A Telephone Directory for the Office of the Vice President
The Office of the Vice President under Dick Cheney seems to cultivate secrecy as an end in itself, and not simply to protect national security or personal privacy. The OVP will not even confirm how many staff people work there, who they are, or much of anything else.
“Cheney’s office refuses to give any details to reporters,” observed Justin Rood in TPMmuckraker yesterday, noting further that the OVP “is exempt from the Freedom of Information Act, so any such request would be futile.”
Similarly, a Cheney spokesman recently told reporter Laura Rozen, “If we have a personnel announcement we’d like you to know about, we’ll tell you.”
Some Americans still find this willful obscurity offensive to democratic principles, and TPMmuckraker summoned the blogosphere to help pierce the veil.
Secrecy News was able to contribute a 2004 telephone directory for the OVP (pdf), which is marked “for official use only,” naturally. Though it is no longer current — it still lists the departed Scooter Libby as assistant to the Vice President, for example — it provides a good sense of the size and structure of the OVP. It is posted here (with phone and fax numbers redacted by Secrecy News).
See further discussion of the matter on TPMmuckraker and on CBS News.
The proposed Office will resurrect the long-closed Office of Technology Assessment (OTA), the archive of which has been maintained by FAS for decades at https://ota.fas.org/.
If Congress needs help understanding the risks and rewards of a piece of technology, they shouldn’t have to rely solely on the sparknotes from a salesman. The rub is much simpler: Congress needs nerds.
If we set up the new OTA to do its job well, members will see it as the first stop to see what issues are lurking around the corner. They will bring their questions early. And they will keep coming back for more.
Even the best-designed policy rests on assumptions about who will staff it, how it will be funded, whether the responsible institutions have ever coordinated, and if the goals are achievable.