The National Security Agency last week invoked a rarely-used authority in order to declassify a classified document that was mistakenly posted on the NSA website with all of its classified passages intact. The article is a historical study entitled Maybe You Had to Be There: The SIGINT on Thirteen Soviet Shootdowns of U.S. Reconnaissance Aircraft. […]
New and updated reports from the Congressional Research Service that Congress has instructed CRS not to make publicly available include the following. Understanding China’s Political System, May 10, 2012 Youth and the Labor Force: Background and Trends, May 10, 2012 Vulnerable Youth: Employment and Job Training Programs, May 11, 2012 Pakistan’s Nuclear Weapons: Proliferation and […]
The laws and policies governing same-sex marriages were exhaustively surveyed in a newly updated report from the Congressional Research Service. See Same-Sex Marriages: Legal Issues, May 9, 2012.
The expected cost of the B61 Life-Extension Program has increased by 50 percent to $6 billion . By Hans M. Kristensen The expected cost of the B61 Life-Extension Program (LEP) has increased by 50 percent to $6 billion dollars, according to U.S. government sources. Only one year ago, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) estimated […]
The Department of Defense has issued a new Instruction defining its response to the “insider threat” from Department personnel who engage in unauthorized disclosures of information or other activities deemed harmful to national security. The new Instruction assigns responsibilities and authorities for systematically detecting “anomalous” employee behavior that may be an indication of an insider […]
New and updated reports from the Congressional Research Service that Congress has not made publicly available include the following. In Brief: Clarifying the Concept of “Partnership” in National Security, May 4, 2012 U.S. Nuclear Cooperation With India: Issues for Congress, May 7, 2012 Japan-U.S. Relations: Issues for Congress, May 4, 2012 U.S. Spent Nuclear Fuel […]
U.S. Air Force policy permits the incidental collection of domestic imagery by unmanned aerial systems (drones), but ordinarily would not allow targeted surveillance of a U.S. person. The Air Force policy was restated in a newly reissued instruction on oversight of Air Force intelligence. “Air Force Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) operations, exercise and training missions […]
Cyber security is a “nebulous domain… that tends to resist easy measurement and, in some cases, appears to defy any measurement,” according to a report issued in March by Sandia National Laboratories. In order to establish a common vocabulary for discussing cyber threats, and thereby to enable an appropriate response, the Sandia authors propose a […]
The Obama Administration is urging Congress to renew provisions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Amendments Act that are set to expire at the end of this year. “Reauthorizing this authority is the top legislative priority of the Intelligence Community,” wrote Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and Attorney General Eric Holder in a […]
A new report describes U.S. and Russian non-strategic nuclear weapons . By Hans M. Kristensen A new report estimates that Russia and the United States combined have a total of roughly 2,800 nuclear warheads assigned to their non-strategic nuclear forces. Several thousands more have been retired and are awaiting dismantlement. The report comes shortly before […]
In 2011, the US Government submitted 1,745 applications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for authorization to conduct electronic surveillance or physical searches under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), according to a new annual report to Congress. Of these, 1,676 included requests for authority for perform electronic surveillance, the report said. That compares to […]
More than a thousand boxes of classified government records are believed to be missing from the Washington National Records Center (WNRC) of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), a three-year Inspector General investigation found. But there are no indications of theft or espionage, an official said. An inventory of the holdings at the Records […]