When the U.S. Army established a password-protected internet portal called Army Knowledge Online a few years ago, it swallowed up untold thousands of unclassified records that had previously been publicly available on the world wide web, and then ceased to be.
One such item was the Military Intelligence Professional Bulletin (MIPB), a quarterly Army journal on military intelligence policy, doctrine, and technology.
Requests for softcopies of the unclassified MIPB were repeatedly submitted to the Army by the Federation of American Scientists under the Freedom of Information Act. After years of denials and deferrals, U.S. Army lawyers were finally unable to devise a legal rationale to justify continued withholding of the MIPB. Last week, the latest issues from 2004 and 2005 were fully released.
They may be found here, along with previous issues dating back to 1995.
Better yet, the Army told us that the MIPB will be restored to direct public access on the web so that FOIA requests will no longer be required.
No one will be surprised if we end up with a continuing resolution to push our shutdown deadline out past the midterms, so the real question is what else will they get done this summer?
Rebuilding public participation starts with something simple — treating the public not as a problem to manage, but as a source of ingenuity government cannot function without.
If the government wants a system of learning and adaptation that improves results in real time, it has to treat translation, utilization, and adaptation as core functions of governance rather than as afterthoughts.
Coordination among federal science agencies is essential to ensure government-wide alignment on R&D investment priorities. However, the federal R&D enterprise suffers from egregious siloization.