“If President Obama really welcomed a debate [on intelligence surveillance policy], there are all kinds of things he could do in terms of declassification and disclosure to foster it. But he’s not doing any of them.” At least that’s my perception. See Debate on Secret Data Looks Unlikely, Partly Due to Secrecy by Scott Shane and Jonathan Weisman, New York Times, June 11.
“As the administration and some in Congress vent their anger about leaks to The Post and to Britain’s Guardian newspaper, officials have only themselves to blame,” wrote Dana Milbank in the Washington Post today. “It is precisely their effort to hide such a vast and consequential program from the American public that caused this pressure valve to burst.” See Edward Snowden’s NSA leaks are the backlash of too much secrecy, June 11.
I discussed some aspects of the latest surveillance controversy on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal today.
The Federation of American Scientists supports H.R. 4420, the Cool Corridors Act of 2025, which would reauthorize the Healthy Streets program through 2030 and seeks to increase green and other shade infrastructure in high-heat areas.
The current lack of public trust in AI risks inhibiting innovation and adoption of AI systems, meaning new methods will not be discovered and new benefits won’t be felt. A failure to uphold high standards in the technology we deploy will also place our nation at a strategic disadvantage compared to our competitors.
Using the NIST as an example, the Radiation Physics Building (still without the funding to complete its renovation) is crucial to national security and the medical community. If it were to go down (or away), every medical device in the United States that uses radiation would be decertified within 6 months, creating a significant single point of failure that cannot be quickly mitigated.
The federal government can support more proactive, efficient, and cost-effective resiliency planning by certifying predictive models to validate and publicly indicate their quality.