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).
By better harnessing the power of data, we can build a learning healthcare system where outcomes drive continuous improvement and where healthcare value leads the way.
In this unprecedented inflection point (and time of difficult disruption) for higher education, science funding, and agency structure, we have an opportunity to move beyond incremental changes and advocate for bold, new ideas that envision a future of the scientific research enterprise that looks very different from the current system.
Assigning persistent digital identifiers (Digital Object Identifiers, or DOIs) and using ORCIDs (Open Researcher and Contributor IDs) for key personnel to track outputs for research grants will improve the accountability and transparency of federal investments in research and reduce reporting burden.
Research funding agencies should apply the content of grant applications to AI tools to predict the future of scientific and technological breakthroughs, enhance peer review, and encourage better research investment decisions by both the public and the private sector.