Government is overzealous with secrecy, Reichert says
Republican Congressman Dave Reichert (R-WA) is interested in developing legislation to streamline the classification system and to eliminate abuses, according to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:
Reichert uses personal experience as a benchmark for how overzealous classification can gum up the works and deny important information to those who need it. While investigating the Green River Killer as King County sheriff, Reichert worked closely with a variety of federal agencies and especially the FBI.
In one instance, he and an FBI agent jointly interviewed a witness. Later, Reichert asked the FBI for a copy of its report on the interrogation to compare it with his own account to see if there was anything he missed.
The request was denied because the report was classified, Reichert said in an interview.
“There’s a fear by federal agencies that if they let too much out, it could cause problems,” Reichert said. The irony, he and others say, is that indiscriminately classifying material as secret weakens security because it makes it harder to discern the truly important from those undeserving documents given the status.
Reichert hopes to develop legislation to streamline and simplify the system to lessen the abuses and to make it easier for government officials at all levels, and especially law enforcement, to be able to share information.
See “Government is overzealous with secrecy, Reichert says” by Charles Pope, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, July 26.
The NCARS Act would amend the National Security Act of 1947 to establish a durable, coordinated federal approach to national resilience.
Federal data is a diverse ecosystem with well over 500,000 datasets – including those tackling Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (ADRD).
To build an affordable, modern grid powered by clean energy, we need more than the right policies; we must also upgrade—and, in some cases, redesign—PUCs to regulate in the public interest and effectively implement new policies.
X-Labs seek to expand on what FROs have shown is possible: the generation of foundational infrastructure for entire new fields of research science.