The widespread use of “Sensitive But Unclassified” (SBU) control markings is a major impediment to information sharing inside and outside of the federal government, according to testimony (pdf) last week from Thomas E. McNamara, the program manager for the Information Sharing Environment, who reports to the Director of National Intelligence.
“More than 60 different marking types are used across the Federal Government to identify SBU, including various designations within a single department,” he observed.
And even “[when] different agencies … use the same marking to denote information that is to be handled as SBU, a chosen category of information is often defined differently from agency to agency, and agencies may impose different handling requirements. Some of these marking and handling procedures are not only inconsistent, but are contradictory.”
See his prepared testimony from a May 10 hearing of the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Intelligence.
“There is, quite frankly, much [SBU] that has no legal basis and doesn’t deserve a legal basis,” he told the Subcommittee. “We should be getting that stuff out.”
See “Congress urged to help make more ‘sensitive’ information public” by Chris Strohm, Congress Daily, May 11.
An interagency working group completed an inventory of SBU procedures in March, and is due to develop recommendations for standardizing such procedures by next month.
Google’s motto famously used to be “don’t be evil.” However, its latest feature has just made being evil a whole lot easier.
The public will judge the next era of American science by the innovation that touches their lives through the new cures, products, and opportunities created within their communities.
99% of the natural gas sampled near the point of extraction across the country contains hazardous air pollutants harmful to health.
The bootcamp brought together more than two dozen next-generation open-source practitioners from across the world.