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.
As we head into the fall and the end of the 119th session, we face significant S&T issues of concern. Here is what we’re tracking.
Colorado faces a projected shortage of more than 2,400 physicians by 2030, alongside the growing shortage nationwide, particularly in rural and certain underserved urban communities.
The Colorado Skills Map would define the technical and durable skills employers expect by sector and occupation, then attach a common skill identifier to ensure that credentials, courses, and work-based learning experiences are recognized as equivalent and portable across the state.
Only through independent monitoring, reporting, and investigation on data centers’ environmental impacts, can we promote public trust, inform the allocation of natural resources, and enable responsible governance on future data center development.