New and updated reports from the Congressional Research Service that Congress has withheld from online public distribution include the following. The Ebola Outbreak: Select Legal Issues, CRS Legal Sidebar, October 6, 2014 Ebola: Basics About the Disease, October 3, 2014 As Midterm Election Approaches, State Election Laws Challenged, CRS Legal Sidebar, October 7, 2014 Child […]
The transcript of the momentous 1954 Atomic Energy Commission hearing that led the AEC to revoke the security clearance of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who had led the Manhattan Project to produce the first atomic bomb, has now been declassified in full by the Department of Energy. “The Department of Energy has re-reviewed the […]
Offices of Inspector General (OIGs) are generally known for performing investigations of executive branch agencies in order to combat waste, fraud and abuse. But many IGs also have a law enforcement function, and many of their employees are armed. The most recent data available (from 2008) indicate that 33 Offices of Inspector General had a […]
Three and a half years after the New START Treaty entered into force in February 2011, many would probably expect that the United States and Russia had decisively reduced their deployed strategic nuclear weapons. On the contrary, the latest aggregate treaty data shows that the two nuclear superpowers both increased their deployed nuclear forces compared […]
The challenges of identifying the perpetrators of a nuclear attack on the United States and communicating that information to senior leadership were considered in a 2009 workshop sponsored by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. A declassified report on the workshop was released last week in heavily redacted form. See “Transforming Nuclear Attribution: […]
The Central Intelligence Agency has asked for authority to destroy email messages sent by non-senior officials of the Agency. The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has tentatively approved the proposal. In an August 18 appraisal of the CIA request, Meredith Scheiber of NARA wrote that any permanently valuable material in the emails would almost […]
The CIA should not have redacted the amount that was paid for a Commodore Amiga portable computer in 1987 from a recently declassified article, a CIA official said today. (CIA: Cost of Personal Computer in 1987 is a Secret, Secrecy News, September 29). “The redaction of the cost of the Commodore Amiga computer was in […]
Updated below Under the prevailing information policies of the Central Intelligence Agency, even some well-known public facts, such as the price of a popular personal computer, may be withheld from public disclosure. “We bought our first Commodore Amiga in 1987 for less than [price redacted] including software,” according to a paper entitled “NPIC, Amiga, and […]
Polygraph testing is here to stay, judging from a new directive issued by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. The directive governs the use of polygraph testing in vetting executive branch agency personnel for security clearances or determining their eligibility for “sensitive” positions. The new Security Executive Agent Directive 2 on the use of the […]
Noteworthy new products of the Congressional Research Service that Congress has withheld from online public distribution include the following. Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798-2014, September 15, 2014 American Foreign Fighters and the Islamic State: Broad Challenges for Federal Law Enforcement, CRS Insights, September 19, 2014 Man without a Country? Expatriation […]
The Department of Energy will review its classification standards to improve their clarity and to eliminate possible ambiguities, the Administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration told the Federation of American Scientists this week. The issue arose in response to the case of James Doyle, a Los Alamos political scientist who published an article on […]
When the government intervened in a private lawsuit to assert the state secrets privilege and to seek dismissal of the entire proceeding (Secrecy News, September 15), it acted improperly and misused the state secrets privilege, the attorney for the plaintiff in the case told the Court yesterday. “The Government has improperly invoked the state secrets […]