Secrecy Reigns at the DoJ Office of Legal Counsel
The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), which is responsible for interpreting the law for executive branch agencies, has played an influential role in the development of Bush Administration policy, and an unusually secretive one.
In a December 7 floor statement, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) described the contents of three OLC opinions that he had been able to review. One of them discussed the nature of executive orders as a category. Sen. Whitehouse characterized the conclusions of that OLC opinion as follows:
“An Executive order cannot limit a President. There is no constitutional requirement for a President to issue a new Executive order whenever he wishes to depart from the terms of a previous Executive order.”
We requested a copy of that seemingly innocuous, if questionable, opinion under the Freedom of Information Act. But the request was denied.
“We are withholding the document in full because it is classified and thus exempt under Exemption 1 of the FOIA,” the OLC responded (pdf).
“The OLC should publicly release more of its opinions, as was routinely done during Janet Reno’s tenure as attorney general during the 1990s,” the Washington Post editorialized today. “Too many Bush OLC memos remain secret, with only a handful of administration officials being privy to their conclusions.”
“During the Bush administration, the OLC has become known as a partisan enabler of legally and ethically questionable presidential policies, including those involving the use of torture.”
The current lack of public trust in AI risks inhibiting innovation and adoption of AI systems, meaning new methods will not be discovered and new benefits won’t be felt. A failure to uphold high standards in the technology we deploy will also place our nation at a strategic disadvantage compared to our competitors.
Using the NIST as an example, the Radiation Physics Building (still without the funding to complete its renovation) is crucial to national security and the medical community. If it were to go down (or away), every medical device in the United States that uses radiation would be decertified within 6 months, creating a significant single point of failure that cannot be quickly mitigated.
The federal government can support more proactive, efficient, and cost-effective resiliency planning by certifying predictive models to validate and publicly indicate their quality.
We need a new agency that specializes in uncovering funding opportunities that were overlooked elsewhere. Judging from the history of scientific breakthroughs, the benefits could be quite substantial.