For many years, the Justice Department’s annual report to Congress on the use of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was a primary source of public information on intelligence surveillance activity and on the workings of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Today, that is less true than ever before.
The latest annual report, released by DOJ yesterday, indicated that in 2013 the Government submitted 1,655 applications for electronic surveillance, physical search or both. Of the 1,588 applications that included electronic surveillance, none were denied by the Court. But that hardly provides an accurate sense of the scope or the scale of intelligence surveillance activity.
The significance of this information, and other statistical data on access to “business records” and the use of national security letters, has receded in the wake of the far more substantial disclosures of the post-Snowden era. For example, we now know that the bland term “business records” extends in principle to everyone’s telephone call records.
In truth, the annual DOJ reports to Congress were never very informative, and they never provided useful data that could inform public policy in a practical way. They represented a facade of transparency with little or no real content. Today, they are practically irrelevant.
More informative and altogether more important is the new website of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which has recently been revamped.
To empower new voices to start their career in nuclear weapons studies, the Federation of American Scientists launched the New Voices on Nuclear Weapons Fellowship. Here’s what our inaugural cohort accomplished.
Common frameworks for evaluating proposals leave this utility function implicit, often evaluating aspects of risk, uncertainty, and potential value independently and qualitatively.
The FAS Nuclear Notebook is one of the most widely sourced reference materials worldwide for reliable information about the status of nuclear weapons and has been published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists since 1987. The Nuclear Notebook is researched and written by the staff of the Federation of American Scientists’ Nuclear Information Project: Director Hans […]
According to the National Center for Education Statistics’ August 2023 pulse panel, 60% of public schools were utilizing a “community school” or “wraparound services model” at the start of this school year—up from 45% last year.