Some new reports from the Congressional Research Service that have not previously been made available to the public include the following (all pdf). “Social Networking and Constituent Communications: Member Use of Twitter During a Two-Month Period in the 111th Congress,” February 3, 2010. “Metropolitan Transportation Planning,” February 3, 2010. “Veterans Health Care: Project HERO Implementation,” […]
Several noteworthy new hearing volumes on national security policy have recently appeared (all pdf). In most cases, the published volumes include valuable new supplementary material for the record. “Examining the State Secrets Privilege: Protecting National Security While Preserving Accountability,” Senate Judiciary Committee, February 13, 2008 (published December 2009) (large pdf). “Coercive Interrogation Techniques: Do They […]
Websites and blogs dealing with military issues in Taiwan were surveyed in a recent report from the DNI Open Source Center that has not been publicly released. See “Taiwan: Unofficial Military Websites” (pdf), Open Source Center Media Aid, January 12, 2010.
Peace activists walked one kilometer onto a US nuclear weapons storage site in Belgium for more than one hour before security personnel reacted. Click image for larger version. (For an update to this map, go here) . By Hans M. Kristensen A group of people last week managed to penetrate deep onto Kleine Brogel Air Base […]
On 13 January, Ivanka Barzashka and I gave a briefing at the AAAS on our work regarding Iran’s uranium enrichment capacity. Joshua Pollack also gave a briefing, which he has described. Joshua’s analysis is thorough and interesting but I think I would use a different distinction than the “actual” and “nominal” values that he defines. […]
Members of Congress are urging the Obama Administration to activate the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, an independent agency that is supposed to monitor and defend civil liberties in the development and implementation of counterterrorism policies. Last week, Rep. Bennie Thompson and Rep. Jane Harman wrote to the President and asked him to appoint […]
Senator George V. Voinovich (R-OH) wanted to know: What is the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) doing to improve the status of women in the Muslim world, and to better engage women around the world on counterterrorism issues? “The response to this question is classified,” replied NCTC Director Michael Leiter in a written response that has […]
At a 2008 Senate hearing, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III was effusively praised for standing by the ailing Attorney General John Ashcroft in his hospital bed in 2004 and helping him to resist White House pressure to reauthorize the Bush Administration’s domestic surveillance program. “It is hard to imagine in America circumstances in which […]
In his provocative new book “Bomb Power” (Penguin Press, 2010) historian Garry Wills argues that the rise of the National Security State and the ongoing expansion of presidential authority, including the spread of government secrecy, are rooted in the development of the atomic bomb in World War II. “At the bottom of it all has […]
The American Physical Society will feature a session of “physics and secrecy” at its annual meeting in Washington DC on February 13. I will be one of the three presenters. In one sense, the whole enterprise of physics is a contest with secrecy and an attempt to discern the order that is hidden in natural […]
The search for signs of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe should not only focus on detection of electromagnetic signals, but should also seek evidence of the physical artifacts that an intelligence life form might produce, a scientist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory suggested in a paper (pdf) last month. “Searching for signatures of […]
Last year, the Palestinian National Liberation Movement (Fatah in the Arabic acronym) led by Palestinian National Authority president Mahmoud Abbas gathered in Bethlehem and approved a revision of its charter for the first time since the 1960s. That revised charter (pdf) has recently been translated into English by the DNI Open Source Center. The document […]