Late last year the Attorney General approved revised guidelines for the use of confidential informants by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (pdf).
The guidelines require that confidential human sources be subjected to a new validation process to help ensure that their information is reliable.
The guidelines also generally require that the FBI and prosecutors inform responsible law enforcement authorities if they discover that an FBI source is engaged in “unauthorized criminal activity.”
“The FBI does not have any authority to make any promise or commitment that would prevent the government from prosecuting a Confidential Human Source for criminal activity that is not authorized…..”
See “Attorney General Guidelines Regarding the Use of FBI Confidential Human Sources,” approved December 13, 2006.
The Guidelines were included in voluminous FBI answers to questions for the record of a recently published Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on “FBI Oversight,” December 6, 2006 (14 MB PDF file).
January saw us watching whether the government would fund science. February has been about how that funding will be distributed, regulated, and contested.
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.