A Secret Session of the House of Representatives
“Since 1830, the House has met behind closed doors only three times,” according to the Congressional Research Service: “in 1979 to discuss the Panama Canal, in 1980 to discuss Central American assistance, and in 1983 to discuss U.S. support for paramilitary operations in Nicaragua.”
On March 13, the House went into secret session once more to consider classified matters concerning the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. After some extended discussion of the unusual practice, followed by a security check, public access to the proceedings was barred.
For related background see “Secret Sessions of the House and Senate” (pdf), Congressional Research Service, updated May 25, 2007, and “Secret Sessions of Congress: A Brief Historical Overview” (pdf), updated May 30, 2007.
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.