In response to a request from the Department of Justice, the Senate yesterday authorized the Senate Intelligence Committee to cooperate with a pending investigation of an unauthorized disclosure of classified information.
“The Chairman and Vice Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, acting jointly, are authorized to provide to the United States Department of Justice, under appropriate security procedures, copies of Committee documents sought in connection with a pending investigation into the unauthorized disclosure of classified national security information, and former and current employees of the Committee are authorized to testify in proceedings arising out of that investigation,” according to Senate Resolution 600 that was passed yesterday.
The target of the leak investigation was not specified, but Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said it involved “someone not connected with the committee.”
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence recently released a copy of Intelligence Community Directive (ICD) Number 700 on “Protection of National Intelligence” (pdf), which was issued on September 21, 2007. Among other things, the Directive mandated the establishment of “fora for the identification and solution of issues affecting the protection of national intelligence and intelligence sources and methods.”
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.