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.
The strength of our nation’s data policy isn’t just in the rules we write, but in how effectively we translate those rules into a system that prioritizes the public good. Join us in this movement to design and build more resilient national data policies.
The human cost is measured in deaths. The financial cost is measured in the $52 billion taxpayers pay annually end stage renal disease – double NASA’s budget.
Gilman Louie, Longest Serving Board Chair of the Federation of American Scientists, Named Chair Emeritus
The proposed Office will resurrect the long-closed Office of Technology Assessment (OTA), the archive of which has been maintained by FAS for decades at https://ota.fas.org/.