Democratic Presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama “will reverse this [Bush Administration] policy of secrecy,” his campaign stated this week, and he addressed the subject in a high-profile address at DePaul University on October 2.
“I’ll lead a new era of openness,” he said.
“I’ll turn the page on a growing empire of classified information, and restore the balance we’ve lost between the necessarily secret and the necessity of openness in a democratic society by creating a new National Declassification Center.”
The Obama campaign said the proposal was based upon a recommendation of the 1997 Moynihan Commission on Secrecy, and that the Center would “serve as a clearinghouse to set rules and regulations for declassification for federal agencies, and to make declassification secure but routine, efficient, and cost-effective.”
“We’ll protect sources and methods, but we won’t use sources and methods as pretexts to hide the truth. Our history doesn’t belong to Washington, it belongs to America,” Sen. Obama said.
This appears to be the most extensive discussion of secrecy and transparency issues in the presidential campaign to date. The subject was briefly addressed by Senator Clinton in her online campaign literature.
As far as could be determined, no Republican candidate has spoken out against current secrecy policy or advocated increased transparency. However, former Senator Fred Thompson issued a report on government secrecy that urged greater openness when he was chairman of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee in 1998 (Sen. Rept. 105-258).
Hurricanes cause around 24 deaths per storm – but the longer-term consequences kill thousands more. With extreme weather events becoming ever-more common, there is a national and moral imperative to rethink not just who responds to disasters, but for how long and to what end.
The program invites teams of researchers and local government collaborators to propose innovative projects addressing real-world transportation, safety, equity, and resilience challenges using mobility data.
The Pentagon’s new report provides additional context and useful perspectives on events in China that took place over the past year.
Successful NC3 modernization must do more than update hardware and software: it must integrate emerging technologies in ways that enhance resilience, ensure meaningful human control, and preserve strategic stability.