The Central Intelligence Agency invoked the state secrets privilege in 2004 to cover up a case of environmental contamination at a CIA facility that caused illnesses to an Agency employee and his family, according to the employee, Kevin Shipp. The episode was revealed in the Washington Post and the New York Times on February 11 […]
The National Declassification Center (NDC) at the National Archives will declassify the full text of the Pentagon Papers as well as the underlying documentation on which they are based, along with investigative material concerning the 1971 leak of the Papers by Daniel Ellsberg, the NDC said yesterday. “One matter to keep in mind concerning the […]
The General Accounting Office concludes that NNSA lacks the basis for justifying multi-billion dollar modernization projects such as the Chemical and Metallurgy Research Replacement Facility at Los Alamos National Laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico. . By Hans M. Kristensen At a time when the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) is asking Congress to authorize […]
The Central Intelligence Agency has taken no action to carry out the Fundamental Classification Guidance Review, a mandatory effort to eliminate obsolete or unnecessary classification practices. The Fundamental Review is a systematic attempt to combat overclassification by subjecting thousands of current classification instructions to critical scrutiny and revision. It was required in President Obama’s December […]
The Congressional Research Service took a decidedly skeptical view of the Obama Administration’s Open Government Initiative in a recently updated report (pdf). The report called into question not only the implementation of the Administration’s transparency policy but also its underlying rationale. “Arguably, releasing previously unavailable datasets to the public increases transparency,” the report granted. “The […]
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) will be “reduced in its size and budget,” DNI James R. Clapper Jr. told the House Intelligence Committee last week (pdf). “We, I think, all understand that we’re going to be in for some belt-tightening. And given, you know, the funding that we have been given […]
By Hans M. Kristensen The Nuclear Notebooks Robert Norris and I publish in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists are now the most frequently read articles in the magazine, according to their latest announcement. The highlight of the announcement is Senator John Kerry’s use of our estimate of Russian nonstrategic nuclear weapons during the Senate […]
Secrecy News reported Monday on strange new guidance from the Air Force Materiel Command declaring that Air Force employees and even their family members could be prosecuted under the Espionage Act for accessing the WikiLeaks web site. On Monday night that new guidance was abruptly withdrawn. Lt. Col. Richard L. Johnson of Air Force Headquarters […]
“Aftergood is too close to the center of power,” said Julian Assange. “He is not an independent fighter for freedom of information.” The passing criticism of me (I’m also “jealous”) was the first thing that caught my eye in the new book “Staatsfeind WikiLeaks” by Der Spiegel reporters Marcel Rosenbach and Holger Stark. But the […]
At the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, “The original classification of information is rarely necessary,” according to an October 2010 ODNI Instruction. But that’s because most relevant information is already classified. There is not much need for new classification activity. Several recent ODNI Instructions that govern the administration of the classification and declassification […]
CIA analysts studied data on major floods due to rainfall in North Korea since 1996 in order to devise a framework for evaluating the significance of such floods and their likely consequences for North Korean agriculture. The analysts identified four principal variables: the intensity of the rainfall, the location of the rainfall, the time of […]
Updated below to reflect withdrawal of the new Air Force guidance Americans who have accessed the WikiLeaks web site may have violated the Espionage Act, under an extreme interpretation of the law advanced by Air Force officials last week. Many government agencies have instructed their employees not to download classified materials from the WikiLeaks web […]