WikiLeaks Prompts Stronger Safeguards for Classified Info
Inevitably and predictably, the U.S. Government has moved to systematically increase the monitoring of classified computer networks and to tighten the safeguarding of classified information in response to the indiscriminate publication of classified records by WikiLeaks.
An executive order issued on October 7 does not define the new security policies. Instead, it establishes new mechanisms for monitoring, developing and implementing information system security policies, including a newly established Insider Threat Task Force.
In a gesture directed at whistleblowers, the new executive order states (sect. 7e) that “the entities created and the activities directed by this order shall not seek to deter, detect, or mitigate disclosures of information by Government employees or contractors that are lawful under and protected by” whistleblower protection statutes.
But while the systematic tracking of online behavior may not deliberately “seek” to deter or detect whistleblowers, it’s hard to see how it could fail to produce such effects.
This rule gives agencies significantly more authority over certain career policy roles. Whether that authority improves accountability or creates new risks depends almost entirely on how agencies interrupt and apply it.
Our environmental system was built for 1970s-era pollution control, but today it needs stable, integrated, multi-level governance that can make tradeoffs, share and use evidence, and deliver infrastructure while demonstrating that improved trust and participation are essential to future progress.
Durable and legitimate climate action requires a government capable of clearly weighting, explaining, and managing cost tradeoffs to the widest away of audiences, which in turn requires strong technocratic competency.
FAS is launching the Center for Regulatory Ingenuity (CRI) to build a new, transpartisan vision of government that works – that has the capacity to achieve ambitious goals while adeptly responding to people’s basic needs.