At first glance, several provisions in a newly reissued Defense Department Instruction seem to offer a surprisingly forthcoming public disclosure policy to curb the steadily increasing secrecy of recent years. But on closer inspection, that is probably not the case.
“Declassification of information shall receive equal attention with classification so that information remains classified only as long as required by national security considerations,” according to DoD Instruction 5200.01, entitled “DoD Information Security Program and Protection of Sensitive Compartmented Information” (pdf),October 9, 2008.
This DoD requirement that declassification and classification should receive “equal attention” does not appear anywhere in the President’sexecutive order on classification or in its implementing directive which allow agencies to prioritize declassification as they see fit.
Similarly, the new DoD Instruction dictates that “The volume of classified national security information and CUI [controlled unclassified information], in whatever format or media, shall be reduced to the minimum necessary to meet operational requirements.”
No such policy on reducing the volume of secret information to the minimum is specified in the executive order or in the President’s May 2008 policy on controlled unclassified information.
On second glance, however, it turns out that both of these requirements have been on the books at the Pentagon for over a decade (except for the reference to the new CUI category) in the previous version of DoD Directive 5200.01, even as secrecy has grown by leaps and bounds. In other words, these provisions have proved to be mere rhetorical gestures that do not actually constrain official secrecy policy.
With targeted policy interventions, we can efficiently and effectively support the U.S. innovation economy through the translation of breakthrough scientific research from the lab to the market.
Crowd forecasting methods offer a systematic approach to quantifying the U.S. intelligence community’s uncertainty about the future and predicting the impact of interventions, allowing decision-makers to strategize effectively and allocate resources by outlining risks and tradeoffs in a legible format.
The energy transition underway in the United States continues to present a unique set of opportunities to put Americans back to work through the deployment of new technologies, infrastructure, energy efficiency, and expansion of the electricity system to meet our carbon goals.
The United States has the only proven and scalable tritium production supply chain, but it is largely reserved for nuclear weapons. Excess tritium production capacity should be leveraged to ensure the success of and U.S. leadership in fusion energy.