The National Archives this week announced the opening of approximately 1.3 million pages of historic Central Intelligence Agency records dating from 1947 to 1977. The documents, which are described as open source publications gathered by the CIA’s Foreign Documents Division, are being released as “a part of the National Declassification Initiative program announced by the Archivist of the United States Allen Weinstein in April 2006.”
On March 17, 2008, the Public Interest Declassification Board (PIDB) heard public comments on its report Improving Declassification that was sent to the President in 2007. The meeting was covered by Lee White of the National Coalition for History.
Last year the National Intelligence Council, a component of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, sponsored a conference in Ghana on democratization in Africa. The NIC has now published the proceedings of that conference for broad public consumption and consideration. See “Democratization in Africa: What Progress Toward Institutionalization?” (pdf).
U.S. Air Force intelligence organization and functions are described in “General Intelligence Rules” (pdf), Air Force Instruction 14-202 (vol. 3), 10 March 2008.
This rule gives agencies significantly more authority over certain career policy roles. Whether that authority improves accountability or creates new risks depends almost entirely on how agencies interrupt and apply it.
Our environmental system was built for 1970s-era pollution control, but today it needs stable, integrated, multi-level governance that can make tradeoffs, share and use evidence, and deliver infrastructure while demonstrating that improved trust and participation are essential to future progress.
Durable and legitimate climate action requires a government capable of clearly weighting, explaining, and managing cost tradeoffs to the widest away of audiences, which in turn requires strong technocratic competency.
FAS is launching the Center for Regulatory Ingenuity (CRI) to build a new, transpartisan vision of government that works – that has the capacity to achieve ambitious goals while adeptly responding to people’s basic needs.