President Bush this week said that a newspaper — the Los Angeles Times — had published details of a new technology used to defend against improvised explosive devices, and that jihadists used details from that newspaper story to develop techniques for defeating the new technology. Noah Shachtman of DefenseTech.org argues that there is reason to doubt the President’s account. See “The Enemy is Me,” March 14. (There’s more here.)
“In another sign of increasing government secrecy, the Federal Aviation Administration has removed from its Web site the transcript of a heated public hearing during which pilots ridiculed no-fly zones that have surrounded Washington since 9/11,” writes Lance Gay of Scripps Howard News Service. See “FAA yanks potentially ‘sensitive’ information from Web site,” March 15.
If the New York Times could be prosecuted under the Espionage Act for having disclosed the warrantless NSA surveillance activity, as some enthusiasts have proposed, then who else might be guilty of a similar offense? That question was asked and answered by Jack Shafer in “A Gitmo for Journos: Who besides the New York Times could be prosecuted under the Espionage Act?”, Slate, March 14.
The strength of our nation’s data policy isn’t just in the rules we write, but in how effectively we translate those rules into a system that prioritizes the public good. Join us in this movement to design and build more resilient national data policies.
The human cost is measured in deaths. The financial cost is measured in the $52 billion taxpayers pay annually end stage renal disease – double NASA’s budget.
Gilman Louie, Longest Serving Board Chair of the Federation of American Scientists, Named Chair Emeritus
The proposed Office will resurrect the long-closed Office of Technology Assessment (OTA), the archive of which has been maintained by FAS for decades at https://ota.fas.org/.