By almost every available measure, government secrecy continued to increase over the past year, according to report this week from OpenTheGovernment.org, a broad coalition of consumer and open government groups.
The report (pdf) describes the mostly unfavorable trends across a range of quantitative indicators, including classification and declassification activity, “black budget” spending, invention secrecy, Freedom of Information Act processing, and more.
“These trends indicate that citizens will have to wait even longer to find out what their government is doing,” said Patrice McDermott, director of OpenTheGovernment.org.
The new report is the fifth in an annual series issued by the coalition. See the 2008 Secrecy Report Card from OpenTheGovernment.org.
To increase the real and perceived benefit of research funding, funding agencies should develop challenge goals for their extramural research programs focused on the impact portion of their mission.
Without trusted mechanisms to ensure privacy while enabling secure data access, essential R&D stalls, educational innovation stalls, and U.S. global competitiveness suffers.
Satellite imagery has long served as a tool for observing on-the-ground activity worldwide, and offers especially valuable insights into the operation, development, and physical features related to nuclear technology.
This year’s Red Sky Summit was an opportunity to further consider what the role of fire tech can and should be – and how public policy can support its development, scaling, and application.