fox News last week.

The National Reconnaissance Office, which develops, launches and operates U.S. intelligence satellites, last week released most of the unclassified portions (pdf) of its Congressional Budget Justification Book for FY2009.  While those unclassified portions are only a small fraction of the full budget document, they still provide a fresh glimpse or two of the agency and its four directorates (IMINT, SIGINT, Advanced Systems and Technology, and Communications).

“The U.S. is arguably more reliant on overhead collection that ever before,” the NRO says, while “intelligence problems are becoming more complex and increasingly require synergistic, multi-INT, multi-source solutions.”  See “National Reconnaissance Program,” FY2009 Congressional Budget Justification, February 2008, released under the Freedom of Information Act July 2009.

The NRO has suffered serious acquisition failures in recent years and it has been rumored, unconfirmably, that the agency may be broken up or reorganized.  (“Spy Agency May Face Ax” by Colin Clark, DoD Buzz, July 1, 2009).  Meanwhile, President Obama reportedly issued a directive last spring — Presidential Study Directive 2 — ordering a review of classified space activities.  (“President Orders Sweeping U.S. Space Policy Review” by Amy Klamper, Space News, July 6, 2009).

A newly disclosed report from the JASON defense advisory panel may not excite the interest of anyone who is not a student of electrical engineering.  It examines the distribution of electrical current flowing through a long, narrow conductive object.  See “Current Spreading in Long Objects” (pdf), October 2008.

Somewhat more interesting is the fact that the JASON study was sponsored by the Center for Security Evaluation.  The Center is a component of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence that supports the Department of State in protecting intelligence and other classified information in U.S. diplomatic facilities abroad.  Its charter was set forth in “Center for Security Evaluation” (pdf), Intelligence Community Directive 707, October 17, 2008.

Last year, Congress directed intelligence agency Inspectors General to prepare an unclassified report on the Bush Administration’s warrantless surveillance program. That report has just been released. It traces the origins, implementation, and utilization of the Program, and discusses the legal questions surrounding its development. See Unclassified Report on the President’s Surveillance Program (pdf), Joint Inspector General Report, 10 July 2009.

The intelligence authorization bill that is pending in the House of Representatives would generally require all members of the intelligence committees to be briefed on covert actions, not just the so-called “Gang of Eight,” unless the Committee itself decided to limit such briefings.

“The Committee understands well the need to protect intelligence information from unauthorized disclosure and the prerogatives of the executive branch with respect to the protection of classified information. However, these principles must be balanced against the constitutional requirement for congressional oversight,” the Committee wrote in its report.

The White House said it “strongly objects” to that provision and suggested the President would veto the bill to block it.  The revised notification procedures would undermine “a long tradition spanning decades of comity between the branches regarding intelligence matters,” the July 8 White House Statement of Administration Policy (pdf) said.

But a new report from the Congressional Research Service reminds readers that the “tradition” regarding covert action notification is not so long, and that it is subject to modification in response to changing circumstances.  It was first put in place in 1980, during the Iran hostage crisis.  In 1991, following the Iran-Contra Affair, it was elaborated in congressional report language.  Following the momentous challenges to congressional oversight in recent years, it would not be surprising if it were adjusted further.

A copy of the new CRS report was obtained by Secrecy News.  See “Sensitive Covert Action Notifications: Oversight Options for Congress,” July 7, 2009.

The CRS report mentions in passing an apparent discrepancy in the public record concerning covert action and the CIA detainee interrogation program.  In pre-confirmation responses to questions (pdf, p.9), DNI Dennis Blair told the Senate Intelligence Committee that neither the Terrorist Surveillance Program nor the CIA detention, interrogation and rendition programs were covert actions and that therefore neither should have been subject to limited “Gang of Eight” notification procedures.  But former CIA director Michael Hayden said in an April 16, 2009 news interview that the CIA interrogation program “began life as a covert action.”  CIA Director Leon Panetta, when asked about both programs (pdf, pp. 16-17) prior to his confirmation, said that the Terrorist Surveillance Program was not a covert action, but he was silent about the CIA program.  Both DNI Blair and DCIA Panetta prefaced their responses with a disclaimer that they were not yet privy to classified information on these matters, though presumably the contents would have been reviewed prior to submission to eliminate factual errors.  The discrepancy between their statements and that of former DCIA Hayden is unresolved.

The number of U.S. troops deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan in the decade following 9/11 is documented or projected in a detailed new report from the Congressional Research Service.  “Using five DOD sources, this report describes, analyzes, and estimates the number of troops deployed for each war from the 9/11 attacks to FY2012 to help Congress assess upcoming DOD war funding requests as well as the implications for the long-term U.S. presence in the region.”  See “Troop Levels in the Afghan and Iraq Wars, FY2001-FY2012: Cost and Other Potential Issues” (pdf), July 2, 2009.

Other substantively new and interesting CRS reports that have not previously been published online include the following (all pdf).

“U.S. Security Assistance to the Palestinian Authority,” June 24, 2009.

“North Korea’s Second Nuclear Test: Implications of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1874,” July 1, 2009.

“Indonesia: Domestic Politics, Strategic Dynamics, and American Interests,” updated June 17, 2009.

Last month, for the first time since 1989, the House of Representatives impeached a federal judge, Samuel B. Kent of the Southern District of Texas.  Background on the process is helpfully provided in “Impeachment: An Overview of Constitutional Provisions, Procedure, and Practice,” June 22, 2009.

Resolutions of Inquiry are increasingly used in the House of Representatives to elicit information from the executive branch.  In the current Congress, eleven such resolutions had been introduced by mid-June.  An updated account of this legislative instrument is given in “House Resolutions of Inquiry,” June 17, 2009.

Last year, the Supreme Court refused to hear a case brought by the ACLU against the National Security Agency challenging the constitutionality of the Terrorist Surveillance Program.  Sen. Arlen Specter wrote to Judge Sonia Sotomayor this week asking the Supreme Court nominee to be prepared at her confirmation hearing next week to say, among other things, whether she would have favored Supreme Court review of the matter.

The DNI Information Sharing Environment has released its latest annual report (pdf), detailing progress made and challenges remaining in the effort to improve sharing of terrorism-related information among authorized users, which generally does not include members of the public.

The public interest group OMB Watch reviewed the evolving policy on “controlled unclassified information” and offered its own critique in “Controlled Unclassified Information: Recommendations for Information Control Reform” (pdf), July 2009.

Compliance with IAEA nuclear safeguards agreements is mandated in a new Air Force Instruction that also provides useful background on the safeguards process.  See “Implementation of the US-International Atomic Energy Agency Integrated Safeguards Agreements” (pdf), Air Force Instruction 16-605, June 23, 2009.

The effectiveness and the unintended consequences of U.S. export control policies were discussed at a hearing of the House Science and Technology Committee.  The record of that hearing, with extensive post-hearing questions for the record, has just been published.  See “Impacts of U.S. Export Control Policies on Science and Technology Activities and Competitiveness” (pdf), February 25, 2009.

Public comments and recommendations on classification and declassification policies and related matters are being received until July 19 on the White House Office of Science and Technology blog.

Last month, the House Intelligence Committee complained that the Department of Defense has blurred the distinction between traditional intelligence collection, which is subject to intelligence committee oversight, and clandestine military operations, which are not.  Because they are labeled in a misleading manner, some DoD clandestine operations that are substantively the same as intelligence activities are evading the congressional oversight they are supposed to receive.

“In categorizing its clandestine activities,” the Committee said in its report on the 2010 intelligence bill, “DoD frequently labels them as ‘Operational Preparation of the Environment’ (OPE) to distinguish particular operations as traditional military activities and not as intelligence functions.  The Committee observes, though, that overuse of the term has made the distinction all but meaningless.”

Operational Preparation of the Environment (OPE) is an elusive, somewhat mysterious concept, variously described as a form of foreign intelligence collection, covert action, unconventional warfare, or a prelude to any of these.  The phrase does not appear in the otherwise comprehensive DoD Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms (pdf).  It was mentioned in passing in the 2006 Posture Statement (pdf) of the U.S. Special Operations Command, but not in subsequent posture statements.

Some say OPE closely resembles human intelligence collection.  OPE refers to “the ability of Defense to get into an area and know it prior to the conduct of military operations,” said Gen. Michael Hayden at his 2006 confirmation hearing to be Director of CIA.  “An awful lot of those [OPE] activities… are not, in terms of tradecraft or other aspects, recognizably different than collecting human intelligence for a foreign intelligence purpose,” he said.  “They look very much the same.  Different authorities;  somewhat different purposes;  mostly indistinguishable activities.”

From another point of view, OPE is more akin to covert action.  “There is often not a bright line between [covert action and] military activities to prepare the battlefield or the environment,” said DNI Dennis C. Blair in a written response to questions (pdf) about OPE in advance of his confirmation earlier this year (pp. 15-16).

Though it was neither intelligence collection nor covert action, “U.S. support to and in some cases leadership of irregular resistance to Japanese forces in the Philippine archipelago [in 1942-1945]… stands as a premier example of what military planners today call operational preparation of the environment,” according to a historical survey of unconventional warfare in the September 2007 Irregular Warfare Joint Operating Concept (pdf).

Perhaps the most extensive unclassified treatment of OPE (then still known as “operational preparation of the battlespace” or OPB) appears in a 2003 U.S. Army War College research paper, which noted that the term is “seldom used outside of Special Operations Forces channels.”  OPE “consists of both pre-crisis activities (PCA) and, when authorized, advance force operations (AFO),” both of which are described by the author at some length.  See “Combating Terrorism with Preparation of the Battlespace” (pdf) by Michael S. Repass, U.S. Army War College, April 2003.  Further discussion appeared in “Leveraging Operational Preparation of the Environment in the GWOT” (pdf) by Maj. Michael T. Kenny, U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, 2006.  OPE should be reconceived as a stand-alone mission with its own doctrine, argued another research paper.  See “Ending the Debate: Unconventional Warfare, Foreign Internal Defense, and Why Words Matter” (pdf) by D. Jones, U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, 2006.

In any event, “DoD has shown a propensity to apply the OPE label where the slightest nexus of a theoretical, distant military operation might one day exist,” according to the House Intelligence Committee report last month.  “Consequently, these activities often escape the scrutiny of the intelligence committees…. In the future, if DoD does not meet its obligations to inform the Committee of intelligence activities,” the House report concluded weakly, “the Committee will consider legislative action clarifying the Department’s obligation to do so.”

The increasing capability of high-resolution military and intelligence sensors is producing ever growing quantities of data that could overwhelm the capacity to analyze them without new approaches to data management and analysis, according to a newly released report (pdf) from the JASON defense advisory panel.

“As the amount of data captured by these sensors grows, the difficulty in storing, analyzing, and fusing the sensor data becomes increasingly significant,” the report said.

Extrapolating from current trends, data production could hypothetically reach the Yottabyte range by 2015.  (The Yotta- prefix means ten raised to the twenty-fourth power.  Mega- means ten to the sixth power, Giga- means ten to the ninth power, and Tera- is ten to the twelfth power.)  If one byte of data were used to image one square meter of the Earth’s surface, then 1.6 Yottabytes would be generated by imaging the entire surface of the Earth every second for a hundred years, the report explained.

While the data management challenge is daunting, it is not unmanageable in principle, the JASONs said, nor is it entirely unprecedented.  “Important parallels can be drawn with data intensive science efforts such as high energy physics and astronomy.”  These efforts show how data filtering approaches can be applied to reduce data storage and processing requirements well below the Yottabyte range.

The report suggested several research and development strategies for improving data management and analysis.  The JASONs also proposed a series of “grand challenges” that would set ambitious technical goals and provide monetary rewards for their achievement.

The December 2008 JASON report was initially withheld from public access, but a copy was released in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from Secrecy News.  See “Data Analysis Challenges”.

A new Joint Chiefs of Staff publication presents updated doctrine on intelligence preparation of the operational environment — which, confusingly enough, is not the same thing as “operational preparation of the environment” (OPE).  See “Joint Intelligence Preparation of the Operational Environment” (pdf), Joint Publication JP 2-01.3, June 16, 2009.

The Caribbean nation of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines last week became the 181st State to have signed the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which prohibits all nuclear explosive testing.

Public discussion of proposed or desired changes to national security classification and declassification policies continues this week on the web site of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Although people have been complaining about abuse of the national security classification system for decades, such complaints have rarely been translated into real policy changes.

More than half a century ago, a Defense Department advisory committee warned that “Overclassification has reached serious proportions.”  But despite innumerable attempts at corrective action over the years by official commissions, legislators, public interest groups and others, similar or identical complaints echo today.  What is even more interesting and instructive, however, is that a few of those attempts did not fail.  Instead, they led to specific, identifiable reductions in official secrecy, at least on a limited scale.

For example, the Interagency Security Classification Appeals Panel (ISCAP) that was created in 1995 has consistently overturned the classification of information in the majority of documents presented for its review.  And the Fundamental Classification Policy Review that was performed by the Department of Energy in 1995 eliminated dozens of obsolete classification categories following a detailed review of agency classification guides.  These and just a few other exceptional efforts demonstrate that even deeply entrenched secrecy practices can be overcome under certain conditions.

In an effort to identify some of those conditions, I wrote a paper entitled “Reducing Government Secrecy: Finding What Works” (pdf). It has just been published in the Yale Law and Policy Review, volume 27, no. 2, Spring 2009.

Among other things, the experience of the ISCAP underscores the importance of extending declassification authority beyond the agency that imposed the classification in the first place.  It would be useless to restore “the presumption against classification” in cases of “significant doubt,” as President Obama suggested on May 29, if that presumption applied only when such doubt arose in the mind of the classifier.  But if classification were to be overruled by doubt in the minds of other persons — ISOO overseers, Inspector General auditors, judges in FOIA proceedings, and others — significant changes would be enabled.

However, systemic classification reform simply will not happen without careful independent review of agency classification guides, which specify exactly what information is to be classified.  The DoE Fundamental Classification Policy Review proves that such a review, including public participation and input, is both possible and highly effective. It needs to be replicated at other classifying agencies.

The White House has announced an online process for receiving public comments and recommendations for changes to classification and declassification policies.  Discussion of declassification policy begins today here.

The House Intelligence Committee last week filed its report on the FY 2010 intelligence authorization act, including many interesting and potentially important intelligence policy provisions.

Perhaps the most significant measure is the proposed creation of a statutory inspector general for the intelligence community.  Other steps include a requirement to report on the number of Federal Government employees who hold security clearances (remarkably, a number that is not readily available today, even within the government); cautious endorsement of a limited role for the Government Accountability Office in intelligence oversight (a move favored by FAS [pdf]); expanded review and notification requirements concerning covert action; a proposed study on the possibility of revoking the pensions of persons who commit unauthorized disclosures of classified information; and quite a bit more.

See “Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2010,” House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, H.Rept. 111-186, June 26, 2009.