On October 23, President Bush named former CIA information officer Herbert Briick to the Public Interest Declassification Board, and also reappointed former CIA general counsel Elizabeth Rindskopf Parker. The Board will hold its next public meeting at the National Archives on Friday, October 31, where it will discuss how to identify and prioritize “historically valuable” information for declassification. For details on attendance see this October 14 Federal Register notice (pdf).
What is intelligence? Kristan J. Wheaton, a professor of intelligence studies at Mercyhurst College, invites readers to indicate their understanding of the term and its implications in a brief online survey.
The question of whether the United States needs a new domestic intelligence service that is independent of law enforcement was examined by Greg Treverton of the RAND Corporation in a new report for Congress entitled “Reorganizing U.S. Domestic Intelligence.”
Josh Gerstein, late of the New York Sun, has done some of the best reporting around on the AIPAC case involving unauthorized dissemination of classified information. In a new blog posting, he updates readers on the latest developments in the case in advance of a pre-trial appeal hearing on October 29.
On July 16, 2008, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing entitled “How the Administration’s Failed Detainee Policies Have Hurt the Fight Against Terrorism: Putting the Fight Against Terrorism on Sound Legal Foundations.” The record of that hearing was recently published and is available here.
“One thing became increasingly clear: AI doesn’t simply introduce a new category of risk. It changes the speed, scale, complexity, and interaction of risks that already exist.”
In an ideal world, we would not have state or federal climate intervention research bans. We would have researchers and institutions that would not shy away from revealing the good, the bad, and the ugly of these technologies and doing so responsibly.
“What excites me is that it’s very tempting to be very discouraged, and say, ‘Oh, we’ve got these archaic institutions that are calcified and you could never change them.’ But I think we’re in the middle of a technological revolution that will upend lots of things, and does provide a window.”
Ask people what worries them most right now, and they’ll say the cost of living and their livelihoods, not climate change. But those concerns are not separate.