The term “overclassification” is used in two distinct senses: The classification of information that should not be classified at all, and the classification of information at a higher level than is justified. Both are problematic, though in different ways. The second form of overclassification, which unnecessarily limits the sharing of information by cleared persons, is addressed in a new Senate Committee report on “The Reducing Over-Classification Act.”
The latest volume of the Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series documents U.S. policy toward Vietnam during January to October 1972, including events surrounding the so-called Easter Offensive of the war in Vietnam. The 1100-page FRUS volume includes a large collection of transcripts of tapes from the Nixon White House.
The National Security Agency and the UK’s GCHQ have both published declassified documents regarding the 1946 UKUSA Agreement on cooperation between the United States and Great Britain in signals intelligence.
On May 26, two days before his final day as Director of National Intelligence, Dennis C. Blair signed a new Intelligence Community Directive, ICD-705 (pdf), on “Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities” or SCIFs. It mostly says that all SCIFs must comply with technical security standards that are to be issued in the near future.
The Congressional Research Service has an opening for an analyst with expertise in one or more of the following areas: presidential powers, emergency powers, information policy, privacy, and/or transparency, among others.
In anticipation of future known and unknown health security threats, including new pandemics, biothreats, and climate-related health emergencies, our answers need to be much faster, cheaper, and less disruptive to other operations.
To unlock the full potential of artificial intelligence within the Department of Health and Human Services, an AI Corps should be established, embedding specialized AI experts within each of the department’s 10 agencies.
Investing in interventions behind the walls is not just a matter of improving conditions for incarcerated individuals—it is a public safety and economic imperative. By reducing recidivism through education and family contact, we can improve reentry outcomes and save billions in taxpayer dollars.
The U.S. government should establish a public-private National Exposome Project (NEP) to generate benchmark human exposure levels for the ~80,000 chemicals to which Americans are regularly exposed.