The Government Accountability Office will issue a long-awaited report on intelligence community contractors in the next few weeks, a congressional official said. The GAO report is an unclassified version of a classified assessment that was completed last year. According to a statement of work obtained by Secrecy News in 2012, the GAO project was to […]
In a striking new example of secret lawmaking, a classified provision in the consolidated appropriations bill passed by Congress last week prohibited the transfer of CIA drone operations to the Department of Defense. “This is outrageous,” said Sen. John McCain of the secret legislative move, “and it should not have happened.” The secret provision was […]
For more than three years, author Anthony Shaffer has been challenging the government’s contention that hundreds of passages in his Afghanistan memoir “Operation Dark Heart” are classified and should not be publicly disclosed. Now a judge has ordered the full text of the book to be delivered to her in “complete and unredacted” form. DC […]
Updated below The White House yesterday issued Presidential Policy Directive 27 on United States Conventional Arms Transfer Policy. The text of the directive was posted on the White House web site. “The new policy provides greater clarity and transparency with respect to U.S. goals for arms transfers and on the criteria used to make arms […]
The U.S. intelligence community needs to expand the collection and analysis of open source information, according to a Senate Intelligence Committee report on the 2012 attack on U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Libya. But that recommendation ironically comes just as the CIA has terminated public and scholarly access to its open source collection of foreign news […]
New and updated reports from the Congressional Research Service that Congress has withheld from online public distribution include the following. Marine Corps Drawdown, Force Structure Initiatives, and Roles and Missions: Background and Issues for Congress, January 9, 2014 Border Security: Immigration Inspections at Port of Entry, January 9, 2014 Oil and Chemical Spills: Federal Emergency […]
In a December 2009 memorandum, President Obama directed the newly established National Declassification Center (NDC) to process an estimated 400 million page backlog of historical records at the National Archives “in a manner that will permit public access to all declassified records from this backlog no later than December 31, 2013.” That December 31 deadline […]
New and newly updated reports from the Congressional Research Service that Congress has withheld from online public distribution include the following. National Security Letters in Foreign Intelligence Investigations: Legal Background, January 3, 2014 National Security Letters in Foreign Intelligence Investigations: A Glimpse at the Legal Background, January 3, 2014 Nuclear Power Plant Security and Vulnerabilities, […]
Beginning in 1974, the U.S. intelligence community provided the public with a broad selection of foreign news reports, updated daily. These were collected and translated by the Central Intelligence Agency’s Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS), which was reconstituted in 2004 as the Open Source Center (OSC). But the CIA has now terminated public access to […]
Digitally-based virtual worlds and online games such as Second Life and World of Warcraft represent a qualitatively new phenomenon that could have profound impacts on culture, politics and national security, according to a newly disclosed report (large pdf) prepared in 2008 for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. “This technology has the potential […]
Years ago, the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, conducted routine audits and investigations of the National Security Agency, such that the two agencies were in “nearly continuous contact” with one another. In the post-Snowden era, GAO could perform that oversight function once again. “NSA advises that the GAO maintains a team permanently […]
Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper has been widely criticized for making a false statement at a March 2013 hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee. What has gone unremarked, however, is the fact that the Committee permitted that statement to stand uncorrected. Sen. Ron Wyden asked DNI James Clapper at a March 12, 2013 […]