“The USSR is publicly discussing an ambitious array of manned and unmanned space missions … planned over the next quarter century,” the CIA’s Foreign Broadcast Information Service reported in a 1987 internal assessment (pdf).
“Recent items in the Soviet press and scientific literature… have provided new details on Soviet space plans from the present through the end of this century,” said the FBIS analysis, which was marked “For Official Use Only.”
The Soviet Union ceased to exist in 1991. FBIS was absorbed into the DNI Open Source Center in 2004 2005.
See “Soviet Space Missions Planned Through the Year 2000,” Foreign Broadcast Information Service Science and Technology Perspectives, April 8, 1987 (4.5 MB PDF file, thanks to Allen Thomson).
Some other historical U.S. intelligence assessments of Soviet space programs can be found here.
The clearinghouse will also neutrally mediate the assignment of auditors to audits—strengthening independence, trust, and ethical governance across the AI ecosystem.
The potential implication of these evidence gaps becomes more consequential when you look at how institutions actually make decisions day to day.
Every new institution inherits something – existing incentives, existing staff, decades of prior investment that shaped what’s possible.
This is not the first time Google has agreed to censor imagery at the behest of governments, but be warned: obfuscation at this broad level poses a direct threat to the public’s ability to monitor and scrutinize government operations.