The growing use of the state secrets privilege could threaten basic constitutional rights, according to one recent critical analysis.
If current trends in government reliance on the state secrets privilege are allowed to continue, “it is questionable whether any constitutional complaint against the government involving classified information will ever be allowed to be adjudicated,” concluded Carrie Newton Lyons in a review published last year.
Ms. Lyons, a former CIA operations officer, presented her assessment in “The State Secrets Privilege: Expanding Its Scope Through Government Misuse” (pdf), Lewis & Clark Law Review, Volume 11, No. 1, Spring 2007.
Potential reforms to the state secrets privilege will be explored by Louis Fisher of the Law Library of Congress and other experts in a January 24 panel discussion sponsored by the Constitution Project.
The human cost is measured in deaths. The financial cost is measured in the $52 billion taxpayers pay annually end stage renal disease – double NASA’s budget.
Gilman Louie, Longest Serving Board Chair of the Federation of American Scientists, Named Chair Emeritus
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.