New DNI Directive on Technical Surveillance Countermeasures
Last month the Director of National Intelligence issued a new Intelligence Community Directive (ICD) on “Technical Surveillance Countermeasures” (pdf) (TSCM).
TSCM “represents the convergence of two distinct disciplines — counterintelligence and security countermeasures,” the directive explained. Its purpose is “to detect and nullify a wide variety of technologies used to gain unauthorized access to classified national security information, restricted data, or otherwise sensitive information.”
The directive was released (in a fuzzy, not very well scanned copy) by the ODNI Freedom of Information Act office.
See “Technical Surveillance Countermeasures,” ICD 702, February 18, 2008.
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.