“The CIA requires all current and former Agency employees and contractors, and others who are obligated by CIA secrecy agreement, to submit for prepublication review to the CIA’s Publications Review Board (PRB) all intelligence-related materials intended for publication or public dissemination,” according to a 2007 regulation (pdf) on the subject.
The scope of the requirement, according to CIA, is expansive. It “includes, but is not limited to, works of fiction; books; newspaper columns; academic journal articles; magazine articles;… letters to the editor;… scripts; screenplays; internet blogs, emails, or other writings;” and so forth.
A redacted version of the latest version of the CIA regulation was released in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the James Madison Project, a non-profit advocacy organization. The Project’s director, attorney Mark S. Zaid, frequently litigates pre-publication review disputes against the CIA.
The text of the regulation, “Agency Prepublication Review of Certain Material Prepared for Public Dissemination,” 30 May 2007, is here.
Related background on CIA prepublication review policy, including a (redacted) handbook for agency reviewers (pdf), can be found on this page.
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.
The cost of inaction is not merely economic; it is measured in preventable illness, deaths and diminished livelihoods.