Comments Invited on “Transforming Classification”
The Public Interest Declassification Board, an advisory committee appointed by the President and Congressional leaders, is developing recommendations on how to transform the national security classification system. It has invited interested members of the public to comment on its emerging recommendations over the next several weeks on a new blog here.
The Board itself has no power to effect any transformation; it is purely advisory. However, it has also been fairly influential. Its advocacy of a National Declassification Center (first proposed by the Moynihan Commission in 1997) probably helped bring that concept to fruition. In any case, even if the Board has little direct leverage of its own, “we do have access” to senior policy makers, said Board Chair Martin Faga, a former National Reconnaissance Office director, last week.
The initial recommendations of the Board stop well short of anything that we would call transformation. Most fundamentally, the Board does not propose any reductions in the scope of what is classified. It also does not inquire whether today’s hierarchical classification system is appropriate to a networked world, much less what could be devised to replace it.
But the very fact of a public conversation on the purpose and character of national security secrecy may have transformative implications. So interested persons are encouraged to participate.
Board member Sanford J. Ungar wrote about “Unnecessary Secrets” in the March/April 2011 issue of Columbia Journalism Review.
It is in the interests of the United States to appropriately protect information that needs to be protected while maintaining our participation in new discoveries to maintain our competitive advantage.
The question is not whether the capital exists (it does!), nor whether energy solutions are available (they are!), but whether we can align energy finance quickly enough to channel the right types of capital where and when it’s needed most.
Our analysis of federal AI governance across administrations shows that divergent compliance procedures and uneven institutional capacity challenge the government’s ability to deploy AI in ways that uphold public trust.
From California to New Jersey, wildfires are taking a toll—costing the United States up to $424 billion annually and displacing tens of thousands of people. Congress needs solutions.