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.
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.