White House Names Three to Intel Oversight Board
At a time when the legality of U.S. intelligence activities such as the NSA surveillance program is a live issue, President Bush announced that he would name three individuals to the Intelligence Oversight Board, which is supposed to notify the President of any unlawful activities performed by U.S. intelligence agencies.
The three appointees are Adm. David E. Jeremiah, attorney Arthur B. Culvahouse and former Commerce Secretary Donald L. Evans. All three are members of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board.
As prescribed in Executive Order 12863, the Intelligence Oversight Board “shall prepare for the President reports of intelligence activities that the IOB believes may be unlawful or contrary to Executive order or Presidential directive.”
The IOB, like the PFIAB, is a White House advisory body that works exclusively for the President, and only rarely releases any information to the public.
The Federation of American Scientists supports H.R. 4420, the Cool Corridors Act of 2025, which would reauthorize the Healthy Streets program through 2030 and seeks to increase green and other shade infrastructure in high-heat areas.
The current lack of public trust in AI risks inhibiting innovation and adoption of AI systems, meaning new methods will not be discovered and new benefits won’t be felt. A failure to uphold high standards in the technology we deploy will also place our nation at a strategic disadvantage compared to our competitors.
Using the NIST as an example, the Radiation Physics Building (still without the funding to complete its renovation) is crucial to national security and the medical community. If it were to go down (or away), every medical device in the United States that uses radiation would be decertified within 6 months, creating a significant single point of failure that cannot be quickly mitigated.
The federal government can support more proactive, efficient, and cost-effective resiliency planning by certifying predictive models to validate and publicly indicate their quality.