A former Central Intelligence Agency employee, Thomas Waters Jr., filed a lawsuit against the Agency last week, arguing that publication of his book had been improperly blocked in the prepublication review process.
“The Central Intelligence Agency has unlawfully imposed a prior restraint upon Thomas Waters by obstructing and infringing on his right to publish his unclassified memoirs and threatening him with civil and criminal penalties,” according to the March 3 complaint (pdf) filed in DC District Court.
The case seems to reflect the tightening of controls on public disclosure of information at the CIA.
Almost all of Waters’ manuscript had been cleared for publication by the CIA in September 2004, according to the complaint (pdf). But last month, the Agency notified him that substantial portions of the book, including some material that had previously been approved, could not be published after all.
“The CIA continues to deliberately create a hostile environment for its former employees who are seeking to do nothing other than publish nonsensitive, unclassified information,” said Mark S. Zaid, Waters’ attorney. “Its actions are completely unconstitutional and designed to disable the First Amendment.”
See also “CIA Sued Over Right to Publish” by Shaun Waterman, United Press International, March 6.
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.