A Central Intelligence Agency employee who supported Agency declassification activities was killed in a traffic accident late last year. Perhaps befitting a CIA classification official, his name has not been publicly acknowledged by the Agency.
“The CIA expressed its sadness concerning a CIA member’s death,” according to a brief notice in the December 2007 minutes of a closed session of the State Department Historical Advisory Committee, which were published last week. “The member had served as a moving force on declassification issues.”
Secrecy News asked CIA Public Affairs to provide the name of the CIA member. No response was received.
But a former Agency colleague identified him as Bob Knight.
His death in a motorcycle accident on the way to work was “a major blow to the rather small CIA declassification cadre.”
“I think his career was mostly in the DI [Directorate of Intelligence], but he had worked in declassification since at least 2002.”
Mr. Knight previously served as an Assistant Information Review Officer and worked on at least three major NIC publications, including National Intelligence Estimates on China, Vietnam, and the former Yugoslavia. Just prior to his death, he was serving as CIA coordinator for the Foreign Relations of the United States series.
“Bob’s death was keenly felt by all who had worked with him,” the former colleague said.
The current lack of public trust in AI risks inhibiting innovation and adoption of AI systems, meaning new methods will not be discovered and new benefits won’t be felt. A failure to uphold high standards in the technology we deploy will also place our nation at a strategic disadvantage compared to our competitors.
Using the NIST as an example, the Radiation Physics Building (still without the funding to complete its renovation) is crucial to national security and the medical community. If it were to go down (or away), every medical device in the United States that uses radiation would be decertified within 6 months, creating a significant single point of failure that cannot be quickly mitigated.
The federal government can support more proactive, efficient, and cost-effective resiliency planning by certifying predictive models to validate and publicly indicate their quality.
We need a new agency that specializes in uncovering funding opportunities that were overlooked elsewhere. Judging from the history of scientific breakthroughs, the benefits could be quite substantial.