Appeals Court Hears Arguments on President’s Daily Briefs
A federal appeals court yesterday heard oral arguments in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit seeking disclosure of two Vietnam-era editions of the President’s Daily Brief.
The Central Intelligence Agency refused to disclose the two PDBs to University of California professor Larry Berman, who filed the lawsuit in cooperation with the lawfirm Davis Wright Tremaine and the National Security Archive.
The July 10 hearing was reported in “Federal Court Skeptical of CIA Bid for Secrecy” by Josh Gerstein, New York Sun, July 11.
An audio recording of the fairly technical court session can be downloaded from this site. Click on “Audio Files” on the left side of the page and then enter case number 05-16820.
Additional background on the case is available from the National Security Archive.
No one will be surprised if we end up with a continuing resolution to push our shutdown deadline out past the midterms, so the real question is what else will they get done this summer?
Rebuilding public participation starts with something simple — treating the public not as a problem to manage, but as a source of ingenuity government cannot function without.
If the government wants a system of learning and adaptation that improves results in real time, it has to treat translation, utilization, and adaptation as core functions of governance rather than as afterthoughts.
Coordination among federal science agencies is essential to ensure government-wide alignment on R&D investment priorities. However, the federal R&D enterprise suffers from egregious siloization.