ACLU Files Suit on Behalf of Fired CRS Official
The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit Friday on behalf of Col. Morris D. Davis, a former chief prosecutor at Guantanamo, alleging that he was unlawfully fired from the Congressional Research Service because he made statements as a private individual that were critical of Obama Administration policy on military commissions. (“CRS Fires A Division Chief,” Secrecy News, December 4, 2009.)
“Col. Davis has a constitutional right to speak about issues of which he has expert knowledge, and the public has a right to hear from him,” said ACLU attorney Aden Fine.
The lawsuit names as defendants James H. Billington, the Librarian of Congress, as well as CRS Director Daniel P. Mulhollan, who is sued in his personal capacity.
At the root of the matter, ACLU argues, are ambiguous Library regulations and a problematic 2004 CRS policy (pdf) on “outside activities” by CRS employees.
“Neither the Library’s regulations nor CRS’s policy establishes a standard for determining which outside speaking and writing is permissible and which is not. The regulations and policy afford the Library and CRS unfettered discretion to determine which speech to punish,” according to the ACLU lawsuit (pdf).
“We maintain that the removal of Mr. Davis is justified,” wrote Library of Congress General Counsel Elizabeth Pugh on December 14, 2009 (pdf).
The case was assigned to Judge Reggie Walton of the DC District Court. A job vacancy notice for Mr. Davis’s position was posted on USAJobs on January 8, 2010.
The Federation of American Scientists supports H.R. 4420, the Cool Corridors Act of 2025, which would reauthorize the Healthy Streets program through 2030 and seeks to increase green and other shade infrastructure in high-heat areas.
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.